This Future of Marketing Briefing covers the latest in marketing for Digiday+ members and is distributed over email every Friday at 10 a.m. ET. More from the series →The most important AI lesson senior marketers are learning: start with the process, not the agent. Buried beneath all the noise about agents and autonomous workflows is something that actually cuts to the heart of why there are so many conflicting views about where AI adoption really is right now — and more importantly, why so much of it isn’t working.
They’re deploying agents into workflows, mapping tools onto current organization structures and then wondering why the gains are marginal. A strategy agent here, a creative ideation tool there. Useful, but not really transformative. What they’re producing, as one person I spoke to put it, are faster versions of the wrong thing.
The brands that are actually getting somewhere are asking a different question first: not what agent is necessary, but what process needs to change before anything is built. It sounds obvious. Yet, few are doing it. And the ones that are tend to be the ones facing the most acute pressure. The automotive brands rattled by Chinese EVs, the financial services firms staring down fintech competition. The ones, in other words, that don’t have the luxury of moving slowly. For everyone else, the organization chart stays intact and the agents get slotted in around it.
