Las Vegas, April 2026. Two conferences in the same week — Adobe Summit and Google Cloud Next.

For anyone who read The Agentic CMO when it was published in June 2025 — and for anyone who didn’t — these were the days the book’s central claim became falsifiable.

The claim was that marketing automation was ending and marketing autonomy was beginning. That a new role would emerge — call it the supermarketer, the agentic CMO, the orchestrator — and it would not be a single human being doing more work. It would be a human orchestrating a stable of agents, each with bounded authority, each accountable to outcomes the human had not personally executed but had agreed to be measured on.

Eighteen months ago, that was a thesis. In April 2026 it was on stage with named customers behind it.

Adobe demonstrated CX Enterprise Coworker taking a single goal — improve cross-sell by three per cent — and assembling audiences, creative, decisioning, and execution behind it. The human approved the plan. The agents ran it. The platform measured it. Vodafone, on Google’s stage, talked about hundreds of agents in production saving millions of euros a year. Comcast rebuilt the Xfinity Assistant on Google’s Agent Development Kit and runtime. L’Oréal launched a Beauty Tech Agentic Platform on Google Cloud. Adobe Marketing Agent is now generally available inside Microsoft 365 Copilot and in beta inside Claude Enterprise, ChatGPT Enterprise, Gemini Enterprise, and IBM watsonx Orchestrate.

The supermarketer is now a working demo with logos behind it.

The Question Neither Vendor Answered

And this is the part the keynotes were careful not to say out loud.

We now know how to build the supermarketer. We do not know how to manage one.

The hardest unsolved problem in agentic marketing is not model quality. It is not runtime cost — though that one is closer than most CMOs realise. It is not even the data substrate, though Google’s Agentic Data Cloud and Adobe’s Brand Intelligence both acknowledge that agents fail without governed business context. The hardest unsolved problem is organisational.

When Adobe demonstrated CX Enterprise Coworker, the chosen scenario was a three per cent cross-sell improvement. Watch the demo carefully and you can list the open questions on one hand.

Who set the three per cent? At what level of seniority did that goal originate, and against what counterfactual? “Improve cross-sell by three per cent” is a conversational instruction. It’s not a budget. It’s not a forecast. It’s not a promise to a board. The agent can execute against it. It cannot decide whether the number should have been five.

Who carries the cost? Both Adobe and Google disclosed essentially no public pricing for their flagship agentic offerings. Read the silence. It is not oversight. It is an admission that cost-to-serve is not yet predictable, even for the vendors. Inference cost, runtime cost, memory cost, context-storage cost, observability cost, human-review cost — these accrue at different rates against different agents under different workloads. A SaaS seat is the wrong unit of analysis. The right unit is unit economics of work delivered. Most marketing organisations do not have a P&L granular enough to count it.

Who approves the action? Adobe’s example included a human approval step. So did Google’s. Neither vendor explained how the approval ladder works at scale. If you are running fifty agents, you cannot approve every action. If you are running five hundred, you cannot approve any of them and still call it management. Bounded autonomy — the framework I built the second edition of the book around — requires a governance authority. The authority does not yet exist on most org charts.

Who is accountable when the agent underperforms? The CMO? The Head of MarTech? The platform vendor? The agency that integrated it? In the conventional marketing organisation, accountability follows execution. In the agentic organisation, execution belongs to the agent. Accountability does not transfer cleanly upward. Someone has to volunteer for it.

Who decides when to expand the agent’s authority? An agent that is good enough to recommend an audience is, with one configuration change, good enough to assemble the audience. With another, good enough to launch the campaign. With another, good enough to commit budget without a human in the loop. Each step changes the risk profile of the organisation. There is no chief autonomy officer to make the call. There is no controller for the autonomy ledger.

A Small Pilot, A Large Problem

When I ran into this at S&P Global, the symptom was banal. We piloted an agent capable of drafting personalised outbound communications at scale. The technology worked. The pilot stalled — not on output quality, not on integration, not on data. It stalled on a single question: at what volume does this stop being marketing-led and start being compliance-led? Nobody had been hired to answer that. Nobody had been empowered to answer that. The org chart had no row for it.

That was a small pilot in a tightly regulated industry. Multiply it across a Fortune 500 marketing function with eight regions, twelve product lines, three hundred markets, and several hundred agents on the way, and the absence of the governance row stops being an inconvenience. It becomes the rate-limit on everything else.

What Adobe Got Right And Why It Isn’t Enough

To Adobe’s credit, the Summit announcements came closer to the operating-model question than anything I’ve seen from a major vendor. Naming Brand Intelligence and Engagement Intelligence as two separate, opposed reasoning engines inside CX Enterprise is the first time a vendor has admitted at the architectural level that marketing has two clocks running. One engine optimises for engagement economics on short horizons — conversion, lifetime value, return on spend. The other optimises for brand integrity on long horizons — consistency, voice, equity, trust. Without the second engine constraining the first, the agentic stack will eat the brand alive within a quarter.

The architecture is correct. It is not the answer to the question I am asking. Two engines make a platform. They don’t make a job description. The agent that launches the campaign is not the agent that approves the goal, controls the budget, decides when to expand autonomy, or carries the consequence when the customer complains. The org chart still has to exist somewhere — and it will exist in your company, not in Adobe’s.

A Word On The Pricing Silence

A short note on the pricing silence, because I think it’s been under-read. Both vendors are betting that the unit economics of agentic work will become predictable before any enterprise procurement team forces them to publish a rate card. They may be right. They may not. What is certain is that the chief marketing officer who treats the agentic platform as a SaaS line item will, within twelve months, find a multi-million-pound surprise on the inference invoice. The chief financial officer will not be in a forgiving mood.

If you are negotiating either contract — Adobe CX Enterprise, Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, or both in tandem — separate the costs of model, runtime, memory, storage, context, observability, and human-review workflow. Refuse contracts that bundle them. The bundle is the vendor’s risk transfer to you.

What This Means For Your Next Quarter

The Agentic CMO thesis was that marketing automation was ending and marketing autonomy was beginning. April 2026 is the month I would mark on the calendar as the inflection. The demos work. The customers are named. The protocols — MCP, A2A, Agent Payment Protocol — are open enough that vendor lock-in has shifted shape rather than disappeared. The supermarketer is in sight.

The hardest job in marketing for the next twenty-four months is not building the supermarketer. It is writing the job description.

It is deciding who owns the autonomy ledger, who carries the inference budget, who escalates the goal, who approves the expansion of authority, who answers when it goes wrong. None of that is a procurement question. All of it is an organisational question. None of the keynotes addressed it. None of the vendors will.

The first wave of agentic marketing rollouts will not fail on technology. They will fail on accountability.

The CMOs who win the next cycle are not the ones with the best stack. They are the ones who hired the right person to be accountable for it — and then wrote the org chart that lets that person actually do the job.

Two questions worth sitting with this week.

First: if your CFO asked tomorrow who carries the P&L for agentic marketing across your organisation, could you give a name? Not a function. A name.

Second: if your CEO asked who has authority to expand an agent’s scope from recommendation to execution to autonomous spend — and who has authority to revoke it — could you draw the line on a single page?

If either answer is no, start there. The rest is procurement.

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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in Chronicles of Change and on my social media accounts are my own and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of S&P Global.