Automation will be everywhere, good leadership won’t

At its recent Google I/O conference, the company framed the dawn of the ‘agentic era’ – where AI moves beyond answering questions to taking on longer-running, more autonomous tasks. At Google Marketing Live (GML), we got a clearer indication of what this shift looks like in practice for marketers: a very different way of running campaigns, producing creative, handling measurement, and ultimately connecting everything together. 

AI systems are starting to plan, build, and iterate work. Agents are beginning to run continuously in the background. And, platforms are increasingly pulling execution, data and decision-making into one place. 

At the same time, the way people interact with the internet is changing. Search is becoming more conversational. Journeys are getting shorter. And, instead of moving through multiple websites, people are increasingly getting answers, recommendations and next steps directly inside the search experience itself. Search is being redesigned as an AI-first experience.  

In reality, this means fewer clicks, fewer touchpoints, and less opportunity to influence decisions in the way marketers are used to. While the technology will get most of the attention, the real shift is organisational. 

Why This Is a Leadership Challenge 

When the machine handles more of the doing, the human role shifts. It becomes much more about judgement: setting direction, defining guardrails and being clear about what ‘good’ truly looks like. 

Increasingly, the challenge for brands isn’t just around being found; it’s being selected by the system in the first place. Are brands set up for this new age? 

Five things brand leaders should do now to prepare for the agentic era 

1. Be clear on where human judgement still matters most 

As execution increasingly moves into platforms and systems, the role of the marketing leader shifts. The priority is knowing where human judgement adds the most value – in brand direction, commercial trade-offs, creative quality and risk. That also means building a team around judgement, not just channel execution. As AI takes more of the doing out of day-to-day marketing, internal capability needs to evolve with it. Brand leaders should be thinking about the mix of skills they need in-house – not just channel specialists, but people who can interpret signals, challenge outputs, ask better questions, and make better decisions. 

2. Get your data foundations in order 

If AI systems are increasingly making recommendations, optimisations and decisions on your behalf, the quality of the data feeding them becomes critical. That means clean CRM data, strong data hygiene, joined-up first-party data and confidence in what’s being passed into the machine. Put simply: if the inputs are weak, the outputs will be too. For a lot of brands, this is where the real work should start. 

3. Redesign a few core workflows before the pressure really lands

Most businesses already know where things feel clunky – reporting, campaign optimisation, approvals, creative production. Rather than asking where AI fits, leaders should be asking how those workflows need to change if more of the execution is going to be handled by systems. Automation requires teams that can design, build, run and scale agentic systems. The brands that move earliest here will be in a much stronger position later. 

4. Reassess the role of agency partners

If execution becomes easier or more automated, the value of the agency relationship will evolve. The capability to operationalise agentic systems and workflows becomes a focus. In addition, the value an agency brings will move further towards strategic thinking, interpretation, specialist expertise, advisory support and helping brands navigate change. In this environment, the strongest partnerships will be the ones that bring judgement, perspective and real consultancy value – not just access to tools. 

5. Tighten decision-making and governance

If more activity is happening continuously and inside platforms, brands need to be much clearer on what can run automatically, what needs sign-off, and where accountability sits. Without that, the risk isn’t just poor performance, it’s brand drift, inconsistent quality and decisions being made by default rather than design. Strong leadership here is about clarity, not control for its own sake. 

The Bottom Line 

AI is becoming the operating layer of modern marketing. The organisations that win won’t be the ones using the most tools; they’ll be the ones with strong leadership around the right decisions, the ones rethinking how work happens and building the right mix of internal and external capabilities and expertise to support the shift. 

Automation will be everywhere. Good leadership won’t.