Marketing isn’t just about shaping brand perception anymore. Today’s CMOs are expected to influence revenue, accelerate pipelines, build loyalty, and drive long-term growth —all without bigger budgets. McKinsey research shows that organisations where marketing leaders play a strategic role see 1.4x higher top-line growth, yet marketing budgets have stayed flat at around 7.7% of revenue for the last three years.
So, the real question facing every CMO is: “How do you grow impact without growing spend?”
This is where agentic analytics, or AI-driven systems that don’t just show insights, but help act on them instantly, emerge across high-growth teams.
The gap between insight and action
Marketers consistently grapple with three persistent challenges:
- Siloed data across tools
- Delayed insights
- Poor martech integration, leading to low ROI
And these lead to a familiar frustration: dashboards that show what happened, but not what to do next. No wonder 55% of CMOs say martech ROI has been disappointing, largely because their systems don’t talk to each other.
Meanwhile, customer behaviour is shifting fast. Analysts predict a 25% drop in mobile app usage by 2027, as people move to conversational interfaces and AI assistants. Scheduled, static campaigns are no longer enough, and marketing must become context-aware and adaptive.
What agentic analytics really means for marketing
Think of agentic analytics as analytics with the ability to act. It blends AI, automation, and intelligence so systems can understand context, recommend actions, and execute autonomously within guardrails.
It’s a dashboard that behaves like a dependable teammate:
- Spots a drop in engagement
- Reallocates budget to a better-performing channels
- Personalises messaging for a key audience segment
- Reports the outcomes in real time.
Marketers save hours of manual optimisations and focus on strategy, storytelling, and creative impact instead. And it works. 85% of APAC marketers are already deploying AI or planning to do so, with mature adopters reporting up to 59% revenue growth.
Agentic systems essentially form “action loops”, or continuous cycles where insights trigger instant execution and learning. It’s a virtuous cycle: less manual effort, faster feedback, and better customer alignment, helping the shift from simple, reactive reporting to predictive and prescriptive “orchestration”.
As orchestration becomes more intelligent, visualisation also evolves. Embedded AI—whether predictive scoring or ML models — empowers marketers with proactive cues inside the same workspace where they build and optimise campaigns. They can instantly see audience drop-offs, recommended next-best actions, likely conversion drivers, and opportunities to refine segments or journeys. This shift helps teams course-correct faster and keep pace with customer behaviour in real time.
How Marketing Cloud powers agentic analytics
Agentic analytics only works when your marketing systems talk and the stack blends seamlessly. Salesforce brings intelligence, data, and automation together through a unified, purpose-built ecosystem, comprising:
- Agentforce: An agentic layer built on Salesforce unified platform. AI agents that automate tasks, surface insights, and connect to any data source across database. In essence, Agentforce helps transform “what happened” to “what to do now” across the marketing lifecycle.
- Tableau: An agentic analytics platform. Beyond dashboards, Tableau delivers contextual insights, personalised summaries, proactive alerts, and AI-driven recommendations directly.
- Marketing Cloud: A complete marketing platform for the entire customer journey. Marketing Cloud connects all marketing functions with data and agentic AI, reducing wasted spend and improving campaign performance.
- Agentforce Observability: A real time AI observability layer that ensures reliability, transparency, and responsible use.
These capabilities work as one system, not disparate tools, helping marketers turn every touchpoint into an opportunity to learn and connect. From acquisition to loyalty, the journey becomes smarter, faster, and more autonomous. A brand that’s already putting this vision into practice is Sai Silks Kalamandir.
How Sai Silks Kalamandir tripled engagement efficiency with Marketing Cloud
Sai Silks Kalamandir (SSKL) uses Salesforce Marketing Cloud to swiftly design and deliver personalised campaigns, targeted to these diverse segments.
Individualised loyalty reminders, segment activations, birthday messages, and cross-sell/upsell promotions are sent out seamlessly across email, SMS, WhatsApp, in-app push notifications, social media and digital advertising – a big jump from the previously limited use of WhatsApp and social media channels. There are now 150 richly tailored templates readily available on WhatsApp alone, compared to 38 earlier.
The vastly improved targeting has helped SSKL optimise resources, and minimise missed sales opportunities. Where earlier, three lakh messages were sent for a particular campaign, now just a lakh achieve the same results, resulting in an efficiency boost of 3X.
A/B testing helps to gauge the effectiveness of the communication while geo-fencing on Meta supports location-based targeting, both measures boosting RoI.
SSKL is also building tailored cross-channel journeys from awareness to post-purchase. Currently, five journeys, including cross-selling, upselling, and abandoned cart, are live. Enhanced by rich insights and targeted campaigns, the journeys are helping SSKL optimise channel usage and significantly enhance personalisation.
A clear example of how connected data, smarter analytics, and automated campaign orchestration enable faster responses, better personalisation, and measurable growth.
Read their full story here.
A call to action for marketing leaders
Marketing teams need clearer decisions and faster action to keep pace with customers and the changing landscape. Agentic analytics brings data, AI, and automation into one intelligent workflow so marketers can move beyond reporting to understand customers better and act in real time. The outcome: smarter spend, more relevant journeys, and marketing that continuously adapts to drive growth.
Ready to see how agentic analytics can transform your marketing performance? Start small, run a pilot that auto-optimises budget allocation in real time, powered by Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
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