For many marketers, handing over customer interactions to an automatic genAI-powered process requires a leap of religion. The excellent news is that as more AI agents come to market, the usage of this technology to enhance engagement and drive revenue will turn out to be clearer.
Adoption is already underway. During the 2024 holidays, traffic to retail sites from genAI-powered chatbots increased 13X over the previous 12 months. According to Adobe, chatbot use peaked on Cyber Monday, up 1,950% YoY.
2025 can be the 12 months of the AI agent
Marketers trying to integrate AI agents into customer experience now have several options. Salesforce introduced Agentforce in September 2024, and most recently, SAP announced shopping assistant agents for later in 2025.
Dig deeper: Salesforce Agentforce: What that you must know
“While 2023 and 2024 [was for] realizing the initial advantages of AI in customer experience, 2025 can be the 12 months where we actually begin to see the profound impact it’s going to have,” said Jay Patel, SVP & GM, Webex Customer Experience Solutions, Cisco. “This shift will see AI becoming an integral a part of customer interactions, with each consumers and businesses embracing its capabilities.
Patel added: “In 2025, AI can be woven into the material of on a regular basis customer support operations — including AI agents which have natural voice capabilities and the flexibility to act on customer requests. This will drive efficiency, personalization and satisfaction to unprecedented levels. This mainstream acceptance won’t only elevate the client experience but additionally set recent standards for engagement, making AI an indispensable tool in the client service arsenal.”
Better personalization from AI agents
Advances in agents in 2025 will help brands create personalized AI agents for patrons. These AI models, which is able to include small language models that operate on individual devices, will power highly personalized virtual assistants, in response to Patel.
“These assistants will seamlessly interact with brands and repair providers, offering a level of convenience and customization previously unattainable,” Patel stated. “The shift towards personalized AI won’t only empower users with more efficient and tailored communication but additionally anticipate their needs, making interactions more intuitive and proactive. This evolution will significantly enhance the general customer experience, making a more dynamic and responsive digital environment.”
AI agents reflecting core brand value
“On the flip side, brands will increasingly adopt AI agents that embody their unique values, personality and purpose,” Patel said. “These AI-driven representatives will engage with customers in ways which might be deeply aligned with the brand’s ethos, ensuring interactions are authentic, meaningful and memorable. By leveraging AI to reflect their core values, brands will create more consistent and emotionally resonant customer experiences. Moreover, these AI agents will enable brands to take care of a coherent voice and presence across all touchpoints, fostering stronger customer loyalty and trust.
Dig deeper: How genAI can fill the trust gap for brands
Bigger AI investments behind agents
Businesses have committed to AI investments in 2025. Nearly all those organizations surveyed by Invoca said they may increase investments within the 12 months ahead.
“In 2025, AI investments will shift decisively from experimentation to execution,” said Megh Gautam, Chief Product Officer at Crunchbase. “While 2022-2024 saw firms making splashy AI announcements and conducting broad and, in some cases, performative experiments, 2025 will mark the 12 months when AI must prove its ROI. Companies will abandon generic AI applications in favor of targeted solutions that solve specific, high-value business problems.”
Gautam added: “We’ll see this manifest in two key areas. First is the rise of AI agents — agentic AI — handling routine but complex operational tasks. Salesforce’s success this 12 months is powered by this trend. Secondly, the widespread adoption of AI tools that drive measurable improvements in core business metrics, particularly in sales optimization and customer support automation.”
AI agents will increase foot traffic and loyalty
“With the assistance of AI agents, brands can now have an area extension of their store manager trained and able to assist digital customers 24/7,” said Monica Ho, CMO of AI-powered marketing technology company SOCi. “AI agents have the flexibility to bring back dormant online business profiles, increasing foot traffic and bolstering brand loyalty through immersive consumer experiences that resonate. By mitigating human error, AI agents function as reliable, strategic assets, representing brands with an area touch that manual efforts struggle to attain. For brands, deploying AI agents can be critical to constructing impactful, scalable, and trustworthy local experiences that set them other than competitors in 2025.”
Using AI agents to realize customer insights
AI agents engage customers in conversations. These longer queries and responses provide a brand new stream of knowledge that marketers can draw on to enhance experience and drive revenue.
“Leveraging agentic AI, marketers can more easily gain a holistic view of the client journey from data housed across systems and departments,” said Pedro Andrade, VP of artificial intelligence at Talkdesk, a cloud contact center software company. “In 2025, we’ll see marketers lean on this technology to capitalize on a wealth of customer knowledge.”
The data from these conversations could be analyzed elsewhere within the stack, and resulting insights could be used for more holistic marketing strategies.
“For example, within the contact center, AI agents can connect with existing CRMs and analyze customer interactions in real-time, discover patterns, and proactively suggest solutions or personalized offers,” Andrade said. “By leveraging conversational AI, these agents can anticipate customer needs by autonomously taking decisions on processes to resolve the necessity.”
Andrade added: “Insights marketers can glean include the leading drivers of customer churn and which competitors are mentioned, the brand new features or improvements customers ask for during interactions and emerging topics. These agentic AI systems can automate the research on top of the vast amount of knowledge to drive insights and ensure marketers that their strategy resonates with customers, develop more practical and relevant campaigns highlighting customer areas of interest and proactively address issues of their communications.”
Streamlining marketing strategy and functions
With data and insights from AI agent conversations, marketers may have a brand new streamlined process for improving campaigns. How does this work?
“Agentic AI can monitor phone calls or chats with customers to constantly understand their feelings and attitudes and confirm the correlation of those emotions with changes in purchase patterns,” Andrade explained. “Agentic AI can surface sentiment evaluation insights to permit marketers to place themselves in the shoppers’ shoes more easily, and integrate feedback into marketing strategies, campaigns and messaging.”
Keeping humans within the loop
“Virtual assistants and sentiment evaluation will change the function of contact center employees, not replace them,” said Titus Jumper, CEO and founding father of digital marketing company Sales-Hub. “As virtual assistants handle nearly all of routine inquiries, human agents will shift toward ‘humans within the loop’ roles, overseeing and supporting AI in complex or emotionally charged interactions. Rather than managing basic inquiries, these agents will step in when human empathy, nuanced judgment, or specialized knowledge is required, empowering a seamless escalation process.”
With AI agents joining marketing and repair teams, businesses may have to implement retraining programs in the brand new 12 months, in response to Jumper.
Dig deeper: AI adoption gap found between executives and entry-level marketers
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