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Telstra CMO Brent Smart warned in 2019 that martech and CX was becoming “hygiene” and vanilla and offered little competitive advantage. The ANZ team at consumer CRM platform Klaviyo this year commissioned ad effectiveness advisor and co-founder of brand tracking start-up Tracksuit, James Hurman, to analyse 1.7 million online shoppers from multiple ANZ ecom players to discover emotion and CX were a core competitive advantage – if indeed the experience did trigger a positive emotional response. Now research firm Forrester is on the case – AI and automation have made service quick and cheap, it says, but oddly cold. Forrester says customer ease is on the rise but emotional engagement is down. The risk is “good-enough” looks efficient on paper but loses on loyalty. The fix: wire AI into human workflows, redesign journeys for trust, and make empathy measurable – and if Smart and Hurman’s work for Klaviyo is right – make the experience emotional to lock in loyalty. .

Co-owner of family run Springhill Farms, Fiona Whatley, isn’t afraid of being real, nor does she shy away from fessing up to several marketing mistakes as she strives to build a stronger brand narrative for the Aussie snacking manufacturer’s growing better-for-you product offering. Armed with a product offering that taps into two key growing consumer trends – healthier snacking and the wellbeing movement – the business is in a good place to keep growing if it can stick to its newly homed strategy and longer-standing authenticity, she tells Mi3. As to executing that strategy, there’s everything from prioritising food-in-mouth experiences, formalising the avatar of Springhill’s target customer, Sarah, rethinking product identity and packaging, and engaging influencers, fractional CMOs, agencies and product strategists on the table.

Mortgage broking is not the sort of business where revolutions are expected. Yet David Hyman, Lendi Group CEO is rapidly building one. With Project Aurora, his firm plans to replace much of the mortgage grind with agentic AI. That will see digital brokers that work around the clock, humans managing agents, and even agents managing their human counterparts, at least as coaches. The aim is not to cull jobs, but to rewire them: people for trust and complexity, machines for speed and scale. Meanwhile, Chief Technology Officer, Devesh Maheshwari sees the absence of any mature scaffolding in the current agentic AI ecosystem as an opportunity. It forces the team to design for resilience from day one, and creates room for innovators to set the bar for how Agentic AI should operate securely, transparently, and at enterprise scale. By mid-2026, if their plan works, the home loan could become less a paper chase and more a precision-engineered service, one where the busiest worker in the room isn’t human.