By this point in the AI revolution, the phrase “AI won’t take your job, but someone using AI will” has saturated the ears of marketers and business owners alike. While admittedly grating at times, innovative leaders are seeing truth in the technological platitude in a new light as AI agents—autonomous cybernetic partners that can think, act and learn—grow in capability and popularity.
According to the AI Marketing Institute’s 2025 State of Marketing AI Report, 74% of respondents said that AI was either “critically important” or “very important” to their marketing efforts. Of those surveyed, 60% were either piloting AI tools in their organizations or scaling them to widespread use.
These agents, in tandem with technologically adept users behind the scenes, are spearheading a new kind of marketing for brands across the globe with impressive results.
Autonomous marketing agents in action
AI-agent focused health care marketing agency Caidera.ai has used multilevel AI agent schemas to develop content at scale. Faced with strict regulations (e.g., HIPAA & FDA), the agency had to create content with each claim substantially backed up by credible sources. No small feat.
The agency used multiple AI agents to source and verify its scientific claims, draft content at scale, such as newsletters and advertisements, and check its marketing materials with regulatory guidelines. Using these agents significantly reduced manual work for its staff and had noticeable ROI benefits: They had double conversion rates compared to traditional marketing methods and needed 40% less resources to create campaigns.
Oz Etzioni, co-founder and CEO of the company Clinch, and his team have created what he calls an “orchestration operating system” for advertising across all kinds of channels, known as Flight Control. Multiple AI agents operate to help his Fortune 500 clients with creative strategy, distribution, optimization and data and analytics for media campaigns. Etzioni describes how his clients can have conversations with multiple types of agents to understand best marketing practices, historical data trends on their previous campaigns and other key metrics all in plain language, after relevant data is fed to the agents to learn about their company’s best marketing practices.
A core example he shared was how brands can simply upload their master reference documents and brand guidelines to create ads for all types of channels at scale using conversational instructions: “So something that used to take days and weeks [and] multiple teams, now takes minutes.”
The results are exciting, but they also come with caveats.
Great results require great data
Etzioni doesn’t hold back from describing the benefits of using agentic AI in marketing campaigns, but he doesn’t glamourize AI partners either.
“You [cannot] just create an agent and let it run—it will be clueless… So you gotta have the data behind it to feed and educate the agent in order… to get you what you want,” he says, adding, “The quality of your data really determines how good your agent is.”
Imran Jaffery, VP of growth marketing at The Shift Network, recommends training your AI agent on every bit of marketing information you can find so it can create multiple creative outputs that match your brand’s voice and goals. His reason? Your business has “unique needs” and assumedly swaths of unique knowledge on how to meet them—use it.
“We’ve trained an AI agent, built on GPT-5, on every aspect of our business from brand identity, values, historical performance and business goals,” he says.
Scale and speed aren’t the only considerations
AI marketing agents open the door to a level of scalability for creative work that excites brands, Etzioni notes, but excitement without proper planning won’t give the results they’re looking for. He thinks a focus on generating marketing materials only leads to additional bottlenecks—creating more materials means you have to know what to do with them.
“You have 50,000 creatives; before, you had 500. How are you gonna traffic them? How are you gonna control [them] ? How are you gonna measure [them]?” he rhetorically suggests, noting that companies that use AI marketing agents need to “grow at the same time or else you’re gonna create multiple bottlenecks and it’s all gonna fall down on more people.”
For those interested in creating their own AI agents to grow their campaigns, Etzioni suggests treating agentic AI “like any other technology.” You need to know what your goals are, what challenges you are solving with the agent specifically and how you will measure success, he recommends.
Transparency is key to retaining authentic client connections
Communication is always a key ingredient in maintaining healthy customer relationships. Introducing AI agents into your marketing campaigns can bring about massive change at scale, and that increases the risk of sending the wrong message to consumers.
Etzioni has seen brands rush to implement AI agents too quickly, without letting their clients or user base know that they’re going to be building a brand-new technology.
“I think people are rushing to the market too fast…. You gotta be transparent with your clients as well,” he advises. He suggests letting clients know that you’re experimenting with a new technology and set expectations from the get-go.
‘There’s an agent for that’
It’s been suggested by experts in the AI space that the rise of LLMs like ChatGPT are just the beginning of a “golden age” in machine learning and are ushering in a massive wave of opportunities for those who are willing to grab them.
As a pioneer in the agentic AI space, Etzioni compares the current technological climate surrounding AI agents to another technological boom in the 2000s: the iPhone.
“ But I do think… the same way we had… when the iPhone launched and… we had an app for that…. I think we’re coming to that peak as well with applications for AI and agents that people are building agents for specific things and there’s gonna be an agent for this, an agent for that.”
It’s undeniable that there is pressure to adopt AI agents to give your business an edge. Competitors that adopt the burgeoning tech have an edge in speed, scale and analysis. However, everyone rushing to use the technology as soon as possible can give thoughtful leaders an advantage: careful, transparent and methodical implementation—that will give them the real edge.
Photo by Drazen Zigic/Shutterstock
