Brand Building In An Age Of AI Agents
Jim Misener is President of 50,000 feet. Founded in 2001, 50,000feet is a global brand consultancy and creative agency with teams in Chicago, New York and London. From brand identity systems, marketing communications and advertising to all facets of digital, 50,000feet combines business acumen, creative excellence and technology innovation to help the most respected brands connect more deeply with their customers, clients and consumers. (More on Jim below.)
Just when you thought your business was adapting to generative AI, along comes another AI-driven disruption: autonomous agents.
AI agents are designed to manage tasks autonomously. They don’t require constant human prompting as large language models do. When assigned an objective, they can independently generate tasks, complete them, create additional tasks as needed, adjust priorities, address the new top task, and continue cycling through until the objective is achieved.
In your personal and professional life, AI agents can manage tedious ones that people don’t want to do.
Autonomous agents can manage content calendars, set reminders, and schedule appointments or meetings. But they can potentially do much more, including managing social media campaigns, creating content, and performing complicated customer service queries.
You can build them yourself. Or you can work with commercially available products like Agentforce from Salesforce for customer relationship management or ServiceNow to automate workflows.
AI agents also open up many questions that you need to understand and assess.
- How might AI agents change how your businesses build relationships with their audience through the most important marketing channels you use? As venture capitalist Jeremiah Owyang asked, what role does your website play when autonomous agents in addition to people are visiting your content?
- How might autonomous agents change how you market and build your brand, whether you are creating content or managing an advertising campaign?
There is not a simple or single answer to this complex topic. As AI continuously evolves, advice that sounds sensible today will need to be revisited constantly. Let’s focus on a few suggestions to get you started as you consider AI agents.
Proceed Quickly But Thoughtfully
If generative AI has taught us anything, it’s the importance of balancing speed with rigor. AI constantly teaches itself to get better. Businesses that adopt it sooner can leapfrog their competitors faster than they might with other forms of technology. But early applications of generative AI revealed some potentially costly mistakes such as bias violations of privacy.
Your game plan should outline how you will use AI agents to interact with customers and build their brand. To begin, it’s essential to identify your specific goals and what you hope to achieve. Consider whether you want to manage customer support inquiries, analyze complex data, personalize marketing content, or automate social media engagement. Then ask how AI agents can help you achieve your goals more effectively than you are now.
And understand the risks and how to mitigate them. How will you ensure human oversight when agents are acting autonomously? What kind of mechanisms will you put in place to check how AI agents are performing and then perform any necessary course corrections? Anyone who uses AI to automate ad campaigns, for example, will tell you that leaving them alone unmonitored can lead to expensive mistakes and a waste of your ad budget.
As you game plan identify potential uses cases for AI, consider some of these:
Developing AI-Friendly Content
Gartner says that by 2026, at least 15% of day-to-day work decisions will be made autonomously through AI agents, up from 0% in 2024. Your game plan should consider how the uptake of AI agents will affect one of the most visible expressions of your brand, your website.
Consider how you likely adapted your web content for voice search even though voice has not taken over the world. The process of adapting for conversational ways of searching likely helped you prepare for the rise of generative AI-powered search.
The same is true with AI agents. AI agents consume and process information differently than humans so businesses must ensure their content is AI-friendly. This means creating content that is concise, informative, and easy for AI agents to understand. Websites should also be optimized for AI agents with clear information architecture and easy-to-find data.
Additionally, make sure your content is clear, concise, and informative. Use keywords strategically, but avoid keyword stuffing, which can harm your website’s ranking. It’s also important to prepare for a future where AI agents may interact with content in various formats, such as voice, video, or even virtual reality.
Using AI Agents For Marketing Tasks
AI agents can automate marketing tasks such as email marketing, social media marketing, and content creation. This frees human marketers to focus on more strategic tasks.
Consider employing AI agents to generate different types of marketing content, including blog posts, social media updates, and product descriptions. AI agents can also be used for customer segmentation, allowing you to tailor your marketing messages to specific groups.
Automating repetitive marketing tasks like email marketing and social media posting can significantly improve efficiency. This allows human marketers to focus on more strategic and creative aspects of their roles.
Note that I’m not talking about AI agents replacing content creation but rather improving what your people do.
Using AI Agents to Manage Campaigns
AI agents can analyze campaign performance in real-time, allowing brands to adjust strategies based on immediate feedback. This means campaigns can be optimized in-market, improving outcomes with fewer resources.
You can improve campaigns with AI agents in a number of ways. For instance, you can enable AI agents to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) and adjust campaign elements, such as budget allocations or audience targeting, based on real-time data.
Consider how you could use AI agents to re-engage with at-risk customers. You could teach an AI agent to identify users showing signs of disengagement and automatically initiate re-engagement campaigns. This proactive approach helps retain customers who might otherwise leave without further interaction.
Help Your Team. Don’t Replace Them.
As AI agents get better, they will improve human-generated content by performing tasks such as optimizing your content for SEO and helping you align your writing with your brand voice. How can AI agents help your team get better by joining a virtual teammate? Answering that question all begins with strategy. Now more than ever.
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More About Jim Misener
One doesn’t necessarily associate poetry with the day-to-day business of a thriving agency, but Jim has found great success being an exception to the rule. Most mornings you can find him deep in thought about clients’ brand strategies, and by midday he’s making rounds with tasks in hand. Jim received a B.A. with highest honors from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and completed the AIGA Program for Creative Leaders at Yale and the Executive Program at the University of Chicago Management Institute. Jim is also a board member at the Design Museum, Chicago. He is part of the LGBTQ+ community and 50% of 50k is owned and led by other members of the community.
