Beyond just generating creative, the future of AI in CRM is using "agentic AI" to build better strategies. This involves agents that help define audience segments, determine the next best product or action, and accelerate the implementation of complex campaigns, enhancing human strategy rather than replacing it.

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The evolution of 'agentic AI' extends beyond content generation to automating the connective tissue of business operations. Its future value is in initiating workflows that span departments, such as kickstarting creative briefs for marketing, creating product backlogs from feedback, and generating service tickets, streamlining operational handoffs.

Don't unleash a generic AI agent on your entire database. To get high response rates, segment contacts into specific sub-personas based on role, behavior, or status (e.g., churn risk). Then, train dedicated sub-agents or campaigns for each persona, allowing for true personalization at scale in batches of around 1,000 contacts.

When AI automates the 'assembly line' of marketing execution (list building, coding), the marketer's role shifts from operator to strategist. They are liberated from low-value work to become 'brand governors' who define the strategy, voice, and soul of the brand for AI agents to follow.

As consumers delegate purchasing to personal AI agents, marketing's emotional appeals will fail. Brands must prepare for a "Business-to-Machine" (B2M) world where algorithms evaluate products on function and data, rendering decades of psychological tactics obsolete.

Marketers should use AI-driven insights at the beginning of the creative process to inform campaign strategy, rather than solely at the end for performance analysis. This approach combines human creativity with data to create more resonant campaigns and avoid generic AI-generated content.

AI's power is not in creating successful strategies from scratch, but in scaling your existing best practices. An AI agent cannot make a broken process work. First, identify what messaging and campaigns are effective, then use AI to execute them at a near-infinite scale, 24/7.

Agentic AI will evolve into a 'multi-agent ecosystem.' This means AI agents from different companies—like an airline and a hotel—will interact directly with each other to autonomously solve a customer's complex problem, freeing humans from multi-party coordination tasks.

Brands will need a bifurcated approach for marketing. One strategy will focus on creating authentic content for human connection, while a separate, distinct strategy must structure information to be effectively parsed and prioritized by the AI agents that increasingly intermediate the customer journey.

The future role of a marketer is not as a channel expert (e.g., search marketer) but as an orchestrator of AI systems. They will design the logic, goals, and audience strategy that AI agents execute. Core skills will shift from production tasks to taste, judgment, and narrative craft.

AI should not be the starting point for creation, as that leads to generic, spam-like output. Instead, begin with a distinct human point of view and strategy. Then, leverage AI to scale that unique perspective, personalize it with data, and amplify its distribution.