Conclusion: Capitalizing on the next phase—agentic AI The rapid rise of gen AI has introduced transformative opportunities in marketing. As companies gradually adapt, gen AI itself will continue to evolve, moving beyond reactive systems like ChatGPT to AI agents: systems that not only respond but also plan, remember, and take independent action. Taking this a step further, when multiple AI agents are combined and enhanced with greater intelligence, we arrive at agentic AI—an advanced form of AI capable of acting proactively, managing complex tasks, and pursuing long-term goals without being given predefined instructions on how to realize them. Coca-Cola recently showcased the potential of agentic AI in marketing by deploying autonomous agents to deliver personalized coupons to more than 800,000 consumers. The initiative drove nearly four times higher click-through rates, while operating at a fraction of the cost of traditional “manual” campaigns. 31 The campaign was powered by a multi-agent system that orchestrated the entire journey end-to-end, scanning millions of public social-media posts to extract consumer insights, aligning those with profile-level data to build highly targeted micro-clusters of consumers, and generating and delivering personalized offers. The result was a campaign executed at scale and granularity that no human team could have achieved manually. More importantly, it illustrates a fundamental change in how agents can be applied in marketing, not only to automate existing workflows, but to perform tasks that marketers would never attempt at an individual level. By breaking a complex task into coordinated sub-tasks and executing them autonomously, AI agents open entirely new ways to engage consumers. Other industry leaders are also already embracing these advancements. L’Oréal, for instance, uses gen AI to mine millions of social media posts—comments, images, and videos—to identify emerging trends. 32 Once trends are spotted, gen AI helps visualize new product concepts, which are then tested online to gather instant feedback. Beyond product innovation, L’Oréal has also launched a gen AI-powered beauty marketplace and a virtual beauty assistant, offering personalized recommendations and advice to deepen customer relationships. 33 Another standout example is Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG) which has partnered with the Technical University of Munich (TUM) to develop its lighthouse project, which focuses on creating AI-driven music marketing campaigns (for more, see our interview with BMG CEO Thomas Coesfeld and TUM professor Jochen Hartmann, “Inside Bertelsmann Music Group’s gen AI revolution,” on page 44). Companies that fail to seize these opportunities risk falling behind by forgoing near-term efficiency gains and longer-term competitiveness that is enabled by innovative marketing concepts and ways of working. This gap extends beyond internal processes to understanding how gen AI is reshaping marketing as we know it. For instance, the rise of answer engines is fundamentally transforming how consumers search, discover, and engage with brands, powered by the integration of large language models (LLMs) into search engines like Google’s AI Overviews and the rapid consumer adoption of gen AI chatbots. Traditional search engine optimization (SEO) is evolving into generative engine optimization (GEO), where marketers optimize their presence in gen AI-generated summaries and recommendations to remain visible in the new discovery landscape. This shift is critical: More than 50 percent of AI search users now rely on these tools to guide discovery and purchase decisions. 34 31 Asa Hiken, “How Coke used an AI agent to target ads to 828,000 fast-food fans,” Ad Age, May 21, 2025. 32 “Trendspotter: An AI-powered tool to fuel product innovation,” L’Oréal, accessed October 2025. 33 Bernard Marr, “The amazing ways L’Oréal is using AI to transform the beauty industry forever,” Forbes, July 7, 2025. 34 “New front door to the internet: Winning in the age of AI search,” McKinsey, October 16, 2025. 43 Past forward: The modern rethinking of marketing’s core