4 Reasons Marketers Need To Stay In The Loop With AI Agents
Imagine you've set out to grow your first garden and you need some direction. Maybe you watch YouTube videos from experienced gardeners or ask a friend or relative for some advice.
As someone who has tried to grow all kinds of backyard vegetables, those resources will only get you so far. You have to learn and understand unique details about your garden space—soil, layout, sunlight, microclimate and more. Growing onions may look simple when a YouTuber does it, but your own trial and error will be the best teacher.
The same mindset applies to using artificial intelligence (AI) in marketing efforts. Agentic AI is an invaluable tool for analyzing audience data, spotting gaps in your buyer journey and supporting campaign execution, but it can't replace human ingenuity.
Marketers have invaluable knowledge of their unique audience and market conditions, as well as powerful creativity that fuels every facet of their strategy. AI can't replicate that. That's why it's critical teams don't lock marketing away in an AI-powered black box—marketers must always stay in the loop.
Let's be clear: agentic AI is unlocking exciting new efficiencies and growth opportunities for marketing by making decisions and operating autonomously. In this way, AI agents can be viewed as new marketing "team members" trained to analyze, learn and execute in real time.
Modern marketers are partnering with AI agents to generate new insights about the audience's behavior and preferences. Agentic AI can apply those insights to fuel continuous improvement and compounding growth.
AI agents help marketing teams brainstorm, hone their best ideas and refine their approach so marketers can ideate and iterate faster with a continuous feedback loop.
Even with such promise, agentic AI has limitations. Marketers must harness AI's incredible strengths while offering the guidance and oversight that only humans can provide.
Humans have a capacity for creativity that AI can't copy. They contribute empathy, originality and customer connections that even the most advanced models couldn't replicate. Importantly, humans have an intuitive sense of the zeitgeist—trends like Brat Summer or Barbie's magical resurgence are not easily understood by agents. That's why I firmly believe in keeping humans in the loop.
Here are four reasons why marketers shouldn't hand the reins over to AI completely.
No matter how thoroughly you train an AI model, its understanding of your business will always be limited.
From segmenting your audiences to optimizing ad bids, agentic AI can complete a wide range of tasks at scale. But it only operates based on the data it has access to, its training and the tasks you ask it to perform. It doesn't understand the ins and outs of your broader business goals and can't predict rapidly shifting market dynamics and trends.
Marketers do have the context and experience needed to create and execute a holistic marketing strategy. Humans can connect the dots between data, storytelling and business impact, which is essential for making deeper connections through marketing.
Have you ever asked an AI tool like ChatGPT or Gemini to generate an "original" idea? After a few minutes, it feels like hitting your head against a brick wall. AI generates output by drawing from existing information. In music terms, AI remixes what's already been released instead of releasing original hits.
Only humans can apply their unique experiences and ingenuity to create something nuanced and new. Marketers can reflect on emerging trends, engage with culture and evoke emotion in ways AI can't. To surprise and delight your audience through your marketing, you need a marketer's creative spark.
You might trust AI agents to answer customer queries on your website or respond to support requests, but no matter how skilled AI becomes, marketers have stronger customer relationships.
The best campaigns stem from not just demographic or buying behavioral data but firsthand knowledge of the person buying your product or service. Interpersonal connections and conversations with customers can help you capture how they feel and what they really think, uncovering emotional nuances that AI doesn't grasp.
Relationships also help you keep AI-driven personalization helpful and engaging without overstepping or knowing too much. Brands like Ulta, for example, put customer insights to work through their loyalty program to power meaningful personalization that drives loyalty and engagement.
You wouldn't trust an entry-level intern to send a campaign to your entire customer base without oversight from an experienced team member. Agentic AI shouldn't have this level of control, either. It needs the guidance of an experienced marketer to safeguard your brand.
At best, AI can generate content that's off-brand or inaccurate. At worst, unvetted AI-generated marketing content can be tone-deaf, unethical or even illegal. From hiring bias to misuse of private data, we've already seen brands' public failures to govern AI output. The security and governance of proprietary data must be a top priority, especially as agentic AI transforms and expands data's usability.
However marketers use AI, their programs need guardrails to uphold customer expectations of data privacy, transparency and ethical use. Marketers are much better off supervising agentic AI output than risking major fallout from a PR crisis.
In the same way that you might learn from each success and failure of your backyard garden, every AI-powered marketing campaign holds invaluable insights for compounding your brand's growth.
But agentic AI shouldn't be the sole entity in charge of strategy, execution and revisions. It's a tool to support and empower marketers. Humans bring essential context, create fresh ideas, offer relational nuance and apply brand protection standards.
Marketers are gardeners charged with growing the business. Hand in hand with AI, they must stay integrally involved in the process, bringing the ingenuity and care unique to the human experience. Only then can they produce something astounding together.
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