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About this session Key takeaways
Opening Keynote: The Age of Agents
Alex Halliday gives a clear-eyed thesis on what marketing leaders need to rebuild for the agentic era.
Buyers are no longer browsing their way to your brand. They're delegating discovery to agents, and the inputs that drive those agents look almost nothing like the inputs that drove search.
Why Content Engineering is the function that makes the rebuild possible.
- 01Discovery has fundamentally shifted, and the playbook is being written now. The buyer journey has moved from 4-word head terms to 20-60 word generative queries. The long tail becomes the new battleground, and citable chunks replace pages as the unit of work. The marketers who move first will define this era.
- 02AI search is a game of winning consensus across five new surfaces. SEO solved one face of the Rubik's cube, but the cube has rotated. Beyond traditional SEO, brands now have to influence model citation preferences, brand voice preservation, off-site presence (which drives as much as 85% of top-of-funnel influence), content freshness, and attribution.
- 03The data shows what's actually working. From nearly 2 billion observed citations: H2s and H3s should semantically match the buyer question, current-year references signal freshness, SERP rank still matters massively (58.4% citation rate at position 1 vs. 14.2% at position 10), complementary content clusters beat single pages, and review site importance grew 7 points in Q1.
- 04The transition from workflows to agents and Playbooks is the next act for AirOps. Five launches today: specialist agents shaped by billions of citations, Playbooks as a natural language canvas for strategy, an Inbox that pulls subject matter experts into the content process, Quill as the agent captain across the platform, and built-in impact tracking. Real agents must be proactive, precise, codify full strategies, include humans, improve over time, and prove ROI.
- 05The Content Engineer is the MVP of this next era. Content Engineers evolve from builders of the previous generation's workflows into agent shapers, bringing taste, strategy, and customer understanding to direct agents like Quill. AirOps University is relaunching in the next couple of weeks to help teams build that capability.