Brands from sectors including wearable health tech and activewear are already adopting agentic AI to hyper-personalise marketing. Decisioning agents (invisible to consumers) analyse behaviour and sentiment, pinpointing who to target with what content (images and written messages created with generative AI), when and via which channels – revealing their rationale to marketers along the way.

For customer service, agentic AI will evolve chatbots into agents capable of summarising information and autonomously resolving consumers’ problems, such as finding and reserving products in the most relevant store, or planning and booking trips – like a personal assistant (PA) whose proposals can be accepted or modified. Brands including a department store, footwear retailer and airline have taken the first steps.

Servicing strong consumer interest in securing deals, discounts and prized products (see Key Stats), OpenAI and Amazon are rolling out agents akin to strategic shopping guides – but it’s a form of mediation that could dent brands’ critical, loyalty-cementing direct relationships with consumers. Smart brands will need to counteract the shut-out by surfacing expert/specialist advice alongside personalised recommendations.

Thanks to gaming and social media’s use of agentic AI – either embedded into non-player characters (NPCs) or within social media avatars that can autonomously generate conversations and imagery (including conversing with humans), there’s a growing appreciation of semi-autonomous synthetic beings. These two sectors present early blueprints for approaching agentic relationship-engineering in virtual/online brand worlds.