CX is No Longer Enough

For the past two decades, digital strategy has fundamentally been about one thing: creating a great experience for the customer. The site should be fast, navigation smooth, content relevant, checkout frictionless. We’ve named it CX, DX, Digital Experience – and built entire vendor markets around the idea.

This remains true. But it is no longer the whole picture. And that is where I believe many organizations are currently missing something vital.

Three Experiences Simultaneously

In practice, a digital presence has three simultaneous "users" today – and they all need a great experience, but in different ways.

The first is the marketing organization itself. These are the people who every day create content, launch campaigns, optimize pages, approve publications, and follow up on results. Their experience of the platform determines how fast and how well the brand actually moves forward. This is sometimes called Marketing Experience, or MX. It’s not a new concept, but it has long been under-prioritized.

The second is what we all know: the customer's experience on the site, in the app, and in the channels where the brand meets its audience. Digital Experience, DX. This is still the heart of the digital business and will continue to be so.

The third is new. It is the experience for the AI agents that visit, read, and interpret your presence. Agent Experience, AX. And this is where it gets interesting.

The Agent is Becoming an Actual Visitor

A few years ago, an "agent" on a site was a search engine crawler. It read content and ranked it. The only thing you had to think about was SEO.

But something has changed rapidly. Today, there are AI agents that answer customers' questions instead of sending them to sites. Customers no longer ask Google "which company offers X in Stockholm" – they ask Claude or ChatGPT, which in turn learns the answer from various sources. In more and more situations, the agent influences which brand the customer even notices.

And the agent has a completely different experience of your site than a human. It doesn't care about images, animations, or fine typography. It cares about structure. Clear relationships between content. Structured data. Schema. Machine-readable meaning.

This is AX – and the organizations that don't start thinking about it now will notice the consequences quite immediately. Not because their site becomes worse, but because it becomes invisible to the agents that more and more customers use to find information.

And this is no longer a forecast. We see it today in public and private procurement – requirement specifications that explicitly demand AEO and GEO (Answer Engine Optimization and Generative Engine Optimization, respectively), agent-readable structure, and structured content delivery. It’s no longer just early adopters making these demands. It’s buyers who know that otherwise, they are buying a platform that will be semi-functional within a few years.

Demands on the Marketing Organization

This doesn't just change how you build your presence. It changes the pace at which it needs to be able to change.

When an agent misunderstands your offering, it needs to be corrected today, not next sprint. When a campaign isn't working, the hypothesis needs to be tested and adjusted within hours, not weeks. When a new format is needed to meet an emerging agent model, the marketing department needs to be able to deliver it themselves. Not wait in line with IT.

The classic model where marketing orders from IT, waits for delivery, and then optimizes at the margins is no longer sufficient. Not because it’s bad – but because the pace of what AI makes possible has exceeded what ticketing systems can handle.

This means that the marketing department's autonomy becomes a strategic issue. It’s about being able to act without being dependent on another function for every step. It’s about owning your own workflows from idea to publication to follow-up.

And that’s where the platform question becomes acute. Because autonomy requires that the tools actually work together.

Fragmentation is the Real Problem

If you look at how a typical marketing department is set up today, it’s not uncommon to have: one CMS for publishing, a separate system for email marketing, a third for web analytics, a fourth for A/B testing, a fifth for personalization, a sixth for SEO and GEO, perhaps a seventh for asset management, and an eighth for marketing automation. All connected with varying degrees of integration and varying degrees of success.

Each individual system may be good. Together, they create friction. Data ends up in silos. Content is versioned differently in different systems. A campaign change in one system doesn't reflect in another. Insights from one tool never reach the decision point in another. And AI agents trying to navigate this fragmented presence get a correspondingly fragmented view of the brand.

When you now need to build a presence that works for the marketing organization, customer, and agent simultaneously, the fragmented model simply doesn't work anymore. Not at the speed required. Not with the consistency required. And not at a cost that is defensible.

That is why I believe the next generation of platform procurement will ask a different question than before. Not "which is the best CMS?" or "which is the best analytics tool?", but "which platform can deliver MX, DX, and AX fully integrated – with the same content, same data, same governance, and the same AI layer that binds it all together?"

And that is where the deeper value lies. Because the real asset won't be which AI model you use – models come and go and quickly become interchangeable. The strategic value is built in the layer of knowledge, workflows, rules, content, and memory that the organization gathers around the AI. This layer – often called "the harness" – is what actually accumulates over time and becomes difficult for competitors to copy. A fragmented platform stack is fragmented exactly there because the knowledge is never gathered in one place. An integrated platform can start building it up.

My Reflections

Thinking about digital presence as "the customer's experience" is not wrong – but it is no longer enough. It is one of three experiences that the platform delivers simultaneously. Those who understand all three, and how they connect, have a structural advantage over those who continue to optimize only one.

And the real consequence is that marketing department autonomy is no longer a matter of convenience. It is a strategic necessity. And autonomy, in turn, requires that the platform is built to handle the whole – not to be one of eight integrated islands.

CMOs who start thinking in these terms now will find it easier to justify their next platform investment. Not as a tool swap, but as a structural choice that affects speed, cost, and competitiveness for years to come.

We work with these issues in our client deliveries daily, and it is clear that more marketing managers and digital decision-makers are facing the same type of strategic choices. Feel free to reach out if you want to discuss further.