Agentic AI: Supercharging Innovation

By Steve Phillips, Forbes Councils Member. Steve Phillips, Cofounder and CEO, overseeing Zappi's global business, product and growth strategies. Agentic AI is becoming for enterprises what ChatGPT was to consumer-ready AI. AI agents from companies like Microsoft and Google are a tantalizing use case for enterprise adoption. According to a recent survey, 99% of enterprise developers are exploring or developing AI agents. Change is coming for businesses, and now is the time to get on board.

Agentic AI warrants attention because its architecture addresses the limitations of general-purpose tools. If you were building a factory to produce widgets, you’d deploy purpose-built machines, each designed to complete a specific task with precision, efficiency and reliability. People would still oversee the process, but the machinery would be tuned to the job. That's the logic behind agentic AI.

In complex businesses like product development, advertising or market research, generalized AI often falls short. Specialized agents are needed. You want the AI equivalent of a well-oiled production line: a group of intelligent tools, each carrying out a distinct role, contributing to a larger, integrated output. That’s the promise of agentic AI.

Agentic AI in Marketing and Product Innovation

Agentic AI is proving transformative in marketing, especially product innovation. It’s a common refrain in market research that “we don’t know what we know.” Valuable knowledge is scattered across reports, vendor files, emails and databases. Imagine if you could talk to that data and ask it questions like you would a colleague.

AI agents can play a critical role here. When connected to a structured and coherent data set, a marketing agent can do more than respond—it can analyze, synthesize and generate insights. Think of it as a Google-like interface connected directly to your company's proprietary knowledge base, but built with the power to create, not just search.

Complementing Human Expertise

Each person on a creative product team brings domain expertise and an instinctive understanding of consumers. However, human intuition alone can't sift through thousands of data points. AI agents, powered by large datasets and trained on real consumer behavior, can complement human knowledge and expertise with the ability to quickly crunch large datasets, spot patterns and turn insights into viable concepts.

What if you didn’t have to start from scratch the next time your team brainstorms a new product or campaign? What if instead of whiteboards and sticky notes, you came to the meeting armed with fully visualized, brand-relevant ideas—already aligned to consumer trends? Agentic AI doesn't replace creativity—it accelerates it, supercharging human ingenuity with data-backed precision.

The Importance of a Solid Data Foundation

To build trustworthy, effective AI agents, businesses must first address data. Most companies’ data ecosystems are fragmented. Marketing performance data lives in one system. Consumer feedback in another. Retail trends in a third. Without a harmonized, connected view, even the best AI agents are limited by what they can access.

To unlock the real value of AI agents, businesses need to move toward a single source of truth: a structured, clean and continuously updated view of their consumer universe. That doesn’t mean centralizing everything into a monolithic system—it means ensuring systems are connected and insights are actionable.

This shift from siloed data to connected insights is what enables AI agents to become more than clever—they become useful. They learn what actually works for your brand, your audience and your goals. There’s real anxiety about AI replacing jobs, but the future is collaborative. Agentic AI won’t replace your team—it will work alongside them. Innovation and creativity can now move at the speed of consumers, but only if we build the systems, infrastructure and trust to support it. Agentic AI isn’t science fiction—it’s the new purpose-built machinery powering the creative economy.