The Robots are Coming!

october 2025 Digital edition

The Robots Are Coming

A Guide to the Future of AI & MarTech

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We built an Agent Cloud AI assistant to generate quick insights from our latest guide, The Robots Are Coming.

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Agentic AI, explained

Agentic AI owns goals over time—planning sub-tasks, using tools, and learning from feedback.
Agents orchestrate tools, remember constraints, and run continual experiments: handling monitoring, drafting, A/B testing, and crisis workflows.
Hype and compliance risks persist. Prioritize secure integration, governance, and ROI.

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Break the AI slop loop

AI slop is cheap, derivative content flooding the web; usage and consumer concern stats show the problem is already sizable.
Recursive training on slop drives sameness and factual drift. That erodes trust, SEO value, and differentiation across text, images, and video.
Beat slop with proprietary data, human review, layered models, and textured prompts.

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Why "BYOAI" is bad business

BYOAI is is when employees independently adopt consumer AI tools without IT approval or training. Also known as “shadow AI,” it leads to risky and ungoverned workflows.
This leads to data leaks, compliance exposure, uneven results from untrained prompting, integration headaches, and poor scalability.
Secure, enterprise platforms are a much better bet. They integrate cleanly, scale reliably, undergo ongoing model evaluation, and leverage fresh first-party data for speed with governance.

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How agentic AI will change influencer marketing

Agentic AI goes beyond prompting to goal-driven execution, while autonomy scales cautiously.
Near-term AI agents could vet creators, negotiate preliminaries, draft contracts, and adapt mid-flight. Meanwhile, humans are safeguarding brand safety, tone, and risk.
Expect stronger multimodal monitoring and cross-stack orchestration heading into 2026.

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AI and custom rules are changing creative optimization

AI tools can score “pre-flight” creative assets with custom rules, checking brand elements across text, image, and audio to boost consistency, compliance, and ROAS.
AI systems evaluate hundreds of rules in near-real time and surface precise, context-aware fixes.
Agentic agents can independently mine brand docs and literature to propose new rules, which a human-in-the-loop approves.

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Ways AI is revolutionizing market research

AI is now a junior teammate for market researchers, drafting reports, spotting patterns, and forming starter hypotheses.
Biggest wins: analysis at scale across messy datasets, automated reporting, and open-end synthesis. This is improving accuracy, surfacing insights, and accelerating delivery.
Trust needs guardrails. Human oversight, training, integration, and security keep researchers in the driver’s seat.

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How autonomous should AI agents actually be?

Give agents practical autonomy for repeatable, guardrailed tasks. Keep humans in the loop for for sensitive, high-stakes, or reputationally risky decisions.
Real risks (brand safety, blown budgets, privacy breaches) demand hard controls: caps, approved tools, time-boxed access, and an instant kill-switch.
Expand autonomy only when success, intervention rate, cost, and team trust improve. That means after staged trials, full logging, and mandatory checkpoints.

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A few things AI agents still can't do

Agents can't settle all creative differences between your human teammates.
Agents can collect mountains of data, but they still can't ensure your colleagues agree on what made a campaign work.
Agents can dramatically improve the quality of survey samples, but can't guarantee that every survey-taker tells the truth.

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The future of agentic AI in 2026

Mark Penn, CEO of Stagwell: Brands must shape AI agents as ambassadors. With better returns, 2026 brings expanded marketing budgets and large-scale transformation.
Elspeth Rollert, CEO of The Marketing Cloud: Connecting disparate consumer data to agentic systems will personalize journeys in real time, break channel silos, and increase lifetime value.
John Kahan, Chief AI Officer of Stagwell: Integrated, AI-powered ecosystems will unify analysis, audience creation, activation, measurement, and optimization—embedding genAI, always-on agents, and predictive analytics to outpace competitors.

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The Future of AI & Martech

Read more on our BLOG

Agentic AI, explained

The Marketing Cloud

Here's what to know as we head into 2026.

MarTech

How marketers can avoid the AI slop loop

Scott Indrisek

Let's work together toward a slop-free future!

Media

Why BYOAI is a bad idea

Louis Criso

And why purpose-built solutions are a better bet.

MarTech

Agentic AI will radically change influencer marketing

The Marketing Cloud

Here's how the field is set to change.

Communications

How AI and custom rules are changing creative optimization

Eric Walzthöny Kreutzberg

Agentic workflows

Media

AI is revolutionizing market research

The Marketing Cloud

Teams that figure out how to pair human judgment with machine speed are going to run laps around the rest.

Research

How autonomous should AI agents be?

Louis Criso

Today’s best agents are fantastic at speed, scale, and following orders. But when the stakes rise, they still need a human hand at the wheel.

MarTech

5 things AI agents can't do (yet)

Scott Indrisek

They're impressive, not omnipotent.

MarTech

Agentic AI in 2026: What the future holds

The Marketing Cloud

Experts from The Marketing Cloud and Stagwell on what to expect in the coming year.

MarTech

Get Agent Cloud for your team

Here’s what marketing leaders are saying about how Agent Cloud has accelerated their adoption of AI tools.

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Brent Diggins

Managing Director of Performance+Intelligence at Allison

"Our agency would not be able to scale our adoption of AI at the rate we need to without a product like Agent Cloud. It is giving us the confidence to speed up our internal AI roadmaps and bring world-class research and media tools to the fingertips of our staff members around the world. It’s the definition of working smarter with technology."

Michael Lamp

Chief Digital & Social Officer at HUNTER

“The Marketing Cloud has knocked it out of the park with Agent Cloud. As an Innovation Director, having instant access to all the latest AI models — from GPT-5 to Gemini Pro — in one secure, centralized platform has been a gamechanger. The ability to seamlessly switch between models has boosted our team's productivity, facilitated AI adoption and is helping streamline our workflows.”

Jim Stiefelmaier

Innovation Strategy Director

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