Cover of ’Hello Me’ - AI has flipped Personalisation

’Hello Me’ - AI has flipped Personalisation

’Hello Me’ - AI has flipped Personalisation

By: Rasmus Houlind
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Marketing to a new breed of consumer wielding the power of personalisation in their favour. Not yours.

For decades, personalisation has been something brands did to consumers. AI has flipped that. Instead of brands constantly telling consumers who to become, consumers now use AI to help them figure that out for themselves.

Hello Me is a podcast from Rasmus Houlind (Agillic, Hello $Firstname) and Frans Riemersma (MartechTribe, MartechMap.com) — an open, exploratory series about what happens to marketing once consumers start using AI to define who they want to be, instead of waiting for brands to tell them.

Each episode is a genuine conversation, not a product demo or a corporate interview: 45–60 minutes, recorded remotely, with guests invited to challenge the premise rather than just confirm it. There's no fixed season, no set release schedule, and no claim to having the answers — just better questions, one conversation at a time.

Got a sharp, unusual take on personalisation, AI, or the new rules of marketing — especially if you're not already in our usual orbit? We want to hear from you.

Watch the full video playlist on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJGgw-cJasRw
Hello Me — the concept for the show, and every question we're chasing this season: https://omnichannelinstitute.com/hello-me.html
Hello $Firstname — a free written abstract of the book this whole show builds on: https://agillic.com/free-ebook-hello-firstname/
Hello $Firstname — the audiobook edition, with a full cast of narrators, on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2zIvs5pSRNTO3YAeFUWZBL?si=zpeTEW_1RnWNHSwZZEAnWA
Personalisation Cards — workshop decks for Commerce, Subscription, Banking, and Charity/NGO teams: https://omnichannelinstitute.com/cards.html
MartechTribe — Frans Riemersma's research and consultancy on marketing technology: https://www.martechtribe.com
MartechMap.com — Frans Riemersma and Scott Brinker's joint map of the global martech landscape: https://martechmap.com
Omnichannel Institute — Rasmus's home for frameworks, books, and courses on personalisation: https://www.omnichannelinstitute.com

Copyright 2026 All rights reserved. Economics Management Management & Leadership Marketing & Sales
Episodes
  • Scott Brinker: Personalisation Was a Guess - Hello Me - Episode 2

    Scott Brinker: Personalisation Was a Guess - Hello Me - Episode 2
    6 Oct 2026
    For years, personalisation has been us guessing what the customer wants. Scott Brinker, the "Godfather of Martech" and founder of chiefmartec.com, joins Rasmus Houlind and Frans Riemersma and closes on a different idea: instead of guessing, let the customer tell us what they want, and then deliver it. Along the way we trace the show's origin back to a phrase Scott and Frans coined together, "agents of customers". We get into the three types of AI agents now reshaping marketing, why buyers already hold more power than most sellers have noticed, why raw software capability stopped being a moat, and what can't be prompted: trust, relationships and culture. Scott also makes the case for why a little friction in buying might be worth keeping, what happens to UI design once voice takes over, and why regional and cultural differences might be a genuine advantage rather than a weakness. This is an open, ongoing series. We don't know exactly when the next episode drops, or who is in it. If you have a sharp, unusual take on personalisation, AI or the new rules of marketing, especially if you are not already in our usual orbit, we want to hear from you. Chapters 0:00 - Cold open: Hello Me, AI has flipped personalisation 0:30 - Introducing Scott, and a year on from Hello $Firstname 3:10 - Where Hello Me started: "agents of customers" 4:10 - The three types of agents, explained 6:25 - The power shift: buyers, sellers and the information gap 8:05 - How buyers use AI now: "call us" pricing pages and vendor-selection agents 10:50 - Abundance and the empowered consumer: what do we actually want? 12:30 - Are marketers still marketing to the old consumer? 15:00 - Will customers notice their power? Advertising's value and its dark side 17:25 - Your own agent as a filter: guardrails and filter bubbles 19:10 - Where advertising goes when agents filter it out 21:05 - Sycophantic AI: will your guardrails hold when you are hungry? 22:40 - Is removing all friction from buying actually good? 23:50 - B2B buying committees and the puppet show 26:00 - Could your agent negotiate with mine? 28:00 - Abundance for marketers, and a stack bigger than the landscape 30:50 - The future stack: commercial products plus ambient, homegrown software 31:40 - What can't be prompted: trust, relationships and the real moat 33:25 - Ecosystems and culture: the moats that take time 36:30 - Are organisations fit for abundance? Distinctive versus best practice 38:25 - Can an AI capture culture, or feel anything? 42:40 - Voice as the next interface 43:55 - What happens to UI design? 46:10 - Robotics, teased and parked for another day 46:30 - Regional differences: US, China, EU 49:10 - Closing: personalisation was guessing, so let the customer tell us 50:10 - Sign-off: help us find the next guests Sign-off and links This is an open, ongoing series. We don't know exactly when the next episode drops, or who is in it. If you have a sharp, unusual take on personalisation, AI or the new rules of marketing, especially if you are not already in our usual orbit, tell us which of the seven questions is yours, or who we should talk to next. Rasmus & Frans Links and resources Watch the full video playlist on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJGgw-cJasRw The show, the full concept and all seven questions we are chasing: https://omnichannelinstitute.com/hello-me.html Scott's article on moats, mentioned in the episode: https://newsletter.chiefmartec.com/p/the-death-of-moats-in-marketing-and-martech-is-greatly-exaggerated Scott Brinker's chiefmartec.com: https://chiefmartec.com Hello $Firstname, a free written abstract of the book this show builds on: https://agillic.com/free-ebook-hello-firstname/ Hello $Firstname, the audiobook edition with a full cast of narrators, on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2zIvs5pSRNTO3YAeFUWZBL?si=zpeTEW_1RnWNHSwZZEAnWA Personalisation Cards, workshop decks for Commerce, Subscription, Banking and Charity/NGO teams: https://omnichannelinstitute.com/cards.html MartechTribe, Frans Riemersma's research and consultancy on marketing technology: https://www.martechtribe.com MartechMap.com, Frans Riemersma and Scott Brinker's joint map of the global martech landscape: https://martechmap.com Omnichannel Institute, Rasmus's home for frameworks, books and courses on personalisation: https://www.omnichannelinstitute.com
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    51 min
  • Hello $Firstname AI Edition, Epilogue - when the customer sends an agent...

    Hello $Firstname AI Edition, Epilogue - when the customer sends an agent...
    24 Sep 2026
    In the chapters leading up to this point, we've explored how to create meaningful, personalised experiences across channels, campaigns, and touchpoints. We've talked about data, content, and the orchestration that brings it all together. We've introduced the Bowtie of Personalisation, the CX Layers, and the Pyramid of Personalisation to help structure that work. But what happens when the customer never shows up? What happens when they send an agent instead? When this book first went to print, that question was still mostly hypothetical. It no longer is. Every major LLM now ships some form of agent mode, not just one of them. Google answers more questions directly on its results page, without a click. And, more importantly, behaviour has already started to change. Many customers no longer just browse in the traditional sense. They delegate, asking systems to search, compare, and increasingly transact on their behalf. This is already altering the flow of traffic, the role of the website, and the point of contact between brand and consumer. Marketers have responded to one half of that shift already: feeding structured content into the LLMs. Documentation, spec sheets, comparison pages, proof points, reviews, anything that might convince an agent, and the model behind it, that your product deserves to be the one it recommends. Keanu Taylor, reading chapter sixteen for this edition, called the discipline behind this "context engineering": deciding which content is still true, still relevant, and worth surfacing to a system that will act on it without asking you first. It's a new kind of SEO, except the reader you're optimising for has already decided not to read the page. There's another half to this shift, on the seller's side. It's already showing up inside the marketing stack itself, as what we called elsewhere in this book the agentic platform: a layer of semi-autonomous marketing agents sitting on top of your existing systems, coordinating journeys, generating content, and triggering actions across channels. Buyer agents and seller agents are being built at the same time, on both sides of the counter, and both are being trained deliberately to deal with each other. They will get good at it. The real question isn't whether they'll negotiate well together, it's whose interests they'll have been trained to serve when they do. For commoditised products, where the lowest price wins, this model may work well. But for emotionally anchored brands, it will challenge everything we have built around branded experience, loyalty, and long-term value. If your flagship store is replaced by an invisible transaction between agents, where does storytelling go? Where does the moment of delight happen? What becomes of the brand? It's possible that consumers will begin to segment their own behaviour too: relying on agents for utility-driven purchases, but still visiting brand sites when they want to be inspired, still signing up for loyalty programmes, still responding to personalisation, not just of price, but of message, tone, and experience. And it's possible that some will train and deploy agents that reflect their own values: agents that aren't financed by advertising, that factor in long-term preferences and who the person wants to become, not just what they want to buy. That's the hopeful version. Here's the complication. Matthew Niederberger, who read chapter twenty for this edition, pointed out that if an agent is going to remember what a customer told it and act on that next time, the memory has to live somewhere, and somebody has to govern it. Most organisations haven't worked out who that somebody is yet. But there's a bigger version of the same problem sitting one level up. When your customer sends an agent, they tend to assume it's working for them: their preferences, their history, their taste. In practice, that profile mostly doesn't live with the customer, and it doesn't live with you either. It lives with whichever company built the model doing the delegating, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and a short list of others. The consumer believes they own their own preferences. The brand hopes it owns the relationship. The platform, in the meantime, quietly owns the only complete copy of both. So what's actually changed since these pages were first written? Not quite what you'd expect. Steen Rasmussen, who read chapter seventeen for this edition, put a useful correction on it: agentic commerce hasn't suddenly made personalisation hyper-individual overnight. What's actually moved is the cost of execution, and it's dropped fast, for you and for every one of your competitors at the same time. That's a Red Queen effect. You're not running to get ahead any more, you're running to stay where you already are. Once execution is cheap for everyone, doing more of it stops being an edge and becomes table stakes. The bar didn't move because personalisation got smarter. It moved because the whole field started running at once. ...
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    11 min
  • Hello $Firstname AI Edition, Chapter 22: Achieving Organisational Maturity for Personalisation

    Hello $Firstname AI Edition, Chapter 22: Achieving Organisational Maturity for Personalisation
    23 Sep 2026

    In Chapter 22 of Hello $Firstname, Arild Horsberg reads ‘Achieving Organisational Maturity for Personalisation’.

    Arild Horsberg is general manager of Forte Optimize in Oslo, Norway. In this chapter, he reads the final chapter of Part Four, where the book brings people and skills, technology, and governance together and turns the maturity model into action.

    Knowing the levels of the back end of the Pyramid of Personalisation does not by itself help you move from one level to the next. This short chapter focuses on the actions needed to break through the otherwise invisible glass ceilings between Hack, Pack, and Stack.

    To break through from Hack to Pack, the chapter recommends stabilising the performance of your core platforms, moving from a simple email service provider to a real marketing automation or customer engagement platform, and establishing clarity around how the data layer should work. It also recommends establishing a brand LLM, transitioning your team of builders into a team of executors, and documenting both your existing and your future marketing processes. As the chapter puts it, building the car and driving it are two different jobs.

    To break through from Pack to Stack, the chapter recommends deploying complementary personalisation technologies, streamlining the content and data layers, and establishing agile, cross-functional journey teams with agentic support. Finally, it calls for realigning incentives and personalisation accountability around customer centricity, because if you keep measuring the old metrics, you will not get the new results you are after.

    In his reflection at the end, Arild agrees wholeheartedly and adds one piece of advice: do not let IT have the decisive role in this process. It must be owned by the people responsible for customer communication and the customer journey. And make sure that person has enough empowerment not only to say no to ideas, but to say yes, this is how we are going to do it.

    More resources from the Hello $Firstname universe

    You can buy the physical book here: https://amzn.eu/d/6jV4QZT

    If the Amazon EU link does not work in your country, please search for Hello $Firstname: Profiting from Personalisation, AI Edition on your local Amazon store.

    You can download the illustrations and models from the book here: https://www.omnichannelinstitute.com/en/resources

    You can also learn more about the Personalisation Cards and Canvas, which help teams turn the Bowtie of Personalisation into practical use cases, here: https://www.omnichannelinstitute.com/en/personalizationcards
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    10 min
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