Last week I attended the Marketing AI Conference (MAICON) in Cleveland, Ohio, and the technology took a back seat to something more powerful: the people. Despite the event’s growth, it continues to attract people who show up with curiosity, kindness, openness, and a true sense of community that’s rare at any event, let alone one wrestling with profound change. Every conversation felt generous and collaborative, with people openly sharing what’s working, what isn’t, and what they’re still figuring out. 

MAICON attendees recognize the existential questions (“What does this mean for the future of marketers?”), yet they choose courage. They’re people who commit to learning, growing, and evolving together. This year, SmarterX and Marketing AI Institute founder Paul Roetzer delivered a line that crystallized so much across the event: “Optimization is 10% thinking. Innovation is 10x thinking.”  

That shift from incremental to exponential is the message that marketing leaders need to hear. Almost every CMO I speak with is focused on productivity and efficiency for good reason: It’s now table stakes. But while everyone’s optimizing, the real opportunity lies in reinvention. We must reimagine how marketing creates growth, how content becomes intelligence, and how brands design for both machine logic and human trust. The leaders who win won’t just do their jobs faster. They’ll do it in a fundamentally different way. 

Here are three imperatives from MAICON 2025 for marketing leaders ready to stop optimizing and start reinventing.  

Stop Measuring Speed And Start Measuring System Change 

If you’re reducing cycle times, increasing content velocity, and cutting costs, good. Lock those gains in. But know they’re the opening moves, not the endgame. The next question is: What does 10x progress look like for your team?  

It’s not faster execution of the same playbook. It’s building new capabilities that didn’t exist before: 

  • Content systems structured so AI can find and cite you 
  • Dynamic content that automatically adapts by role, industry, and intent, meeting buyers with what they need, when they need it 
  • Pipeline from AI assistants that recommend your solution during buyer research, and product-embedded content that drives retention and expansion 

Move from counting outputs (assets published, cycle time) to tracking decision influence: share of voice in AI answers, entity authority across knowledge graphs, assist rates on revenue, and customer task completion. 

Codify your productivity wins in 90 days. Then graduate to outcomes: tie content to qualified opportunities, engaging multiple members of the buying group, demo requests, and customers engaging with expansion content. That’s where 10x thinking begins. 

Recast Content As The Intelligent Data Layer 

If your content lives in PDFs, static web pages, and presentations, you’re building for a world that’s disappearing. The 10x perspective is: Content isn’t an asset. It’s a structured, modular, metadata-rich data layer that agents can parse and reuse; humans can experience in any format they prefer; and systems can recombine on demand.  

Start thinking about your content as components: claims, proof points, steps, FAQs, integration notes, ROI snippets — each tagged by entity, intent, audience, and journey stage. Make it machine readable, using schema markup and metadata, and build it in multiple formats by default. Marketers must learn to separate content from the presentation layer so agents can assemble exactly what each buyer needs in the moment.  

What becomes possible: 

  • LLM-parsable content libraries where every claim links to verifiable sources: customer evidence, benchmarks, reference architectures 
  • Buyer’s guides with structured comparison matrices, ROI calculators, and case studies with outcome data, all of which can be queried by agents and assembled into any format buyers prefer 
  • New metrics that matter: increased content reuse, decreased content duplication, increased adoption of a single source of truth, and increased citations from agents 

Design For An Audience Of Humans And Agents 

SEO helped you get found by humans searching. Now you need to be discovered, understood, and recommended by AI agents, who are doing the searches for humans. AI agents are now the primary digital audience. They’re summarizing your content, comparing you to competitors, and making recommendations before a human sees your brand. 

The 10x stance: Your job is to feed agents structured truth and give humans credible narratives. You’re designing for two audiences at the same time, and they need different things.  

  • Machines need entity graphs that map how your company, products, and concepts connect to each other; canonical definitions so you’re not calling the same capability three different things; model-friendly evidence or specific, structured claims agents can extract and cite; provenance trails that show where each claim comes from and when it was verified; and freshness signals so agents know whether your data is current or stale.  
  • Humans need a crisp point of view; framing based on their needs and challenges; tangible outcomes; and vivid proof. Give people the narratives that build conviction and help them choose you.  
  • For distribution, stop thinking in “channels.” Publish your structured content where agents search (documentation hubs, partner portals, and data catalogs) and where humans engage (web, social, communities). Be present where decisions get shaped.  

You’re not just creating content anymore. You’re architecting how truth moves through the systems where your buyers make decisions. 

Think 10x: The Future Rewards Architects, Not Optimizers 

The contrarian truth MAICON made clear is that productivity is how teams learn, but progress is how organizations lead.  

The marketing leaders who win in 2026 won’t be automating more output. They’ll rebuild systems and treat content as data that’s engineered for both agents and humans. They’ll upgrade their operating model to manufacture understanding at scale. That’s 10x different, and it’s a future worth building. 

Forrester can help you with your 2026 action plan. If you’re a Forrester client and would like help making the leap from 10% to 10x thinking, please reach out through your account team or schedule a guidance session.