Three actions you must take to thrive in the agentic era of marketing

AI is reshaping how entrepreneurs work, how stacks are constructed and the way prospects make choices. To grasp the place these shifts are taking place, Scott Brinker and I ran the AI Context Engineering in Advertising Survey (n=103, October 2025). We recognized three key actions that each advertising and marketing and martech chief must grasp now.

• Embrace three agent domains: Entrepreneurs are already working with a rising mixture of Brokers for Entrepreneurs, Brokers for Clients and Brokers of Clients, every reshaping the client journey in several methods.
• Compose hybrid stacks: Stacks are evolving into hybrid programs that mix deterministic SaaS with probabilistic AI. Integrating information, context and language-based intelligence is turning into important for an entire buyer view.
• Be the change agent: Know-how alone doesn’t create worth. Entrepreneurs should shift from a mindset of effectivity to certainly one of effectiveness, utilizing AI to boost creativity, decision-making and new prospects.

Collectively, these themes define how AI is remodeling fashionable advertising and marketing and what leaders should do subsequent to remain forward.

Three AI brokers serve completely different functions

90.3 % of individuals say they use AI brokers someplace of their stack. It’s protected to say: AI brokers in martech are now not experimental. 

They’re displaying up throughout the ecosystem and you may categorize them in some ways, from the underlying know-how to their velocity and depth of reasoning. However on the finish of the day, AI brokers are instruments designed to serve individuals. Essentially the most useful strategy to perceive them is to ask a easy query: Who do they work for? Who do they profit?

Dig deeper: How agentic AI is changing the future of marketing

When considered by this lens, the interplay between entrepreneurs and prospects reveals three distinct domains.

1. Brokers for Entrepreneurs are designed for entrepreneurs and utilized by them to boost every day workflow, increase crew effectivity and expedite content material and marketing campaign execution.
2. Brokers for Clients interact straight with prospects, however entrepreneurs nonetheless set the directions, guidelines and guardrails that form their habits.
3. Brokers of Clients, a brand new class, are solely exterior the marketer’s management. They’re operated by prospects and information their journey on their very own phrases, from analysis to analysis to decision-making.

Based mostly on our survey information, Brokers for Entrepreneurs are essentially the most extensively deployed, with organizations utilizing a median of three.5 of them. Firms are extra cautious with Brokers for Clients, placing a median of 1.71 into use. And although Brokers of Clients function exterior the marketer’s management, organizations nonetheless have a median of 1.46 instruments or techniques in place to serve or affect these buyer-side brokers.

If we step again, we will see how brokers rank by order of adoption for all agent varieties and use circumstances we studied.

1. Content material manufacturing brokers lead by a large margin. 68.9% of respondents use this Agent for Entrepreneurs. Brainstorming, producing and personalizing content material shaped the primary vital wave of generative AI use circumstances in advertising and marketing they usually stay the simplest to run with a human reviewing the output. No shock these use circumstances are essentially the most prevalent.
2. Customer support chatbot brokers (Agent for Clients) come subsequent. 54.4% of survey individuals use chatbots on their web site or inside cell apps. Past customer support, adoption of different Brokers for Clients drops off sharply.
3. Brokers of Clients are the true supply of disruption on this new period. Patrons are more and more turning to AI assistants similar to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity to analysis and consider merchandise. A brand new self-discipline is rising: AEO — AI Engine Optimization or Reply Engine Optimization, generally known as GEO or Generative Engine Optimization. The practices are nonetheless early. In our survey, the one extensively adopted tactic was publishing AI-optimized content material at 63.1%. But, solely 13.6% reported measuring AI inclusion charge or agent-referred conversions!

Dig deeper: Martech stacks evolve through capabilities, not tools

Compose hybrid stacks

With 90.3% of individuals utilizing AI brokers someplace of their stack, the following query is easy methods to combine them successfully. A stack is a group of instruments and people instruments are the habitat for buyer information. Their job is to let that information circulate, join and kind a coherent understanding of the client.

AI brokers rely upon that information. To ship actual worth, they need to collaborate with all of the instruments within the stack to allow them to entry the context surrounding every information level. This shifts stack design. Managing tomorrow’s stack means balancing deterministic, rule-based SaaS with probabilistic, language-based AI. Integration is now not elective. The true problem is how AI connects to the varied information varieties and sources throughout the group.

Already, 37.9% of corporations are integrating AI brokers straight with their cloud information warehouse or lakehouse. However a warehouse is barely the place to begin. Stacks comprise quite a few inside sources that provide the context brokers have to kind a complete view of the client. For instance, a slight drop in product utilization means little or no in isolation. When linked with assist tickets, name transcripts, marketing campaign engagement or knowledge-base interactions, the image turns into clearer. Is the client caught? Annoyed? Evaluating options? AI can solely reply these questions when it has entry to the encircling alerts.

That is why the commonest inside information sources linked to AI brokers at the moment are those that carry the richest context: buyer profiles from a CRM or CDP (61.2%) and model or advertising and marketing property from a DAM or CMS (additionally 61.2%). These two sources anchor the 2 key jobs of any agentic workflow: understanding the client and talking again to the client with the appropriate message.

AI additionally allows the extraction of context from sources exterior of the stack. Firms are more and more complementing inside sources with exterior, unstructured information. The most typical examples embody third-party buyer or prospect enrichment information (50.5%), buyer and prospect web sites (49.5%) and exercise throughout social platforms similar to LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram and X (43.7%).

These alerts are particularly invaluable in B2B, the place shopping for journeys are lengthy, distributed and infrequently opaque. Nevertheless, we’re additionally seeing spillover into B2C, supported by the rising use of exterior intent alerts (35.9%).

Develop into the change agent!

Though the phrase agent suggests autonomy, in all of the circumstances we researched, there are humans-in-the-loop to determine, approve, reverse or assessment. That brings us to the fourth kind of agent, the change agent. You.

As change brokers, we have to shift our mindset from saving time to creating worth. In easy phrases, change from effectivity (solely) to effectiveness.

• Effectivity: Do extra with much less. Optimize what already exists.
• Effectiveness: Do higher with extra. Reimagine what is feasible.

Many corporations are chasing effectivity, primarily digital labour arbitrage, utilizing AI to chop prices and increase short-term earnings. Nevertheless, the long-term winners will give attention to effectiveness or digital labor augmentation, using AI to amplify human creativity, context and decision-making. That’s the place sturdy worth is created.

Consider it this fashion.

• Effectivity provides you velocity.
• Effectiveness provides you path.

You possibly can automate your self right into a useless finish for those who by no means cease to ask whether or not you’re nonetheless fixing the appropriate downside. The promise of AI isn’t productiveness alone. It’s a risk. 

The shift from effectivity to effectiveness transforms AI from a cost-saving instrument right into a progress engine, not solely enhancing operations but in addition reinventing choices, prospects and markets. The true return on AI begins whenever you cease counting saved minutes and begin counting new alternatives. Your creativeness is the one limitation.

Dig deeper: ABM isn’t the B2B salvation we were promised

When the Wright brothers constructed the primary airplanes, that they had no concept they have been paving the way in which for airports, catering companies, baggage dealing with, cabin crew jobs and air-cargo carriers. But these industries emerged as a result of the core breakthrough created room for brand new worth to kind round it.

Think about what AI can do on your prospects and step into the function of change agent inside your organization.