Much like Odysseus’ voyage after the Battle of Troy, marketers’ AI journey is far from over. In fact, it’s just begun. Just as marketers started experimenting with new genAI features, agentic AI arrives and signals the next round of transformative marketing capabilities. Tech giants are racing ahead, pouring significant resources into agentic AI innovation. Last week, Amazon upgraded its Seller Assistant with Agentic AI capabilities, Google introduced its Agents Payment Protocol for agent-led transactions, and Crowdstrike launched its Agentic Security Platform while acquiring Pangea for $260 million. The opportunities are appealing, but this journey isn’t without risk. Data challenges, trust issues, and confusion about the technology itself mean marketers must approach agentic AI thoughtfully — not recklessly.
Agentic AI Will Transform B2C Marketing Inside, Then Out
Agentic AI builds on previous automation and decisioning capabilities while adding sophisticated decision-making and full autonomy. Forrester defines agentic AI as:
Systems of foundation models, rules, architectures, and tools that enable software to flexibly plan and adapt to resolve goals by taking action in their environment, with increasing levels of autonomy.
Currently marketers mainly use AI to augment existing processes, but agentic AI will enable them to rethink marketing processes for the sake of efficiency and performance. As agentic marches towards full autonomy, traditional marketing will evolve into agentic AI-fueled anticipatory experiences. Forrester has identified seven categories of agentic AI use cases for marketing:
Customer data management and hygiene
Customer insights and analytics
Creative development and production
Building and managing marketing campaigns
Building and managing marketing programs
Buying and optimizing media
Marketing performance analytics
Temper Expectations Before Following The Sirens’ Call
An AI agent completing a task fully autonomously, without human input or review, is still years away. Forrester predicts organizations won’t actually experience the benefits from agentic AI for another two to five years. As the technology matures and gains traction for marketing applications, marketers have work to do to build the foundation and prepare their organizations for agentic AI:
Map uncharted waters. While everything marketers learned about genAI will be pertinent for the journey ahead, agentic AI’s decisioning and autonomy is a brand-new discipline. For successful adoption, companies will need to invest in change management and updated processes.
Win over a cautious crew. Employees are justifiably skeptical with only 37% agreeing they feel confident about adapting to AI-based systems for work. Marketers will need to slowly scale AI implementation to build up trust with employees, tracking employee readiness, and monitoring AI outputs.
Repair a shoddy ship. Agentic AI is only as good as the rules, predictive AI, and generative AI it’s built on. It requires high quality data to train, run, and optimize models. Marketers have existing data and technology integration challenges that need to be solved before they can incorporate agentic AI.
The path to agentic AI adoption won’t be short or easy, but marketers who prepare now will see long-term benefits. To learn more read the report, The B2C Marketer’s Guide To Agentic AI. For a deeper dive, Forrester clients can schedule a guidance session on AI use cases, adoption, and privacy.
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