Agents of agility
How agentic AI is supercharging marketing
Marketing is an art and a science, built on compelling creative campaigns and fueled by deep insights about potential audiences. The goal? To reach consumers with the right message at the right time.
On the science side, marketers rely on a wide range of marketing tech—including CRM software, social media management solutions, and analytics tools—to help plan, execute, and measure marketing campaigns. Creating meaningful, tailored content quickly and cost-effectively is difficult—even for data-savvy teams—and optimizing campaigns through real-time A/B testing can still be challenging. Scaling marketing initiatives is often difficult, especially for smaller teams.
As for the art side, the manual, time-consuming nature of marketing can keep marketers from being truly creative and strategic. Instead of seeing the broader picture, they’re distracted by tactical details, such as drafting ad copy, designing graphics, monitoring analytics and managing budgets.
To get a clearer picture of marketing in the agentic era, we sat recently with Nikhil Nanivadekar, Principal Engineer at Amazon Ads, and Christina Westley, Founder of Real Social and former head of influencer marketing at PepsiCo.
“AI is fundamentally reshaping the role of marketers,” says Nanivadekar, who has spearheaded Amazon Ads’ extensive use of AI. “It’s elevating their roles by handling more of the implementation details and repetitive work—enabling them to shift gears toward higher-level strategic thinking.”
Marketers often describe AI as a game-changer, according to Westley. “When marketers lean into AI and learn how to use it correctly, it can allow them to really scale their work, doing more of what they were doing before, but better,” she says. “But its impact goes beyond raising efficiency. It also levels the playing field, giving startups and agile marketing teams access to advanced marketing capabilities that used to be out of reach. That’s the real game-changer.”
Agentic AI differs from generative AI in ways that makes it particularly well-suited for marketing. Unlike generative AI models, which respond to isolated prompts, agents are software systems powered by AI that can act on marketers’ behalf to plan and complete multi-step workflows.
Marketing leaders are already beginning to tap agentic AI’s capabilities to streamline and improve process-heavy marketing campaigns and free marketers to innovate. Working together—and with human counterparts—agents can compress multi-week workflows into hours, enhance the accuracy of decision-making, and enable new levels of scalability, all while helping reduce errors and ensure adherence to brand.
According to Nanivadekar, agentic AI achieves impressive results well beyond what was possible with first-wave AI solutions. Agents can help creative teams generate extensive marketing assets—from product images in contextual settings to complete video ads—autonomously and at scale.
Agents can also bring contextual intelligence and adaptation to ads, maximizing relevance and engagement. They can analyze ad performance and adapt campaigns in real time, including dynamic adjustments to creative.
“What makes it truly different is its contextual awareness and autonomous decision-making.”
“Perhaps most importantly, agentic AI gives marketers the gift of time,” says Nanivadekar. “By automating repetitive tasks and streamlining workflows, it frees marketers to focus on strategic thinking, creative direction, and human connection—all elements where human expertise remains irreplaceable.”
As Real Social’s Westley puts it, “By helping me do the more administrative tasks of my job better, AI can let me really focus on identifying influencers and building relationships—the parts of my job that differentiate the work most and I truly enjoy.”
AI has been used for years by Amazon Ads, helping marketers create effective ads that connect with Amazon audiences, quickly and effectively. Within its Creative Studio, Amazon Ads users can now click “chat” to access a conversational, AI-powered creative partner that conducts product and consumer research, brainstorms ideas, develops creative concepts in a storyboard format, and produces compelling video and display ads.
This powerful agentic solution—built using Amazon Bedrock, Amazon SageMaker AI, and other AI services—puts major new capabilities into the hands of marketers, enabling them to streamline the creative workflow, personalize at scale while maintaining brand consistency, and adapt content with the viewing environment.
“Perhaps most importantly, agentic AI gives marketers the gift of time.”
“What makes it truly different is its contextual awareness and autonomous decision-making,” says Nanivadekar. “Rather than simply generating content based on prompts, our solution actively considers the advertising context, including brand information, advertising objective, ad placement, audience, product category, and performance insights.”
Since agentic AI is more proactive than earlier iterations of AI, this agentic solution can make intelligent decisions about creative elements without requiring step-by-step human direction for each choice, while still giving advertisers full creative control.
“There’s a fine balance between proactive agentic automation and human judgment,” says Nanivadekar. “Think about it as a sliding scale of advertiser control for certain aspects. For example, when iterating on an idea or generating a storyboard, the agent and advertiser work together. But extracting an image ad from video can be done autonomously by the agent. Both approaches help bring new efficiency to the marketing process, so it’s a win-win.”
It’s still early days for agentic AI, as enterprises look beyond the hype and consider how to apply it to sales, marketing, customer experience (CX), and other key functions. Amazon’s Nanivadekar offers clear guidance, based on his experience pioneering AI solutions at Amazon Ads:
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Tip #1
Implementing agentic AI is a journey, not a one-time destination.
Be flexible and adopt a test and learn mindset. The AI landscape is evolving rapidly, and what was cutting-edge nine months ago might be outdated today. Stay open to new capabilities and willing to adapt when better solutions emerge.
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Tip #2
Focus on the practical vs. the possibilities.
Prioritize real-world applications: start with well-defined use cases where AI can solve specific marketing challenges, prototype the solutions, and build from those successes.
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Tip #3
Identify the specific problems you’re trying to solve across your marketing function.
Remember that scaling happens by establishing clear frameworks from the start, not just by deploying more technology.
One last insight? “The organizations that will benefit most from agentic AI are those that approach it as a collaborative partner,” says Nanivadekar, “rather than a replacement for human creativity and judgment.”
To get started, choose a high-impact, measurable use case—such as scaling creative content or budget optimization—and demonstrate immediate value.
Many marketers worry that agentic AI might generate content that doesn’t align with brand guidelines or could even produce harmful content. This is a legitimate concern, but it presents an opportunity to establish clear brand governance frameworks that can improve consistency across all marketing activities.
Another concern is whether AI can generate truly breakthrough creative ideas. In practice, AI often surfaces imaginative combinations and fresh perspectives that creative teams might not have considered, helping inspire new ideas and streamline content generation at scale.
Define structured workflows for seamless agent interaction. Then define clear governance practices to maintain high-quality, compliant output. Create guardrails by establishing clear parameters for brand consistency, compliance and automated decision-making.
Marketing technology stacks are already complex, and adding AI capabilities might seem overwhelming. What marketers need are leaner, more modular plug-and-play agentic AI solutions that can be adopted incrementally. Think about agentic AI systems as building blocks, and architect and evolve your marketing systems to embrace AI innovation.
Though it’s early days for agentic AI, agents are already enabling profound strategic transformation of the marketing function by revolutionizing the speed and scale of execution, making marketing more responsive, strategic, and effective.
Ultimately, the future of marketing leadership belongs to those who adeptly orchestrate intelligent systems, leveraging AI agents to continuously learn, optimize, and scale. By democratizing access to advanced capabilities, agentic AI empowers all marketing groups, not just the biggest brands, to use these transformative new capabilities as a competitive advantage.
Agentic AI’s impact goes beyond marketing teams. By enabling more tailored, relevant, and compelling experiences, it helps improve the customer journey at every stage of their relationship with a brand.
Explore AWS agentic AI solutions.
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