From Hype to Marketing Impact: What Marketers Need to Know Next

From Hype to Marketing Impact: What Marketers Need to Know Next The experimental phase of AI is over. Marketing is entering the agentic era, where AI systems will not only generate content and insights but also plan, decide, execute and optimize across the customer journey with increasing autonomy. As search evolves from keywords and links to AI-powered answers, recommendations and autonomous agents, brands face a fundamental challenge: influencing decisions when AI agents increasingly act as intermediaries between consumers and companies. Visibility will no longer depend only on reaching consumers. Brands must also become discoverable, credible and recommendable to the AI systems acting on their behalf. Bringing together perspectives from Google, Zalando, Reddit, Quancast and the Marketing + Media Alliance (MMA), this session will examine how agentic AI is reshaping search, brand discovery, creative development, media activation and customer experience. It will explore which marketing decisions can be delegated to agents, where human judgment remains essential and how organizations must rethink their data, governance and measurement models for autonomous marketing. The session will also reveal the first findings from MMA’s State of Agentic AI in DACH study, benchmarking how DACH marketers are adopting agentic AI, where they see the greatest potential and how their readiness compares with global peers.