It’s almost here! We’re launching our in-depth Martech for 2026 report on December 2, and you can be among the first to see it. Simply sign up for our Martech for 2026 webinar, and you’ll get the full report the instant it’s released — along with our scintillating repartee of key findings that you can catch live or on-demand.
To share a sneak preview with you, we’ll affirm: AI agents in marketing are real.
90.3% of the participants in our AI & Data in Marketing study reported they’re using AI agents somewhere in their martech stack, even if it’s only for experimentation or in limited production use cases.
Granted, our participants skew more tech-savvy than the average marketing team. But they’re running martech and marketing operations at some of the top B2C and B2B brands in the world. They take their responsibilities seriously. They’re not starry-eyed or reckless. They’re pragmatic and competing at the top of their game.
So what are the AI agents in marketing’s orbit?
To us, the defining characteristics of AI agents in marketing aren’t how big they are or how many tools they use. It’s the people in their lives. Who do they work for? Who do they interact with? Who do they benefit?
The vast majority of AI agents in marketing work for marketers. Hundreds of new agentic tools — plus hundreds of agents added to existing martech platforms — that can help marketers brainstorm, produce, distribute, and analyze campaigns and programs.
The mission of these agents is to improve marketing. In many cases, they make it more efficient. (By the way, don’t you just love the “do more with less” cliché that masquerades as AI strategy with some executives? We thought so.) In the best cases, they actually make marketing more effective too.
But almost all of these improvements are incremental, even if they’re significant.
The real disruption to marketing is happening on the other side of the equation: AI agents that buyers control. The most obvious example of this is the displacement of classic Google search — and the SEO playbooks that marketers have spent the past 25 years honing to win that channel — by AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google’s own Gemini platform.
Buyer-side AI agents are true disruptors because they are fundamentally changing the way in which buyers find, evaluate, and engage with B2C brands and B2B vendors. In this Great Rewiring of the Buyer’s Journey, marketers are losing the visibility and control we’ve become accustomed to.
A whole category of AEO products has sprung up to help address this challenge, growing rapidly. But they’re early in their evolution, and the environment of buyer-side AI agents is advancing at an even faster rate. It’s like chasing a bullet train with a bicycle.
And in our Martech for 2026 research, while we found that the majority of marketing teams (63%) recognize this shift in buyer search channels and behaviors and are intentionally adapting their content strategies accordingly, very few (14%) have instrumented this yet. We expect this will get prioritized in 2026.
We believe buyer-side AI agent disruption is only going to accelerate over the next 6-12 months. Already, AI assistants are morphing from informational answer engines to agentic action engines that can engage with agents or humans on the seller’s side in the service of a customer’s goals.
OpenAI launched their Instant Checkout feature a couple of months ago, enabling users to purchase products from Etsy and Shopify stores directly within ChatGPT. A deal to do the same with Walmart was announced a few weeks later. In parallel with ChatGPT Apps, which embed 3rd-party services directly into ChatGPT’s conversational interface — initial apps include Booking.com, Canva, Coursera, Figma, Spotify, and Zillow — users can increasingly bypass a vendor’s own web experience with their AI assistant.
That’s a very different buyer’s journey!
Google has launched similar transactional functionality with their agentic checkout feature, which can patiently track prices for a desired purchase until it falls within your specified budget and then automatically buy it for you with Google Pay.
One of the new features with Google’s Gemini AI agent is the option to have it call local stores to check for pricing and availability of products you’re interested in. Yes, Google will make voice calls to multiple stores, ask the humans they connect with questions on your behalf, and then report back their answers and offers to you over email.
You have to appreciate the irony in this turning of the tables. For the past year, a number of B2B sellers have been giddy about deploying outbound AI SDRs to tirelessly reach out to prospects and only alert one of their human sales reps when the AI snags a fish on the line. No concern about the fact that human prospects on the receiving end had to wade through more “personalized” (but actually impersonal) incoming emails, texts, and phone calls. The goal was efficiency for reps, not for customers.
Ah, but now, the buyer can sit back at the spa while their AI agent calls human salespeople on their behalf. New efficiency for the customer. Not so much for the salespeople who now face an increasing volume of incoming calls from AI agents because, hey, no sweat for the buyer. Now, they may choose to hang up. But then they’re foregoing a possible sale if one of their competitors is willing to take the call.
Frankly, having AI agents harass engage humans in either direction isn’t particularly efficient. We believe this will be a very brief intermediate state that will hasten the adoption of agent-to-agent interactions.
That’s going to be a whole new game for marketers. How do you market to and serve AI agents as intelligent intermediaries working on behalf of your target audience?
We’ll talk through the first pragmatic steps of that journey in our Martech for 2026 report and webinar. I’ve only touched on a tiny slice of our research here. Come join us on December 2 to step back and get the full picture of what the year ahead has in store for us.
Sign up here for the report and the webinar (live or on-demand).
(A huge thank you to our sponsors GrowthLoop, Hightouch, Intuit Mailchimp, MetaRouter, Progress, SAS, and Treasure Data, whose support for our research enables us to provide this 100+ page report at no cost to you.)