Ep 29. Agentic Marketing Is Here — But Can AI Actually Stay On Brand? with Kashish Gupta, Hightouch

Amazon just launched Alexa Plus Agentic Ads — native checkout through voice, shoppable ads across third-party publishers, and a monetization machine that just keeps accelerating. WPP and Horizon are building agent-to-agent infrastructure. Databricks announced an agentic CDP. And Hightouch made a public offer for LiveRamp's identity spine while simultaneously raising at a $2.75 billion valuation. This week, Shiv and Myles sit down with Kashish Gupta, co-founder and co-CEO of Hightouch, to make sense of all of it. Hightouch works with some of the largest B2C brands in the world — Domino's, Spotify, and others — helping them do their marketing end-to-end in an AI native way. And Kashish has a clearer view than almost anyone of where the technology actually is versus where the hype says it is. Kashish breaks down the number one complaint he hears from CMOs right now — AI still can't reliably stay on brand, no matter which foundation model you use — and why getting from 80% to 99.9% accuracy is the hard engineering problem nobody is talking about. He also explains why AI probably shouldn't own media buying yet — you can't fire your AI, and having a throat to choke for the metric still matters — and why the right model is a proactive insights engine with human discretion at the center, not autonomous agents running everything unchecked. They also get into why agentic voice advertising isn't ready yet — the AI still can't think fast enough while you're talking — why Databricks building audiencing capabilities is actually good news for Hightouch, and why Hightouch's offer for LiveRamp's identity spine is less about competition and more about keeping identity neutral and accessible for the brands that need it most. Learn more about the AI Literacy Alliance at uof.digital/alliance New episodes every two weeks. Get your AI Edge here.