The so-called “AI arms race” is well underway, and it’s fascinating to watch: Tech giants from Meta to Amazon to OpenAI are all releasing their own powerful contenders in the agentic AI space, and it’s happening at what feels like light-speed. Most recently, Google publicly released its highly anticipated Gemini 2.0, which it calls its “new AI model for the agentic era.” Even for an AI aficionado like me, it can be a lot to keep track of.
But one area in which agents are clearly already making waves is marketing. As anyone who has done it knows, designing and deploying a marketing campaign is a complicated undertaking, one that typically requires an entire suite of tools, applications and platforms. Data and business objectives have to be distilled into creative, effective campaigns; content has to be customized; the final output has to be user tested. Shuttling all these outputs from one platform to another can be a waste of marketing professionals’ valuable time.
Or at least, it used to be that way. One example of an organization that has gone all-on on agents is Accenture, which has leveraged these impressive new systems to transform the consulting giant’s marketing department. As Accenture CMO Jill Kramer explained to Digiday, agents have helped slice the number of steps in a marketing project from an average of 135 down to just 85.
Agents are still in their infancy, but leaders should already be thinking about how to integrate this new technology into their operations. Here are some ideas to get you started.
Build Social Media Campaigns From Scratch
Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have already demonstrated their skills in producing clean, engaging content. But what sets agents apart is their ability to act autonomously, orchestrating across apps and platforms to perform a task without human intervention.
Already, 88 percent of marketers are using AI in their jobs. But companies like HubSpot are demonstrating the agents’ ability to take automation to the next level: The software company’s Breeze Copilot is capable of editing podcasts, creating blog posts, writing social media updates, generating personalized emails, and conducting research. Not only that, it can also create marketing campaigns, answer customer questions and enrich customer records.
“AI models are getting bigger, they’re getting better faster,” explains HubSpot’s CTO Dharmesh Shah. “This means we can have agents that take on much more significant roles than we could even a week ago.”
Conduct Market Research
In the past, conducting market research was a slow, arduous process: Teams spent weeks manually sifting through survey data and conducting focus groups, amassing mountains of information that was painstaking to analyze. Even with all that time spent, the sheer volume of information to process often meant missing key insights buried deep amid the data.
Now, AI agents can handle these tasks at lightning speed, pulling data everywhere from conversation threads on social media to online forums and using it to tap into market trends. They can monitor competitor activities and uncover opportunities that even the savviest marketer would be hard-pressed to spot. And they do it all incredibly quickly, working around the clock without ever having to pause for sleep or coffee.
This is a gamechanger for businesses of all sizes, but especially for smaller companies who may once have been locked out by the hefty costs of traditional market research. Meanwhile, marketers themselves are freed up to focus on strategy and creative problem-solving, rather than drowning in endless data.
Generate Dynamic, Market-Specific Landing Pages
Marketers know how time-consuming it can be to design, test and update a landing page. Luckily, one of AI’s strengths is using real-time analytics to drive deep personalization. Now, it’s possible to generate dozens (or hundreds) of landing pages—each targeting a different demographic, product feature or use case—in the time it used to take to revise a single design mockup.
By analyzing existing business content like product descriptions, brand guidelines and customer insights, AI agents can dynamically create landing pages tailored to your audience’s needs. Better still, these agent-generated pages allow you to easily compare performance across multiple market segments using different keywords, case studies and features. The result is faster insights, higher conversion rates and a marketing engine that refines itself.
Personalized Events
Events, whether a product launch or a seasonal sale, are yet another area in which marketing teams have traditionally been forced to manually contend with huge amounts of data, often to inefficient, less-than-comprehensive effect.
Now, of course, there’s a better way. Take the tech consultancy Thoughtworks, which describes how Gemini Pro can be used to create a calendar populated with event recommendations generated using historical performance data, other events taking place within the same time frame, customer insights and more. Suggested events, complete with accompanying copy and assets, are produced in a matter of seconds—a far cry from the days and even weeks such an undertaking would previously require.
We’ve only scratched the surface of the changes AI agents will bring. Marketing departments should be actively exploring the many ways they can save time and effort, sparing them the deep data dives and allowing them to focus their energy on more rewarding, creative areas of their work.
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