How AI agents can make marketers irreplaceable: What CMOs should know

CMOs leading AI-powered marketing can prove ROI—fast

Lots of data? Check. Content-heavy? Check. Outcome-focused? Check. A need for speed and agility? Check and check. These are the prerequisites for AI agents to deliver value in a hurry, and marketing has them all. Marketing also has a secret weapon—marketers. Whether they’re creatives, planners, or analysts, marketers tend to have the kind of skills and mindset that can accelerate AI agent success.

At PwC, we’ve been achieving real-world value in-house and with clients in functions like finance, IT, HR, tax, cybersecurity and a host of others. We’re also reinventing our business and our firm to leverage agent-enhanced workflows and create new operating and business models. We’re using agents in marketing too, and we’re excited about what they can do: Give the business bold campaigns and data-driven strategies that can reach the right audiences with the right messages at the right time.

Reimagine marketing: Content supply chain

Let’s look at how AI can change content creation and delivery. To start, instead of people filling out intake forms and drafting briefs, AI agents do. Planners and content specialists review the agents’ work. Then, agents trained on marketing data segment your audience and come up with concepts that your creatives either accept, adapt, or use as inspiration.

Your creatives either provide direction to agents that do the drafting, or they make a first version with agents assisting. AI agents produce mockups and visuals. They edit and give feedback. They test variations with synthetic customers that mimic real customer reactions and engagement.

Then, a capacity boom takes off.

• AI agents generate different versions—including copy, image, and video variations—for different channels and geographies.
• If you build in governance and brand safeguards, agentic content checks can enforce quality assurance, compliance, and your brand voice.
• Agents can also tag and archive assets so you can retrieve and reuse them—and verify rights.
• With so much work automated, your creatives and strategists can experiment and personalize more.

Altogether, we’ve seen agents take roughly 40% of the burden off the shoulders of content managers. They can compress the timelines from weeks to days and track performance, so content managers can refine brand narratives and positioning, reuse existing assets for new value, and better personalize across platforms—increasing revenue, market share, and margins. With agents tracking these and other metrics, you can show your CEO and CFO that you’re a pivotal growth driver.

Reimagine marketing: Budget and planning

You didn’t become a marketer because you like managing budgets. Now, with AI agents there to help, you don’t have to spend so much time wrangling data, consolidating spreadsheets, and iterating and reconciling across channels and functions.

Instead, you can set goals that align with business priorities and then deploy agentic workflows to help manage the manual tasks.

AI agents can analyze your data to generate summaries of past spend and ROI. They can generate a baseline budget draft, along with suggested spend envelopes and simulations of different scenarios. You’ll review it and make changes as needed. Then agents can create customized versions for your CFO, CEO, and business leaders with the metrics that are more important to them. Agents can even facilitate the back-and-forth among stakeholders. Once you have approval, agents can create and distribute summaries.

The process can cut human effort roughly in half. It can strengthen marketing’s alignment with the business. And with the budget approved, agents keep adding value. They track campaign performance and spend, supporting the manual tasks that have long held marketers back from fully leveraging marketing mix modeling (MMM) and multi-touch attribution (MTA) to provide more prescriptive recommendations for in-moment and future optimization.

5 steps to achieve fast marketing ROI and start to accelerate long-term growth

One of the ways agents differ from older technologies is the speed of ROI. Vendors offer fit-for-purpose agents. Platforms (like our own agent OS) can enable you to orchestrate, integrate, and govern AI agents across applications—so you can often roll out an agent-powered workflow in 30 days. And you don’t have to be deeply technical. Platforms like agent OS can understand plain language commands.

We’ve mapped the high-opportunity marketing workflows that are great places to start—content and budgeting are just two of many options. We also know from experience what processes and skills make agent-powered workflows effective. Here’s how you can activate the AI strategy on your CMO agenda.

1. Prioritize value—and information: To decide where to start, consider not just the value agents can offer but the available data and supporting information as well. Just because data exists doesn’t make it usable. It should be reliable, compliant, and accompanied by a “knowledge base” (including items like brand voice and customer personas) that can give agents context to guide their outputs.
2. Get your people on board: AI works better when people are not just willing to use it but excited to innovate with it. Using AI is iterative, and human creativity remains essential in the agentic future. You can help your teams get there. The data shows that AI makes workers more valuable.
3. Redefine roles, responsibilities, and upskilling paths: Rolling out agents is the easy part. The challenge is shifting what people do: Less repetitive work, more creativity and strategy. Less trial and error, more simulation and data-driven decisions.
4. Let trust be a differentiator. If you embed Responsible AI legal, ethical, and brand-voice checkpoints into agentic workflows, you can create verifiable (and largely automated) compliance, privacy, and bias minimization while enhancing cultural sensitivity and relevance. The result can be a stronger brand that inspires more trust in customers, regulators, and other stakeholders.
5. Measure success and scale it. With the tools that AI itself provides, track the value you’re creating. The architecture that powers agents can be reusable, so you can scale up successes quickly—and affordably.