Worried that AI agents are coming for your marketing job? Don’t be. Whether you are a CMO or an intern, think of them not as competitors but as powerful collaborators who can supercharge your impact.
An AI agent is far more than just a chatbot. With the right data and context, it can execute a series of tasks—either autonomously or with limited human oversight. In this sense, it functions much like a team member you can delegate work to. However, as with any new hire, achieving optimal results depends on choosing wisely.
AI Agents: Your Superpowered Teammates
Unlike generic chatbots, the best agents are specialized and task oriented. They are deeply integrated with quality, real-time data, making them capable of generating content strategies, uncovering market shifts, and equipping sales teams with precision-targeted intelligence. Agents can be core drivers of growth for companies ready to rethink their workflows.
Agents may perform some of the tasks you could do yourself. But they can also perform them at a speed and scale humans can’t match.
They excel at gathering and organizing data. Imagine “reading” hundreds of documents and data points across systems in minutes. It might take you days to do the same amount of digging and researching, and that’s if you could even find the time. Removing this work is a relief, not a threat.
Take, for example, the Similarweb AI Meeting Prep agent that works with our Sales Intelligence solution. Foteini Theodosiou, a Sales Manager at Checkout.com, says his team uses the Meeting Prep Agent to save 5-10 hours per week, per sales representative, by streamlining the meeting research process. As a result, the sales representatives focus on what they do best – closing deals – by offloading manual research.
Guiding Your AI Agents: Where You Need the Human Touch
So, how do you employ agents productively as a marketer? It’s a matter of guiding AI agents’ work and critiquing their output. As discussed in a recent New York Times article, the rise of AI will make the role of the designer, the auditor, and the manager all the more critical. This is because the quality of AI output varies based on many factors, including the body of knowledge that the AI engine is given.
When you assign work to an agent, you are responsible for the quality of its output. If it ‘hallucinates,’ and you use that information without checking it, you risk undermining your own credibility. It happens. Like the lawyer who was caught submitting a ChatGPT-generated legal filing that cited fictitious court cases. Yes, agents can do a lot of work quickly, but a human still needs to review their work.
The risk of using AI tools for copywriting is fairly low if you treat them as brainstorming tools for content that your writers and editors can critique and polish for publication. The risks and rewards increase as we move from chatbots to agents, and from prompt/answer interactions to assigning multi-step tasks.
The rewards will be irresistible, but we need to pursue them intelligently.
Evaluating Agents: What You Should Be Looking For
You can address some of the risks with an upfront evaluation of products that claim to be AI agents. And I say “claim” because lots of products are being rebranded as agents right now based on a sprinkling of automation.
Here is what you should check: (a) Is AI really an important component that matches work you need done, and (b) Is the quality and quantity of the agent’s data appropriate for the specific application?
Our developers have spent a lot of time developing AI agents to ensure they produce “well-informed” analyses of SEO data, content strategy, and sales prospects. We do that by directing agents to our proprietary data sources rather than feeding them random web data.
We don’t want agents to extrapolate or try to be ‘creative’ in the fact-finding phase. Those restrictions can be loosened when it’s time for the agent to write a report summarizing what they’ve found. Part of what tends to impress people about generative AI agents is that they can be surprisingly good writers, doing a better job of organizing information with subheadings and bullet points than most humans.
In short, embrace AI agents as productive teammates. But recognize that they are also not human and certainly not infallible. Don’t let their eloquent responses fool you into believing that they are smarter than you are. Take charge of them, supervise them properly, and you will reap the rewards.
The author, Omri Shtayer is the VP of Data and DaaS Products at Similarweb, specializing in leveraging structured, real-time data to empower enterprise AI decision-making.