By Leandro Perez, Senior Vice President and CMO ANZ, Salesforce

Imagine a world where your marketing team is expanded by dozens of specialists — available 24/7 to generate audience insights, create hyper-targeted data segments, craft copy, and even plan campaigns.

Now imagine these specialists aren’t people but artificial intelligence (AI) agents working tirelessly to amplify your capabilities and unlock new opportunities.

Autonomous AI agents are redefining the scale and ambition of what marketers can achieve. With agents, teams can target entirely new markets, design products for unmet needs, and uncover insights that fuel groundbreaking strategies.

The opportunity for marketers goes far beyond reclaiming time. It’s fundamentally changing how we create value. With agents shouldering much of the operational load, marketers can focus on bold strategies, transformative customer experiences, and commercial outcomes that drive real growth.

I talked about this at SXSW: while AI can handle the tasks, it’s up to marketers to direct its intelligence, bring new perspectives, and make decisions that push boundaries.

For CMOs, this demands a new kind of leadership — steering the ship by not only recognising AI opportunities but integrating them into a strategic vision that empowers teams to lead with impact and innovation.
 

Agents: More than just automation

Let’s clarify what we mean by “agents” because I don’t want this to be a sweeping statement about AI simply removing the mundane. Agents aren’t just changing what we do — they’re fundamentally transforming how we work and empowering us to create new pathways for productivity and growth.

Take something as routine as SEO reports. In the past, marketers would research keywords manually, gather data, and produce reports for stakeholders. Today, agents can automate this process in seconds, pulling data, identifying trends, and delivering actionable reports.

But agents don’t have to stop there — they can act on the reports they generate. An agent could continuously refine SEO performance on specific pages, updating content dynamically in response to shifting search trends. This creates a cycle of action and improvement that scales.

Now, let’s reimagine campaign launches in the agentic era. Instead of simply generating drafts for emails and social posts, agents could take on end-to-end execution. After crafting the assets, they could send emails, respond to incoming queries, adjust messaging based on customer interactions, and even negotiate ad placements with other agents.

This type of autonomous, adaptive capability transforms a one-off task into an ongoing, iterative process that optimises itself in real time.

With their analytical power, agents can support even bigger strategic shifts. They can identify product gaps based on market trends, customer feedback, and competitor analysis, proposing new offerings to meet unmet needs.

Or, they could find untapped audience segments with high growth potential and develop plans to engage them with messaging tailored to their preferences and behaviours.

These aren’t distant, futuristic ideas. We’re already seeing this shift in our customers, like Fisher & Paykel, which has saved over 3,300 hours monthly by rethinking its processes through AI and automation.
 

Redefining marketing roles: What’s changing?

When agents handle routine marketing tasks, what’s left for humans? In short: strategy, creativity, and decision-making. It’s time to move beyond the grind. These marketers will be orchestrators.

Marketers will be managing agents like a team member — training them, guiding their efforts, and ensuring their output aligns with the brand’s vision. Marketers will need to quickly assess what’s working — and what isn’t — using data and insights from agents to guide strategic actions.
 

Essential skills for marketers today

The skills that made you successful in 2010 won’t cut it now or in the future. The World Economic Forum has already identified some key skills of the future — analytical thinking, active learning, and resilience — but marketers will need a more nuanced mix of abilities to thrive. Marketers don’t need more skills. They just need to cultivate the right ones for the future.

• Critical thinking and commercial mindset:
  Successful marketers will ask the big questions: How do we activate agents to drive growth? Where can AI help us unlock new markets? What changes to product or messaging will resonate in a new region? This shift requires moving from insight to action, always with an eye on growth.
• Creative intelligence:
  AI provides the data, but marketers bring the human touch. By blending AI’s quantitative insights with qualitative feedback from sales teams and customers, marketers can understand what resonates emotionally with their audience, creating impactful, tailored campaigns.
• Emotional awareness and leadership:
  In a world of humans working alongside AI agents, leadership extends beyond managing people to also guiding AI. Marketers will need empathy, self-awareness, and strong communication to guide both human and AI teams through this transition.

Continuous learning is essential

Recent Salesforce research underscores that continuous learning isn’t just important — it’s essential. 42% of ANZ respondents believe upskilling will be critical as AI becomes more embedded in the workplace.

As CMOs, our role is to create an environment where our teams feel empowered to ask questions, challenge the status quo, and learn from failure. This culture is a company’s real competitive advantage.

More than just technical upskilling, we also need resilient teams unafraid of change. We create this kind of growth mindset at Salesforce through experiences that push our teams out of their comfort zones and day-to-day roles, from leadership simulations to volunteering. When they return to work, they find their challenges easier to navigate and can tackle projects with a new sense of clarity.
 

The next leap: Adapt to lead

Marketers must shift their approach to keep up in the next era. Success won’t come from mastering AI alone but from working strategically and evolving with it. To succeed, marketers must step up as orchestrators, working with agents to shape strategies that push boundaries.

As we enter this new agentic era, the question isn’t whether you’ll adopt agents, but whether you’ll embrace their full potential to transform how your team — and your business — works.