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The 2026 State of CX Outsourcing
AI as a technology has considerably evolved and broadened in scope over just the last few years. While AI has been traditionally used for trend analysis, new tools such as generative AI can be used for content creation, coding and more. And now, we have agentic AI, which can run programs and campaigns without continuous prompting.
Agentic AI delivers several advantages over generative AI, especially if teams need more than content generation. While generative AI responds to user prompts, agentic AI can reason, plan and act autonomously toward defined business goals. In this instance, generative AI acts more as a tool to get work done, while agentic AI functions more like a co-worker freeing employees to perform higher-level tasks.
To further explore the advantages of agentic AI, CMSWire spoke to Debbie Tucek, VP of Product at Kentico. We discussed Kentico's shift from generative to agentic AI workflows, emphasizing the need for faster market adoption and optimized processes. Our conversation highlighted the evolving roles of marketers, with a focus on process design and orchestration over manual execution.
Table of Contents
- The Shift from Content Generation to Workflow Orchestration
- The Evolution of the Marketer's Role: From Execution to Orchestration
- The Necessity of a Unified Data Foundation
- Governance, Guardrails and Ultimate Responsibility
- Spend Less Time Learning and More Time Doing
The Shift from Content Generation to Workflow Orchestration
In recent years, generative AI has commoditized basic content creation, pushing the frontier of marketing technology toward agentic AI. While generative AI acts as a discrete tool for specific tasks, agentic AI operates as a "virtual teammate" that can handle entire workflows autonomously or semi-autonomously. Agentic AI aims to automate time-consuming tasks like content translation, image processing, and SEO, enhancing efficiency and reducing workloads.
This shift focuses on drastically speeding up time-to-market by reducing clicks and manual steps in processes like market expansion, asset tagging, and campaign optimization. “At Kentico, we’re focused on how we speed up the processes of marketing teams,” Tucek said. “How do we reduce the steps involved in actually getting to market and seeing value'? We're concentrating on drastically shortening the time it takes a marketer to get campaigns and experiences to market and start seeing the conversions and revenue returns. Agentic AI is central to helping achieve these goals.”
The Evolution of the Marketer's Role: From Execution to Orchestration
Some of agentic AI’s biggest advantages revolve around its abilities to perform multi-step execution and act autonomously. Agentic AI can execute multi-step tasks, adapt to changing conditions and coordinate with other systems in a way that generative AI tools can’t.
Unlike generative AI, which is very task-oriented, agentic AI manages workflows and surfaces anomalies requiring human intervention. This means agentic AI is outcome-driven and can orchestrate cross-functional processes.
As agentic AI powers "self-optimizing ecosystems," the day-to-day role of the marketer will transform. Instead of manually executing campaigns or writing content, marketers will be elevated to highly strategic roles focused on orchestration and setting direction. This will shift the oversight of AI processes from a "human in the loop" (reviewing and approving every action) to one of "human on the loop" (monitoring and providing oversight while the AI works in the background). Further, process design skills will become exceptionally valuable. “Marketing is set to become a far more strategic role,” said Tucek.
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The Necessity of a Unified Data Foundation
No new technology is without its pain points. Challenges to agentic AI adoption include fragmented martech systems, data quality and a lack of strategic adoption. Implementing AI on top of a fragmented martech stack (disconnected CRMs, CMSs, CDPs) leads to shallow outputs because the AI lacks unified contextual insight.
Understanding user context has become even more important than the content itself for driving personalization. “We’ve all heard the phrase that content is king and the context is queen,” Tucek said. “But that paradigm has shifted and it's really now all about orchestrating the context. It's about identifying, understanding and reacting to the contextual triggers and signals that you're receiving.”
Having a strong data foundation is critical to achieving success with agentic AI. Organizations must build a connected ecosystem with consolidated, high-quality data, structured content and consistent content taxonomies to build trust in AI outputs.
Governance, Guardrails and Ultimate Responsibility
Of course, more autonomy means more risk. Agentic AI demands robust governance, monitoring and guardrails to ensure safe, reliable operation. As researchers caution, agentic AI introduces new risks such as uncontrolled autonomy and requires new QA strategies.
Despite the autonomy of agentic AI, the need for human critical thinking remains paramount. Setting guardrails, understanding the solutions, and taking ultimate responsibility for the AI's output are crucial elements of adoption. Because of these high stakes, AI procurement and strategy are increasingly being pushed up to the C-suite level to ensure business outcomes and compliance are met.
“Marketers will need more “critical thinking capacity” in the future,” Tucek said. “They will be focussing more on setting the direction, parameters and guardrails to make sure everything works as intended.”
Spend Less Time Learning and More Time Doing
The future of agentic AI is nearly limitless. Kentico's Agentic Marketing Suite integrates customer journey insights, optimization and experimentation capabilities. Using agentic AI will allow teams to spin up campaigns faster and scale nearly any project. “We designed our agentic marketing suite in a way that feels familiar in terms of being able to trigger actions through trigger actions and processes via a button click or by prompting AI using natural language,” Tucek said. “We want our customers to successfully adopt and leverage AI to expand their capacity and make many of their foundational work processes more efficient. Having the technology that just works, and for it to fit into their workflows seamlessly, is key to helping them achieve this goal.”
Kentico can transform your workflows through smart agentic AI implementation. Learn more at kentico.com.