Reconciling with the rise of Agentic AI: How brands can stay on top with the bots
By Billy Loizou (pictured), APAC Area Vice President – Amperity
Imagine a world where your next purchase isn’t selected solely by you, but by an Artificial Intelligence (AI) agent acting as your personal shopper. Need an autumn outfit? Your AI agent instantly scours online stores, considering your size, style preferences, budget, event theme, and even the weather forecast to deliver perfectly tailored recommendations.
This isn’t science fiction, but a reality that’s right on the horizon. Agentic AI is poised to reshape how brands compete for consumer attention globally, with particular relevance in the Asia-Pacific region given China’s considerable advancements in AI technologies.
Success in the era of AI agents will hinge on a brand’s ability to deeply understand customer preferences and anticipate future needs. Brands that excel will consistently surface the most relevant recommendations, predicting and meeting their customers’ evolving desires and behaviors.
To succeed in this future, brands must fundamentally transform how they collect, unify, and leverage customer data.
Stand Out and Win with Personalisation
As AI gatekeepers become more prevalent, brands will have fewer opportunities to directly engage customers. These AI intermediaries—like the personal shoppers described earlier—will filter brand communications before they reach consumers. To thrive in this environment, brands must work harder than ever to nurture customer loyalty and foster direct brand interactions.
The days of segmented email campaigns are soon to be over. Brands will need to collect detailed insights from every customer interaction. Analysing unstructured data, such as conversations from virtual assistants and customer service interactions, will become especially valuable as conversational interfaces become commonplace.
Future success, therefore, requires brands to effectively capture, consolidate, and utilise customer data to deliver meaningful, personalised engagements. The brands that fail to evolve beyond basic segmentation will find themselves increasingly filtered out by AI gatekeepers.
Deploy Robust Customer Data Systems Now
To prepare for a future where AI agents traverse the world wide web, APAC brands must invest in their data infrastructure now. Companies that excel at managing customer information will create a positive data cycle: the more effectively they use data to personalise interactions, the more engagement they’ll generate, leading to richer datasets and increasingly tailored experiences. Such precision will also help brands craft offers capable of navigating past AI gatekeepers.
Creating accurate, unified customer profiles is fundamental. Businesses typically have fragmented customer records scattered across various systems, risking inconsistent or even conflicting experiences. With opportunities to influence customers becoming increasingly fleeting, inaccurate profiles can lead to negative customer experiences and lost opportunities.
Brands must therefore maintain real-time, up-to-date customer profiles. If a customer makes a purchase through one channel, the brand should immediately adapt messaging across all channels.
Rather than repeatedly promoting the same products, they should proactively predict and promote the customer’s next desired purchase. This level of responsiveness and prediction requires not just data collection, but intelligent data unification and activation.
Winning in an AI-Mediated Future
The principles that win customer loyalty today will become even more critical when AI agents filter brand communications. Brands unable to build precise customer profiles will see their current engagement challenges magnify in the age of agentic AI. Effective engagement will depend on delivering the right content through the right channels quickly and accurately, a difficult task at scale without solid data foundations.
Conversely, brands investing in robust customer data infrastructure will position themselves for success by consistently delivering experiences that resonate deeply with customers.
What works for APAC consumers will work for their AI representatives. Relevance and timeliness remain paramount, regardless of whether you’re appealing directly to customers or to their AI intermediaries. Brands that understand local customer preferences and deliver personalised, timely experiences will find ways past these digital barriers.
The time to build these capabilities is now, before AI agents become the primary gateway to your customers. Organisations that hesitate risk losing direct access to their customer base as AI increasingly mediates consumer decisions.
