Gartner Marketing Symposium/Xpo: Day 3 Highlights

We are bringing you news and highlights from Day 3 of the 2026 Gartner Marketing Symposium/Xpo, taking place this week in Denver. Below is a collection of the key announcements and insights coming out of the conference. 

On Day 3, we are highlighting sessions on the path to customer-centric experience orchestration, how to train AI agents to embody your brand, and making the case for marketing-led customer experience.

• Gartner Marketing Survey Finds Awareness and Conversion Account for 62.6% of Total Media Spend
• Gartner Says AI-Powered Disinformation Is Becoming a Brand Risk Marketers Can’t Ignore
• Gartner Survey Finds 49% of U.S. Consumers Say GenAI Has Made Content Quality Worse
• Gartner Marketing Survey Finds 84% of Companies Are Stuck in a “Brand Doom Loop”

By Ant Duffin, VP Analyst, Gartner

Personalization remains a top priority for marketers, but most brands still struggle to deliver it effectively at scale. In this session, Ant Duffin, VP Analyst atGartner, discussed a practical roadmap for how marketing leaders can move from isolated, channel-based personalization to more customer-centric, AI-enabled journey orchestration by 2030.

• “Nearly half of customers find personalized experiences creepy, irrelevant or both. The future of personalization starts with fixing the fundamentals.”

• “Personalization has to shift from knowing what customers did to anticipating what they need next.”

• “AI is essential to the future of personalization, but the near-term opportunity is not full autonomy. It is using AI to assist with targeting, journey creation, content generation and execution while marketers stay in control.”

• “By 2030, the organizations that lead in personalization will be the ones that centralize and evolve their operating model, embed personalization across people, process and technology, and use AI and agents to scale execution responsibly.”

• “When personalization works, customers reward it by being more likely to pay a premium and buy more than they originally intended.”

Journalists can receive additional information and/or request an interview with Ant Duffin by contacting Juliette Dixon at juliette.dixon@gartner.com.

By Alan Lopez, Senior Director Analyst, Gartner

Buyers are increasingly consulting GenAI tools and chatbots instead of brand websites, and AI systems are now speaking on behalf of the brand. In this session, Alan Lopez, Senior Director Analyst atGartner, explained what marketing leaders must do to shape how answer engines, chatbots and agents describe, compare and recommend their products.  

• “Forty-seven percent of consumers and 60% of B2B buyers say they consulted GenAI tools or chatbots for a recent purchase decision.”

• “AI systems don’t experience your brand the way humans do. If your content is vague or overly clever, AI flattens it into something average.”

• “To make your brand survive summarization, infuse AI-preferred content with brand style: use proprietary terms, quote wrapping, first-person expertise, and stylized schema content, so the AI has fewer generic words to swap in.”

• “Modern AI ‘sees’ your images - so your hero images, captions and alt text can shape the adjectives AI uses to describe your products.”

• “This is not about adding another channel. It’s about redefining brand stewardship. Brand is also how intelligent systems behave when no one from your company is in the room.”

Journalists can receive additional information and/or request an interview with Alan Lopez by contacting Juliette Dixon at juliette.dixon@gartner.com.

By Maria Marino, VP Analyst, Gartner

Customer experience (CX) is often treated as a service or operational issue, but marketers should lead it and use it to elevate their role in the enterprise. In this session, Maria Marino, VP Analyst at Gartner, explained why CMOs who own CX strategy are better positioned to become “market-shapers”.

• “CMOs have superhero potential if they start leading CX as a strategic growth lever.”

• “The first superpower CMOs have is their unique positioning to be a customer advocate and influencer because their teams have listening posts across the end-to-end journey.”

• “CMOs’ second superpower is a market wayfinder. CMOs can accelerate the enterprise’s response to disruption, helping peers in the C-Suite navigate that volatility by shaping the enterprise’s understanding and response to disruptive forces.”

• “The final superpower is market designer, which is how CMOs can unlock new revenue streams by sourcing innovative ideas from customer data.”

• “AI gives marketers a powerful new way to turn noisy customer signals into foresight.”

• “The best marketing-led CX leaders are also market designers. They use customer feedback, sentiment and voice-of-customer analytics to uncover unmet needs, spot white space and shape new experiences that customers will value before competitors do.”

Journalists can receive additional information and/or request an interview with Maria Marino by contacting Juliette Dixon at juliette.dixon@gartner.com.