If you’re keeping up with the generative AI trends, you’ve no doubt seen the recent explosion in “agentic AI” — AI agents that can autonomously interact with customers. These agents can scale to meet the most dramatic spikes in customer demand, instantaneously learn new products, understand intent and serve as proactive brand advocates.
Working as fully integrated members of sales and marketing teams, agentic AI can deliver a level of experience with critical brand control that was unachievable by any previous combination of technology and human staff. CMOs, however, need to carefully strategize how to integrate this technology within their teams to fully deliver on its promise.
Most marketing teams have experimented with AI for content creation, while others automate certain data analytics tasks or customer support. While these approaches are safe starting points, they only indirectly contribute to CMOs’ objectives of top-line revenue growth and operational efficiency.
Forward-thinking CMOs, on the other hand, are already leveraging AI agents to not just implement one or two productivity tactics, but to start redefining the entire customer journey for the better. AI agents with human-like reasoning capabilities are the key to engaging with prospects and customers in more complex, multi-step interactions that go far beyond the simple one-step Q&A customer support that we commonly see on websites. These agents, which Gartner predicts will be used by 75% of B2B sales teams by 2025, can be leveraged to increase conversions across the funnel by qualifying and moving buyers through the funnel with automated dialog, delivering a true 1:1 marketing experience at all levels.
How AI Agents Will Transform Lead Nurturing & Acceleration
For the modern buyer, brand experience continues to be the ultimate differentiator, and the explosion of agentic AI is making personalized, brand-aligned conversations at scale a reality. This is enabled by AI’s ability to engage customers in personalized, back-and-forth dialog optimized to move toward a business goal (such as a sales meeting) with the combined power of buyer intent recognition and brand-specific insights.
From a CMO perspective, AI agents will transform and deliver major step-changes to the funnel, including:
Closing The Conversation Gap
The current conventional approach in marketing is to use mass emails to nurture early-stage leads. However, this approach doesn’t work for the modern buyer, who expects brands to know them from the jump. AI agents can fill this gap by initiating real-time, personalized conversations the moment a lead expresses interest. AI agents that are trained on a brand’s proprietary data, furthermore, can reflect a brand’s voice and values and keep conversations in line with business goals.
Leaving No Prospect Behind
Leads your brand doesn’t manage to engage with — whether it’s due to a missed opportunity or a faulty scoring method — can cost your pipeline big time. AI agents that can be integrated with CRM or marketing automation platforms can be assigned automated triggers, engaging leads before they slip away.
Delivering Consistently Stellar Customer Experience
When trained on brand-specific language models and company-specific data, AI agents purpose-built for marketing and sales help ensure that conversations remain consistent with brand identity, and can provide the most accurate information while guiding buyers to the next stage in their journey.
Going Turnkey with AI Agents for GTM Teams
Building and training AI agents may sound daunting, but luckily, it’s as unnecessary — and as impractical — as building a CRM system from scratch. Turnkey, no-code AI agents optimized for complex selling conversations are game-changers for marketers. These agents are designed to handle the multi-step process of moving a lead from interest to opportunity right out of the box, cutting down setup time while ensuring smooth, on-target customer interactions.
When evaluating AI solutions, CMOs should look for options that fit their specific marketing needs and can leverage their unique company data. Ultimately, the agentic AI solution chosen by a company should be capable of not just driving meaningful conversations but steering those conversations toward achievement of business goals.
Revenue-Focused AI Agents Will Break The Funnel Paradigm
According to McKinsey, AI’s role in businesses has grown by nearly 2X in the last year. Additional research shows that more than 50% of CMOs rank AI adoption as a top five priority, with three out of five identifying themselves as the ones driving its investment.
CMOs must take decisive action to deliver the level of customer experience needed to set their brands apart. This means adopting a strategy based on using AI to engage with every single customer meaningfully at every phase of the customer journey — from start to finish. Those who do so will offer, for the first time ever, a true 1:1 marketing experience delivered on a massive scale. Those who only dip their toes in the water, on the other hand, risk being surpassed by their competition.
David Greenberg is the CMO at Conversica, a conversational AI provider for revenue teams. He has more than 20 years of experience as a marketing and go-to-market leader with deep expertise in building high-growth organizations that disrupt the “old way” of doing things. He is deeply passionate about leveraging technologies to create significant step-changes in the business. Greenberg holds a BS in History from Colorado College.