The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlstrom

Dan Weirich, COO & CFO of Treasure AI, explains why the company moved to engagement-based pricing that ties its revenue to customer clicks, and what CMOs should expect as CFOs take a harder look at AI spend. Recorded live at Agentic World 2026 in Miami. **Finance is pumping the brakes on AI spend.** Weirich on how the push to maximize token usage gave way to cost scrutiny, why some high-profile companies didn't see it coming, and what capital discipline looks like for a well-funded vendor in the middle of a hype cycle. **Outcome-based pricing puts the vendor's money where its mouth is.** Why Treasure AI shifted from its 'No Compute' model to engagement-based pricing, what it means for new and existing customers, and whether the rest of the market is headed the same way. **CMOs and CFOs need a closer working relationship.** A CFO's view of how finance and marketing have worked together over the last five years, where the two can partner as marketing's staffing and work change, and how to structure vendor contracts to stay adaptable as the CDP category consolidates.

About Dan Weirich

Dan Weirich is Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer of Treasure AI (formerly Treasure Data), where he leads the company's business and financial operations and sits on its board. He brings more than 25 years of finance and operations leadership at technology companies.

Dan first joined Treasure Data as CFO in 2014. After Arm acquired the company in 2018, he became Vice President of Operations for Arm's data business. He returned as COO and CFO in 2021, when Treasure Data separated from Arm and joined SoftBank Vision Fund 2's portfolio.

Before Treasure Data, Dan spent more than a decade at 8x8, Inc., as CFO and later President, and helped build its software-as-a-service business. Earlier, as Vice President of Business Development at iAsiaWorks, he expanded the company into 13 Asian countries and helped take it public on NASDAQ in 2000. He has also held roles at Qwest and Phoenix Network.

Dan is a General Partner at Carbide Ventures and holds a BS in International Business from the University of Colorado Boulder.

Dan Weirich on LinkedIn

---------- Resources ----------

Treasure AI

The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by TEKsystems.

The hardest part of martech right now is telling which tools are actually earning their keep. That's the question running through the MarTech Summit Boston agenda on October 27. We're attending MarTech Summit Boston on October 27 as a media partner. If you want to join, the code AGILE15 saves you 15%.

We’re proud to be a media partner for #MAICON26 - Oct. 13-15! Learn how AI can power your marketing and business and help you grow smarter. Use code AGILE150 to save!

Need to evaluate martech, AI, or CX platforms and don't know where to start? The Agile Brand Guide List is now in beta. We're building the most useful, free-to-use, and up-to-date way to assess what truly matters when evaluating platforms.

Reach your customers with Reddit. Spend $500 in ad spend, get $500 back in ad credit!

Chaser is the only Slack-native project management platform that helps teams turn messages into tracked tasks, automate follow-ups, and maintain team-wide visibility, without adopting another tool. Now integrated with Claude and other GenAI tools. Learn more at trychaser.com and use code AGILEBRAND for a 3-month free trial (normal trial is 14 days).

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Connect with Greg on LinkedIn

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The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content:

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John Rockhold, VP Market Engagement at Spotlight, says AI answer engines treat a company's own content as a ceiling — the citations that move buyers come from sources it doesn't control. He and Greg Kihlström get into what replaces the old B2B influence playbook.

Self-citation is a ceiling, not a strategy. Publishing more owned content doesn't raise AI visibility past a point; third-party validation does the lifting.

Analysts shape the vocabulary, peer platforms get the citation. The two do different jobs, and budget allocated as if they were the same tends to underperform.

Influence is owned by everybody and therefore nobody. Rockhold on what has to change week to week across analyst relations, comms, and customer marketing — not just who it reports to.

By the time a buyer contacts you, the influencing already happened. What that does to a marketing organization still structured around lead generation and MQLs.

About John Rockhold

B2B buying has become AI-mediated and trust-driven, long before buyers engage a vendor. I spend my time observing how influence is formed, synthesizing signals from analysts, buyer research, and market behavior, and helping organizations make sense of what actually shapes modern buying decisions.

As VP of Market Engagement at Spotlight, I draw on a background that includes journalism, analyst relations, and years of close collaboration with industry analysts. I’m trusted by analysts because I respect their role, understand how their work evolves, and prioritize accuracy, context, and long-term relationships over short-term outcomes.

Much of my work focuses on how influence, visibility, and trust are earned in the modern B2B buyer journey. I help B2B brands understand how experts, customers, vendors, partners, and employees all shape visibility and credibility. At Spotlight, we refer to this coordinated approach to earning and sustaining trust across analysts, customers, and AI systems as Influence Orchestration.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnrockhold/

---------- Resources ----------

This episode is brought to you by Spotlight. Spotlight is pioneering the future of influence orchestration in the B2B buyer journey. Trusted by over 165 teams globally, Spotlight is the world’s leading analyst relations consultancy and industry platform.

The hardest part of martech right now is telling which tools are actually earning their keep. That's the question running through the MarTech Summit Boston agenda on October 27. We're attending MarTech Summit Boston on October 27 as a media partner. If you want to join, the code AGILE15 saves you 15%.

Need to evaluate martech, AI, or CX platforms and don't know where to start? The Agile Brand Guide List is now in beta. We're building the most useful, free-to-use, and up-to-date way to assess what truly matters when evaluating platforms.

Reach your customers with Reddit. Spend $500 in ad spend, get $500 back in ad credit!

Chaser is the only Slack-native project management platform that helps teams turn messages into tracked tasks, automate follow-ups, and maintain team-wide visibility, without adopting another tool. Now integrated with Claude and other GenAI tools. Learn more at trychaser.com and use code AGILEBRAND for a 3-month free trial (normal trial is 14 days).

Start building your own apps with Replit and get $20 off.

Enjoyed the show? Tell us more and give us a rating so others can find the show.

Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstrom

Don't miss a thing: get the latest episodes, sign up for our newsletter, and check out Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology.

The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Kaz Ohta, CEO and CMO of Treasure AI, helped pioneer the customer data platform category. Now he's betting that customer data matters less for what it stores than for what autonomous agents do with it. Recorded at Agentic World, he and Greg Kihlström get into what that shift asks of enterprise marketing leaders.

The CDP label stopped describing the work. Why Treasure Data became Treasure AI, where the company's engineering investment moved, and how Ohta views warehouse-native players like Databricks moving into the category he helped create.

Building the agentic layer creates ecosystem friction. The reasoning behind building Personalization Studio in-house rather than deepening partnerships with testing and personalization vendors, and how to handle the channel conflict that follows.

Autonomy gets set decision by decision. Which decisions enterprise customers hand to agents outright, which still require human sign-off, and how measurement has to change once agents are doing the optimizing.

About Kaz Ohta

Kazuki Ohta is the co-founder and CEO of Treasure AI, an AI-native platform built to enable customer data and agentic experiences. He co-founded Treasure Data, now Treasure AI, in 2011 and served as its CTO during the company’s early development, helping scale the business to more than $100 million in annual recurring revenue.

Kaz Ohta on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kazukiohta/

---------- Resources ----------

Treasure AI: https://www.treasure.ai

The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by TEKsystems. Learn more here: https://aglbrnd.co/r/2868abd8085a9703

The hardest part of martech right now is telling which tools are actually earning their keep. That's the question running through the MarTech Summit Boston agenda on October 27. We're attending MarTech Summit Boston on October 27 as a media partner. If you want to join, the code AGILE15 saves you 15%. https://aglbrnd.co/r/c70c250b8d52dff3

We’re proud to be a media partner for #MAICON26 - Oct. 13-15! Learn how AI can power your marketing and business and help you grow smarter. Use code AGILE150 to save! https://aglbrnd.co/r/7fe458ced0f04658

Need to evaluate martech, AI, or CX platforms and don't know where to start? The Agile Brand Guide List is now in beta. We're building the most useful, free-to-use, and up-to-date way to assess what truly matters when evaluating platforms. See more here: https://aglbrnd.co/r/f76be3a33cc491bb

Reach your customers with Reddit. Spend $500 in ad spend, get $500 back in ad credit! Learn more: https://aglbrnd.co/r/491818c79fb1873f

Chaser is the only Slack-native project management platform that helps teams turn messages into tracked tasks, automate follow-ups, and maintain team-wide visibility, without adopting another tool. Now integrated with Claude and other GenAI tools. Learn more at trychaser.com and use code AGILEBRAND for a 3-month free trial (normal trial is 14 days).

Start building your own apps with Replit and get $20 off. Learn more: https://aglbrnd.co/r/93531742a7625a20

Enjoyed the show? Tell us more and give us a rating so others can find the show: https://aglbrnd.co/r/faaed112fc9887f3

Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstrom

Don't miss a thing: get the latest episodes, sign up for our newsletter, and check out Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://aglbrnd.co/r/35ded3ccfb6716ba

The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content: https://aglbrnd.co/r/f1782ab12211f765

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ankur Goyal, CEO and Co-Founder at Fibr AI, says your website now has a second audience that never looks at it: the AI agents reading and summarizing your brand before a buyer ever arrives.

He and Greg Kihlström get into what that does to pages enterprises have spent a decade optimizing for humans.

Owned properties become the control point. Models keep changing what they cite and how, so the durable investment is in the properties a brand actually controls — not in chasing each platform's ranking behavior.

One page, two requirements. A person needs to be persuaded; an agent needs a fact it can act on. Goyal on where those demands conflict, and how to resolve it without building two websites.

Personalization stops being a segment and becomes a decision. The move from assigning visitors to predefined buckets to running a real-time decision system — and what a CMS, CDP, and testing stack can't be configured to do.

About AJ Goyal

Ankur "AJ" Goyal is Founder & CEO of Fibr AI. He has spent over a decade leading ventures across AI, digital marketing automation, and consumer product innovation. He specializes in personalization and marketing infrastructure, shifting web platforms toward agentic and automated consumer engagement.

AJ Goyal on LinkedIn

---------- Resources ----------

Fibr AI

Companies put enormous effort into bringing people to their websites, but once someone arrives, most sites still show everyone the same generic experience. Fibr adds an intelligent layer to your existing website, without requiring a rebuild, a CMS migration, or engineering support for every update, so one URL can deliver a unique, relevant experience based on what each visitor is trying to accomplish.

And today, your visitors aren’t always people. AI search tools and agents are also reading the web to decide what information to surface. When a brand’s own content isn’t clear or useful, they may rely on sources like Reddit comments and third-party reviews instead. Fibr helps make your website a clearer, more useful source for both people and AI systems, while keeping your brand in control.

The hardest part of martech right now is telling which tools are actually earning their keep. That's the question running through the MarTech Summit Boston agenda on October 27. We're attending MarTech Summit Boston on October 27 as a media partner. If you want to join, the code AGILE15 saves you 15%.

Need to evaluate martech, AI, or CX platforms and don't know where to start? The Agile Brand Guide List is now in beta. We're building the most useful, free-to-use, and up-to-date way to assess what truly matters when evaluating platforms.

Reach your customers with Reddit. Spend $500 in ad spend, get $500 back in ad credit!

Chaser is the only Slack-native project management platform that helps teams turn messages into tracked tasks, automate follow-ups, and maintain team-wide visibility, without adopting another tool. Now integrated with Claude and other GenAI tools. Learn more at trychaser.com and use code AGILEBRAND for a 3-month free trial (normal trial is 14 days).

Start building your own apps with Replit and get $20 off.

Enjoyed the show? Tell us more and give us a rating so others can find the show.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstrom

Don't miss a thing: get the latest episodes, sign up for our newsletter, and check out Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology.

The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ken Stillwell, CFO and COO at Pega, says most enterprise AI business cases fund a label rather than a specific capability — and that the gap shows up later, on the P&L. He and Greg Kihlström get into what financial discipline around AI actually looks like.

"AI" is not a budget category. A rules engine, a predictive model, and a system that acts on its own carry different costs, risks, and payback periods. Stillwell on making teams say which one they're asking for.

The benefit gets modeled; the operational change doesn't. Where AI business cases reliably break down, and what tells you a case is going to miss before you fund it.

Scaling a pilot is a coherence problem, not a technology problem. What it takes to let many teams decide faster without the enterprise ceasing to behave like one company — and who owns that.

About Ken Stillwell

As Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer, Ken Stillwell is responsible for finance, investor relations, legal, facilities, information technology, Pega Cloud, global client support, and business operations, overseeing more than one thousand employees globally. His leadership has been central to Pega’s transformation to an as-a-Service business through Pega’s Cloud transition. Recognized as incisive, transparent, clear, and empathetic, his opinions and counsel are sought after by peers, clients, and media. Ken is a regular contributor to numerous industry publications regarding financial and operational leadership.

Ken has nearly 30 years of financial leadership experience in high-growth organizations in the technology sector. He is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, where he earned his undergraduate degree in business and economics, and the University of South Carolina, where he earned a Master's in accounting and finance. Ken is also a certified public accountant.

Ken Stillwell on LinkedIn

---------- Resources ----------

Pega delivers the platform to reimagine, run, and evolve the processes and decisions an enterprise can't afford to get wrong. We combine AI with proven architecture to keep mission-critical operations governed, scalable, and continuously adaptable. Since 1983, the world's largest organizations have trusted Pega to turn transformation ambition into durable results.

The hardest part of martech right now is telling which tools are actually earning their keep. That's the question running through the MarTech Summit Boston agenda on October 27. We're attending MarTech Summit Boston on October 27 as a media partner. If you want to join, the code AGILE15 saves you 15%.

We’re proud to be a media partner for #MAICON26 - Oct. 13-15! Learn how AI can power your marketing and business and help you grow smarter. Use code AGILE150 to save!

Need to evaluate martech, AI, or CX platforms and don't know where to start? The Agile Brand Guide List is now in beta. We're building the most useful, free-to-use, and up-to-date way to assess what truly matters when evaluating platforms.

Reach your customers with Reddit. Spend $500 in ad spend, get $500 back in ad credit!

Chaser is the only Slack-native project management platform that helps teams turn messages into tracked tasks, automate follow-ups, and maintain team-wide visibility, without adopting another tool. Now integrated with Claude and other GenAI tools. Learn more at trychaser.com and use code AGILEBRAND for a 3-month free trial (normal trial is 14 days).

Start building your own apps with Replit and get $20 off.

Enjoyed the show? Tell us more and give us a rating so others can find the show.

Connect with Greg on LinkedIn

Don't miss a thing: get the latest episodes, sign up for our newsletter, and check out Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology.

The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.