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Your Marketing Channels Are Going To Get Disrupted By Ai. Here’s How You Can Prepare.
How do you expect today’s marketing channels to change with AI agents? Agents will be a boon for our industry. They will perform actions for companies and individuals that simplify many of the tasks that we do today by clicking and browsing on our own. They will also change the way consumers and brands engage. What will that mean for marketing? One thing is certain: your marketing channel strategy is going to be disrupted in a big way.
Businesses are already preparing for this future. Take for example Google, which is introducing Gemini as a replacement for traditional search. They’re bringing agentic results into the experience because they know agents outside their browser are eventually going to replace traditional search, and they want to get ahead of that.
Other channels will be impacted as well. SMS and WhatsApp, which have traditionally had only outbound communications from businesses, will soon have the ability for complex two-way interactions with agents – at the scale of marketing. Simply put, pretty much every channel will become a research and transaction channel driven by an agent, from your company’s website to email to loyalty programs to social media. This has the potential to take customer relationships to another level, but will require rethinking your strategy.
Let’s take a deeper look at what’s coming our way and how we can prepare.
What are AI agents?
A quick primer: Agents are the next step in autonomous AI for business. They bring generative and predictive AI together and add a third quality: complex decision-making. Agents can handle end-to-end tasks, improve personalization, and operate across marketing, sales, and service.
Here’s a quick video that shows how agents can help you create campaigns:
Agents can fulfill the potential of AI. There’s a disconnect right now. All marketers and technologists know AI is something they should be focusing on, and most of them are. However, it’s been a challenge to get from idea to implementation to actual execution. A lot of people still haven’t figured out how to use AI effectively in their organization.
Agents will be the bridge that leads businesses to develop stronger use cases for AI, so we can go from talking about it to actually doing it and seeing results. Yes, there’s a learning curve for agents, but if you take the right steps, you’ll be in a good place in no time.
On that note, here are three things to be mindful of as you rethink the channel marketing strategy in your organization.
How to prepare your channel marketing strategy for AI agents
- You need to set your data foundation right now. Channels have stayed about the same for the past 15-20 years. For example, customers do a Google search, get links, and then follow the paths that are presented to gather information or buy products. Or they browse social media and get information from influencers or ads. The individual customer does the work, taking the time to research and choose which paths to take. Their eyeballs scan a website and try to make sense of the information. It takes time and effort. But it won’t for much longer.
Over the next year or so, agents will be doing more of this work for individuals. Let’s say a customer is shopping for a car. They can make a request on their phone like they do with Siri or Google. The agent will do the research and say, for example, “here are five cars in that category you’re looking for. This one’s rated the highest for these reasons.” The customer will never leave the channel in which they’re corresponding with the agent. The agent will even select the best lease deal for the car and send the contract to sign.
So what does this mean for marketers? You’ll have to change how you connect with prospects and customers. This is a big deal. It will be similar to what happened in the late 2000s with the emergence of Facebook and Instagram. Those proved to be essential for marketers, and agents will too. But you need to set the data foundation now so the agent can use your business’s data and provide a unique – and accurate – experience when a customer is interacting with or researching your brand.
Click here for an overview of Data Cloud to learn more about establishing this foundation.
- Pay special attention to WhatsApp and your business’s website. This year we’re going to see very simple means of deploying AI agents on these channels. Getting your footing will help you roll out agents in all your journeys. Here are a few examples:
Agents will make customer orders smoother. Let’s say a person gets an offer, alert, or order confirmation in WhatsApp. An agent can autonomously assist them with relevant product recommendations and order updates. The agent can also escalate the conversation to a human service representative if needed. This happens within the same WhatsApp thread, so the customer can handle everything in one place. This is a new way of using WhatsApp, both for the consumer and the business, and will take some adjustment and enablement for your team. The same process also works with SMS.
Agents will also improve efficiency and productivity at corporate events. An agent can greet visitors on an event webpage and help them register and recommend sessions for a personalized agenda. Through a conversational chat interface, the attendee can set their event schedule without having to sift through pages of information. They can focus their time and energy on getting the most out of the conference.
These tasks might seem simple, but the baby steps are crucial to take on the path to getting comfortable with agents, both from the customer side and the marketer side. Marketers must learn the technology and have customer data ready to help the agents do this job. Remember, agents can’t do the work completely on their own: they need help from the human marketer.
Check out this video to learn more about how you can use Marketing Cloud on your mobile channels.
D-I-Why? Deploy AI agents faster with Agentforce
Building and deploying autonomous AI agents takes time. Agentforce, the agentic layer of the Salesforce platform, can reduce time to market by 16x compared to DIY approaches — with 70% greater accuracy, according to a new Valoir report.
- You’ll need to regularly optimize content on all your channels. As AI and agents become more ingrained in channels, the amount of content will increase and you’ll need to stay on top of it to make sure it remains relevant, unique, and really represents the brand.
One of the advantages of agentic AI is it can work with your business’s internal data, not just third-party sources. It can monitor your channel content 24/7 and make updates as needed using guidelines set by your team. The result will be personalized content at scale, created and optimized in real time. This will make the customer’s channel journey much more comprehensive and useful, and their connection with your brand will become stronger.
As marketers, we’re often tasked with predicting the future and acting on it before it happens. New technologies, cutting-edge trends, faster solutions – we have to identify what’s coming our way, and take action. Agentic AI is going to change the way we work and interact with customers. Businesses that rethink their channel marketing strategy in advance will be two steps ahead.
You can check out the latest innovations from our partners, such as Typeface, Movable Ink and others in this section on AppExchange.
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