Looking Back on 2025 Advocacy Trends: Data, Community, AI, and the Road to 2026
When we published From Metrics to Community: The 2025 Advocacy Landscape, our goal was to call out the shifts we believed would define advocacy and customer-led growth in 2025. With the benefit of hindsight and a year of real execution across the market, it’s worth reflecting on what held true, where we underestimated the change, and what we’re now watching as we look ahead.
What We Got Right
The importance of data and impact has only increased. Advocacy teams are no longer being asked whether their programs are valuable but how that value shows up in pipeline, retention, and expansion. The move toward stronger measurement, tighter integrations, and clearer reporting has proven to be foundational to advocacy earning a strategic seat at the table.
We were also right about advocacy and customer marketing continuing to converge. The teams seeing the most success are the ones treating advocacy as a growth lever, not a side program. Customer evidence, peer influence, and lifecycle engagement are now tightly woven into broader go-to-market motions, and advocacy leaders are increasingly expected to operate across those boundaries.
Personalization at scale: well, customers now expect experiences to be tailored to them by default. Generic outreach and one-size-fits-all programs are no longer effective. The organizations leaning into richer customer data, automation, and smarter orchestration are seeing higher participation and more durable advocate relationships.
Finally, we correctly anticipated the continued rise of community and multi-format storytelling. Video, co-created content, and customer-led narratives are now core elements of modern advocacy programs, not optional add-ons. Trust is built through authentic voices, and that shift has only accelerated (and will continue to, imo).
What We Would Refine
We talked about employee advocacy gaining momentum, but what we’ve seen goes beyond amplification. The real evolution is toward integrated influence, where employees, customers, and partners participate in coordinated storytelling across channels. That requires more intentional strategy and tooling than we initially emphasized.
We also could have been more precise about community. Not every advocacy hub or portal creates a true community. Many teams are now learning that community is a long-term investment, not a feature you launch and move on from; the difference lies in two-way engagement and participation over time.
And while we highlighted personalization, the bigger story emerging is about automation and AI reshaping how advocacy is activated. The most advanced teams are moving toward systems that help prioritize opportunities and embed VoC directly into sales, marketing, and product workflows. Be honest- is anyone reading this not using (at least) Open.ai, Perplexity, Claude or equivalent in some way?
Looking Ahead to 2026
Advocacy continues to mature, and that maturity is moving faster. Heading into 2026, we’re paying close attention to how AI-driven orchestration changes the role of customer voice, how teams measure the true return on community investments, and how advocacy becomes more tightly connected to real buyer behavior.
We’ll be sharing our 2026 predictions soon. For now, we’re keeping a close eye on what’s next and continuing to learn alongside the teams building the future of customer-led growth.
In early 2025, we published our perspective on the shifts we believed would redefine customer advocacy—from stronger measurement and deeper GTM alignment to the growing role of community and storytelling. With a year of execution behind us, those predictions largely held true, but the pace and depth of change exceeded expectations. Advocacy teams are now being measured on pipeline influence, retention, and expansion, personalization has become table stakes, and community has emerged as a long-term strategic investment rather than a programmatic feature. This retrospective looks at what we got right, where our thinking has evolved, and what advocacy leaders should be preparing for as AI-driven orchestration accelerates into 2026.