The marketing operations role is evolving from managing data to mastering customer context, powered by the rise of agentic AI.
Gurdeep Dhillon, Chief Marketing Officer at Contentstack, describes why the most valuable asset a brand can have is a deep, real-time understanding of its customers.
Dhillon advises brands to consolidate data into an "activation layer," and move from rigid rules to "reasoning-based personalization."
He suggests starting by creating a digital "brand kit" to ensure AI-driven outputs are authentic and to adopt a "crawl, walk, run" approach to implementation.
Marketing operations is moving from managing data to owning customer context, the real-time understanding of who customers are and what drives their decisions. As context becomes the new currency of marketing, success depends on building systems that can interpret and activate it at scale. That demand is giving rise to a new kind of marketer, one who thinks like a builder and moves fluidly between data, integrations, and agentic AI to create systems that learn, adapt, and act on their own.
Gurdeep Dhillon, Chief Marketing Officer at Contentstack, has spent his career driving the evolution now redefining marketing. After leading teams at powerhouses like Adobe, Zuora, and SAP, he knows exactly what it looks like when an industry outgrows its old playbook, and more importantly, what it takes to write the next one.
"The core currency brands will fight for in the AI era is context. It’s the understanding of who a customer is, what they want, and how they engage with your brand, whether they’re anonymous or known. In the past, conversion meant a form fill. Today, it’s about turning anonymous engagement on your own channels into an actionable journey," says Dhillon. But before you can spend that currency, you need to build the bank. For him, the first practical step is to consolidate disparate data streams into a single system designed to make customer context usable.
Fixing the plumbing: "You need a customer data strategy, a way to capture and consolidate everything you know about your customers into what I call an activation layer," Dhillon says. "Marketing will take greater ownership of that part of the strategy, and you need to be able to connect different kinds of data, whether it’s transactional, behavioral, or stored in a data warehouse or CRM."
With that foundation in place, the real magic begins. Dhillon calls it "reasoning-based personalization," a leap beyond the rigid, rules-based systems of the past where a "digital concierge" can create a one-to-one experience on the fly.
Reasoning over rules: "Imagine you're chatting with a digital concierge and say, 'I'm interested in men's size ten HOKA shoes.' In real time, that agent can update the site and create a page for you with all the size ten HOKA shoes that are in stock. With a reasoning-based system, the consumer has a thought, the system captures it, and turns it into a personalized experience. It would use agents to recreate the page with the right content, and if any content is missing, it'll just create it using AI. This is very different than the old way, where the marketer has to define all the rules."
But letting AI create content on the fly, done poorly, sounds like a recipe for brand disaster. Dhillon advises brands to first digitize their identity to keep automated outputs authentic and maintain customer confidence.
Brand-safe bots: "Trust is going to be the key. My number one piece of advice for brands is to make sure your brand lives in the digital realm so that AI can work on behalf of your company. This involves creating a brand kit. It's a place for your tone of voice, your style kit, and your product information. Then, the output is as if someone on your team wrote it. It's important for the brand to trust the AI, but it's even more important for the end customer to trust the output. If it's off, that's when it can go wrong," Dhillon explains.
Crawl, walk, run: That’s a big vision, and for many teams, it’s overwhelming. Dhillon’s advice is to treat it like any major change: crawl, walk, run. "This is an end state, and there's not an expectation that people are experts right away. But if you don't lean in now, you will fall behind really fast. I'm encouraging my team to lead versus follow, even if it means making more mistakes. I'm okay with them messing up as long as they're trying."
But does this new approach actually deliver measurable results? Dhillon points to his own team's experience, which was tasked with reaching over 15,000 target accounts. By using AI agents for "prospecting at scale," he reports that his team increased its sales pipeline by nearly 100% year-over-year, hitting far more accounts with personalized messaging than purely human-led efforts could match.
Looking ahead, Dhillon sees these capabilities extending beyond the digital realm to connect a customer's online behavior with their physical experiences.
From URL to IRL: "Imagine a Bay FC fan goes to their website and looks at her favorite player's jersey but doesn't buy it. That weekend, she has tickets to the game. As she walks into the stadium and opens the team app, a personalized offer pops up for that specific jersey with a 20% discount. That's how you bridge the digital and physical. The digital experience was anonymous, but because the brand invested in an omnichannel customer data strategy, they can connect that web activity to the app holder. The moment she walks in the stadium, they can target that personalized ad to prompt her to go to the physical store and buy that jersey."
For Dhillon, however, the most significant impact of this technological change is a human one. The endgame isn't about the technology itself, but about how it can change the nature of his team's work, freeing them to focus on what humans do best: create.
"I'm excited for my team to automate the repetitive, less creative aspects of the job so they can focus on true human creativity. You have to learn a lot of new things, and that can be scary, but the positive is that it unlocks you to operate at 150% of your capacity without working more hours. You can dedicate that extra time to pure creativity," Dhillon concludes.
