The Agentic Illusion: Why autonomous AI fails in marketing at scale, and what works instead

AI promised marketing an exponential productivity boost. Yet most teams are still in experiment mode, trying to scale the first promising results up to campaign size. But this will turn out to be a dead end.

Agents do something silently different on every run, producing generic output blind to brand terms, naming conventions and customers requirements. Providing to them the context they need, will always eat the hours AI was supposed to save. And this is a problem by design. How do we know that?

We put autonomous agents to the test, on real ad-account tasks and measured what happens at scale: exploding costs and never-ending touching-up for campaign managers. In this session, we reveal our benchmark results for the first time and explain what they mean for anyone betting on agentic AI in marketing. And most importantly: You’ll leave knowing what to build instead, to unlock AI’s productivity boost and be an AI-first marketing team.