What happens when your next customer isn't even human?
Chris Koehler is the CMO of Twilio, and his 2026 marketing plan lasted exactly one month before AI agents forced him to rethink everything. In this conversation, Chris gets real about why planning horizons have collapsed from years to weeks, what happens when AI agents — not humans — are doing the buying, and why brand might matter MORE in an AI-driven world, not less.
Chris Koehler is the Chief Marketing Officer at Twilio, a $5B+ customer engagement platform. Previously, he led marketing at Box and helped build the analytics engine at Adobe.
Key takeaways:
• Why using AI to speed up bad processes is the wrong move — you need to reimagine them entirely
• The agent buying continuum: SEO → AEO → human-to-agent → agent-to-agent
• Why brand awareness becomes MORE critical when agents do the discovery
• The 'frozen food vs pizza' framework for the future of software
• How to stop feeling paralyzed: the quadrant exercise he uses to prioritize AI initiatives
Follow Chris on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ckoehler/
Learn more: twilio.com
Chapters:
00:00 Meet Chris Koehler, CMO of Twilio
01:44 The Healthy Tension Between IT and Marketing
02:44 Planning in Weeks, Not Quarters
04:40 The Rise of Asynchronous AI Work
07:22 Unlearning 30 Years of Marketing
11:37 Frozen Food vs Pizza: The Future of Software
14:07 Content Scarcity to Content Abundance
15:51 Could AI Agents Fix the Privacy Problem?
17:11 The Agent Buying Continuum
22:12 The Tsunami Most People Can't See
24:40 How to Get Embedded in LLM Recommendations
26:33 Does Brand Matter When Agents Are Buying?
31:01 Measuring Success When You Can't Track Anything
33:12 The AI Agent Webinar Experiment
36:44 What Events Look Like in 2029
42:48 How Chris Curates AI Intel Daily
46:22 Advice for Paralyzed CMOs
49:01 Lightning Round