5 Reasons Why You Should Believe in Agentic AI for Marketing

The buzz around AI is deafening, and it’s leading to what some are calling “AI Fatigue”. A survey from EY in 2024 found that more than half of senior leaders (53%) report their employees are feeling overwhelmed or exhausted by the constant influx of AI information and developments. Almost two-thirds (65%) say they struggle to keep workers motivated to embrace the technology. You might be reluctant to look into agentic AI for marketing because you’re tired of the hype and underwhelmed by the outcomes. We’re going to cut to the chase in this blog. Here are 5 quick reasons why it should be on your to-do list this year.

It brings reasoning and automation to the forefront. Previous iterations augmented the way we work, but agentic AI does the work. Unlike predictive AI, agentic AI acts on the predictions — for example, what’s the best course of action for this moment — and takes the next step. Unlike pure generative AI, agentic AI incorporates information that’s provided to the model specific to the job at hand. And unlike AI chatbots, agentic AI continuously learns from its interactions.

Agentic AI can optimize engagement and build relationships at critical moments in the overall customer lifecycle. Journey mapping and building can be hard. Journey mapping exercises are often best done with professional strategists who specialize in such work. Understanding the end-to-end customer lifecycle is nearly impossible. Journeys are often smaller components of the overall journey itself — really moments on the overarching customer journey.

For example, there’s a cart recovery journey or an onboarding journey. Those are really moments on the overarching journey. Plus, the journey is never-ending. It’s more cost-effective to sell to an existing customer than to acquire a new one. Agentic AI can step in and help improve those moments using all the tools at hand and whatever information is necessary.

Imagine if you could assign an employee to monitor customer interactions at critical stages of the lifecycle. When a customer gets stuck, the employee can engage and help them get unstuck, moving them along on the most efficient path possible. There’s no way that can be done with a human at all stages 24/7, but agentic AI can do it.

Many marketers feel constrained by the amount of busywork in their jobs and feel like their role has become akin to machine operators. Imagine having technology that can alleviate the need for staff to do tedious and repetitive tasks. Agents can do this.

Delivering one-to-one personalization has long been the target goal for marketers. However, that personalization has been constrained by the need for people to think through and create elaborate rules-based journeys, defining, and creating content and offers while consistently optimizing the programs to add new customer cohorts.

Agents now provide the support to deliver on personalization by automating data analysis, creating content and offers, decisioning on the next step of journeys and streamlining the ability to test and learn.

Think about the money, resources, and time dedicated to developing data assets. And the massive amount of data that is siloed and underutilized. What about all the institutional knowledge that’s locked away in assets that aren’t easily stored in relational databases? Agentic AI, with its inherent use of RAG, unlocks institutional knowledge in a way that general purpose LLMs cannot.

There’s simply more data that is now underused – upward of 80% — that can now be used and maximized. How about the marketing technology stacks that have mushroomed over the past decade or so? Each tool requires specialized expertise. Marketers can provide more effective engagement if the tech siloes are broken, giving everyone expertise in every tool. Agentic AI enables actions across tools, increasing the value of each one.

While individual tasks have become easier, what about the collaboration between marketing teams? Campaigns often require that marketers work with analytics, data science, creative, copy writers, and digital production. Agents today can empower the manager to create the campaign brief using natural language. Based on that brief, agents can then create segments, drafts of email creative and copy, and even create flows to ensure customers are engaged in the most impactful way. Over the course of the campaign, agents can streamline analysis and suggest optimizations.

Of course, marketing often works closely with commerce, sales, and service. But, those collaborations are often full of friction and silos. Think about the backlog of creative ideas that go untouched. These can now be brought to life with agents.