New Delhi: Agentic AI could power as much as two-thirds of current marketing activities and help companies unlock new levels of growth, speed and efficiency, according to McKinsey.<\/p>\n
The consulting firm said marketing is moving from campaigns and channels to a real-time growth engine that brings together insights, content, commerce and performance.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It said advantage will go to organisations that learn faster, personalise at scale, optimise across the full funnel and design experiences for both consumers and the AI systems influencing them.\u00a0<\/p>\n
McKinsey said the role of the chief marketing officer is expanding from brand and demand stewardship to the orchestration of data, technology and AI-enabled execution.\u00a0<\/p>\n
According to McKinsey, marketers were among the earliest adopters of generative AI, using it for tasks such as copy generation and image creation. However, many tools have remained limited to isolated tasks, creating a \u201cpatchwork of disconnected pilots and systems\u201d that increase activity but do not deliver meaningful enterprise-wide benefits.<\/p>\n
McKinsey said this has contributed to the \u201cGenAI paradox\u201d, where the technology is visible across organisations but has not shown up clearly on the bottom line.<\/p>\n
The firm said agentic AI can address this gap because it can execute multistep processes. Instead of depending on individual practitioners using separate AI tools, companies can create hybrid human-agentic workforces where people design and oversee networks of AI agents handling much of the execution.<\/p>\n
In such a model, one marketing professional could supervise a team of agents, helping drive growth, improve productivity and allow human teams to focus on creativity and strategy.\u00a0<\/p>\n
McKinsey said this shift will require a modern technology base, including unified identity and data layers, flexible model-serving infrastructure, and content and activation systems with reliable APIs.<\/p>\n
Agentic AI may eventually power around 60% of tasks across the marketing process. It said the technology can enable automated content generation, synthetic audience testing, and audience-based media planning.<\/p>\n
McKinsey said organisations implementing agentic workflows in marketing can expect 10-30% revenue growth from hyper-personalised marketing. It also estimated that agentic systems could accelerate the creation and execution of marketing campaigns by 10 to 15 times.<\/p>\n
The firm said AI agents can also help companies move resources from processes and operations towards working spend, allowing more money to be directed at reaching consumers.\u00a0<\/p>\n
However, McKinsey cautioned that these gains are not automatic. It said companies must reimagine how marketing work is done instead of simply adding AI tools to existing workflows.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It laid out a five-step process for creating agentic marketing workflows.<\/p>\n
The first step, according to McKinsey, is to create a detailed taxonomy of key marketing activities. Companies must break down priority workflows into the full chain of activities involved and map the systems that support them, including CRM, CMS, digital asset management, analytics and data pipelines.<\/p>\n
McKinsey cited the example of a leading consumer brand that redesigned its creative ideation and production process. The company identified activities such as ideation, concept creation and testing, content production, content versioning, optimisation and agency management. These were then broken into hundreds of microtasks.<\/p>\n
The second step is to define agent archetypes. McKinsey said marketing organisations may use archetypes such as knowledge extraction, data analysis and content generation. In the consumer brand example, the company classified tasks into six archetypes: content generator, knowledge, localisation, analyser, planner and operator.<\/p>\n
The third step is to determine the full set of agents needed across workflows. McKinsey said companies must identify specific agents within each archetype and ensure they can integrate with data platforms, content repositories and activation platforms. It said interoperability, rather than model design, is often the limiting factor.<\/p>\n
The fourth step is to define future-state workflows with clear human roles. McKinsey said marketers will need to focus more on strategy, understanding what resonates with audiences, stakeholder relationships and in-person activations.<\/p>\n
It said marketers will also need to oversee the infrastructure behind AI workflows, including data quality, content metadata, orchestration rules and API governance. The new skills required will include prompt engineering, agent collaboration, quality monitoring, refining AI outputs with human expertise, data and AI fluency, and applied machine learning knowledge.<\/p>\n
The fifth step is to prioritise implementation in waves, starting with high-value workflows that can drive adoption. McKinsey said companies must decide whether to build custom tools or use off-the-shelf solutions, while factoring in technical readiness.<\/p>\n
In the consumer brand example, the rollout happened in three waves. The first built an ideation engine, the second added pretesting and compliance checks, and the third extended the system globally for localisation and scalable testing. McKinsey said some content creation pilots increased end-to-end speed by four times compared with traditional workflows.<\/p>\n
The article also said agentic systems are emerging in media execution. It cited an advanced advertising platform building AI agents to optimise campaigns across major digital channels by evaluating performance, adjusting bids and budgets, pairing creatives with audiences, and generating new message variants.<\/p>\n
McKinsey said early adopters have reported faster optimisation cycles and improvements in return on ad spend.<\/p>\n
At the same time, the firm warned that brands will need strong governance to manage legal and brand risks. It said marketing is especially sensitive because it directly affects consumer-facing content and brand perception.<\/p>\n
A McKinsey survey of 35 CMOs at Fortune 250 consumer and technology companies found that executives were mainly concerned about brand and legal governance, human capability challenges, technology underinvestment and data bottlenecks.<\/p>\n
McKinsey said nearly 90% of CMOs are experimenting with AI use cases across different parts of marketing, but less than 10 per cent have captured value across end-to-end workflows.<\/p>\n
McKinsey said the future of marketing will not be about replacing human marketers but augmenting them. It said human judgment, cultural understanding, qualitative sense-making and strategic thinking will remain essential as AI agents bring speed, precision and scale to execution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New Delhi: Agentic AI could power as much as two-thirds of current marketing activities and help companies unlock…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17843,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[179,7493,24,615,12816,174,1413],"class_list":{"0":"post-17842","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-agentic-ai","8":"tag-agentic-ai","9":"tag-agentic-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-ai","11":"tag-content","12":"tag-creative","13":"tag-marketing","14":"tag-mckinsey"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17842","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17842"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17842\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17843"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}