Angela Tangas, the new Global Oliver CEO and The Brandtech Group’s Chief Strategy Officer, and Jack Smyth, Brandtech and Jellyfish’s Country Lead in Australia, discuss the transformative impact of agentic AI on marketing.
We explore the definition of agentic AI, its applications in real-world marketing scenarios, and the benefits it brings to efficiency and decision-making. The conversation also delves into the importance of building consumer trust in AI, the evolving landscape of branding, and the role of creativity in the age of AI. Additionally, they discuss how organizations can attract and retain talent in this new environment and provide methodologies for implementing AI effectively in marketing strategies.
If last year was the year when Generative AI took centre stage with some high-profile brand film productions, then this year is looking to be the year of the agents. Agentic AI is not just the hot topic; it is driving brand transformations as the new operating system for brands, for creativity, for growth and for talent attraction and retention.
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Agentic AI. If I hear it one more time, it’s definitely top of place on my bullshit bingo card,
Transcription (Edited):
Darren Woolley
Hi, I’m Darren Woolley, founder and CEO of TrinityP3 Marketing Management Consultancy, and welcome to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media, and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners. If you’re enjoying the Managing Marketing podcast, please like, review, or share this episode to help spread the word from our guests each week.
If last year was the year of generative AI, which took centre stage with some high-profile brand film productions , then this year is looking to be the year of the agents. Agentic AI isn’t just a hot topic; it’s driving brand transformations as the new operating system for brands, creativity, growth, and talent attraction and retention.
So, what do brands need to do to discover their AI advantage and scale without limits? To answer that question in a language we can all understand, please welcome to the Managing Marketing podcast, Angela Tangas, the new Global Oliver CEO and Brand Tech Group’s Chief Strategy Officer. Welcome, Angela.
Angela Tangas
Hello, Darren. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Darren Woolley
Great to have you here. And Jack Smyth, Brandtech and Jellyfish’s Country Lead in Australia. Hello, Jack.
Jack Smyth
Hello, Darren. Thank you so much for letting us join.
Defining Agentic AI: Software that Uses Software
Darren Woolley
Well, it is the hot topic, isn’t it? As I said, generative AI seemed to dominate the advertising industry last year. But this year, it’s definitely agentic AI. If I hear it one more time, it’s top of the list on my bullshit bingo card, because everyone seems to be talking about it.
We need to make sure that the average person working in advertising and marketing gets a proper understanding of what we’re actually talking about. Jack, can you, in 30 words or less, define agentic AI?
Jack Smyth
Absolutely. My favourite definition is that it’s software that can use software. Think about delegating tasks to technology that can perform them on your behalf. A simple example is a web browser. You and I have spent hours clicking around trying to navigate websites. What if that browser could click around for you, allowing you to use your time more valuably?
Darren Woolley
And hopefully then summarise everything it’s looked at.
Jack Smyth
And come up with a better definition of agents. That would be the best customer experience.
Darren Woolley
Yeah. Angela, when you’re speaking to CMOs or other marketing leaders, how do you frame agentic AI?
Agentic AI as a ‘Super Coach’ for Marketers
Angela Tangas
Well, there are a few threads to this, Darren. I’ve been with the company for four months and have spoken with CMOs across different markets. They are all clearly grappling with how to best leverage AI—not just agentic AI, but AI more broadly—across their entire marketing ecosystem.
The immediate question becomes: where and how can I get the most value from this idea of “software using software”?
We’re seeing big opportunities right from the very beginning, starting with the briefing process—for example, when providing a creative brief to a company like ours. It extends all the way through to determining the next best action based on the outcome a media channel is demonstrating. The agents organise all this and provide it in real-time.
I like to think of agentic AI almost like your super coach. If you’re the CMO, a brand lead, or a data scientist, your super coach helps you translate what’s happening across your world. It interprets data in interesting ways, allowing you to make the most informed next action.
That action could involve:
- Modifying your brand campaign.
- Rethinking your product strategy.
- Taking consumer insights and feeding them directly into the sales or service teams.
The interoperability of agentic AI is particularly fascinating because it services how we can all be better at what we do every day.
Brand Case Studies: Optimising and Researching
Darren Woolley
Most of the conversations I’ve had are with media agencies, and several have trained staff to build their own AI agents. I understand why: I once spoke to a junior media agency person whose day job was watching three screens pump out numbers, which they then manually retyped into an Excel spreadsheet. There clearly had to be a better way.
But beyond agencies, what about the brands themselves? Have you seen good examples of brands embracing agentic AI to improve their work and results?
Jack Smyth
Absolutely. Two examples come to mind.
Example 1: Proactive Marketing Strategy
One recent example involved an airline based in Asia. We created an agent for them that would read their press releases and proactively suggest a marketing strategy to convert that activity into bookings for the new route.
From the client’s perspective, this fundamentally changes the way they work. Instead of writing briefs, they get into the mindset of approving recommendations from an agent. This is liberating. If someone in the business is working on a new product, the agent can start the marketing process based on the initial PR release, and the client simply jumps in when it’s ready.
Example 2: Competitor Analysis
The second example is for a client who created an agent to keep an eye on their competitors. An agent is a truly semi-autonomous worker that operates 24/7. It doesn’t get bored; it checks every possible angle and finds every aspect of the story. This allows the client to learn an enormous amount about competitor actions—something that would have taken a human hours of painstaking analysis. This analysis helps the client think strategically about how to grow market share by behaving differently.
Darren Woolley
I like that one example is about optimising opportunity—it’s not mere automation, but contains analysis. The other highlights the research function of agentic AI, which makes recommendations and learns from your actions.
Benefits and Addressing Ethical Concerns
Darren Woolley
What are the direct benefits that marketers are reporting from implementing this? There’s genuine concern in some organisations about embracing AI due to legal and ethical reasons surrounding copyright, data safety, and privacy.
Angela Tangas
We are certainly seeing efficiency gains without question. These gains occur when you have the right partner to help you identify how to best utilise agents and where to extract the most value. You must identify the most time-intensive tasks that can be leveraged by automation. This frees up capacity to focus on higher-order problem-solving efforts that drive strategic value for the business.
Regarding compliance, privacy, and ethical concerns , that’s precisely why you would choose a partner like Brandtech Group. All the infrastructure we build belongs to you, and all the value and IP accrue directly to you. This is critical because brands need as much control as possible over their ecosystem.
We always knew brand equity was important. Now, if anything, brand becomes the last mile of competitive advantage or the most important asset for an organisation. While organisations are testing and experimenting, creating a temporary time drain , the flip side is that those who embrace it effectively gain efficiency and make decisions faster and more effectively.
The Role of Brand in an AI-Driven World
Darren Woolley
Jack, consumers are using AI, too, and a lot of what they input refines the AI’s responsiveness. How does a business ensure what they put into AI doesn’t become part of a large knowledge pool shared with competitors?
Jack Smyth
That’s a fascinating question. As Angela noted, brand is the last mile or the moat you have. Every asset you publish effectively becomes a brief to someone else’s model about why they should choose your brand.
It’s less about separating ourselves from the training set—or the consideration set—and more about how you articulate your brand to make it the obvious choice. The customer’s agent is fundamentally trying to find the best deal, product, or price.
This creates an entirely new field of branding around that fuzzy logic. Today, many agents are rational; they look for the best price, fastest delivery, or highest reviews. In a world where agents can easily find that information, you have to articulate why your brand is better. That’s fascinating because the agent acts as a member of your audience, and they think and care about different things.
Building Consumer Trust
Darren Woolley
A report suggested there’s a big trust gap with many consumers regarding AI. How do businesses make consumers feel better about interacting with their AI agent?
Angela Tangas
Trust sits at the heart of any great brand. Many organisations are becoming much more open about what content is AI-powered versus what isn’t. That openness is necessary and helpful.
We are also making sure that content we generate includes the correct watermarks. This provides the brand with absolute certainty regarding where and how that content is being used in the broader environment. This is crucial for IP and preserving brand value. However, we still have a way to go in solving the consumer trust equation.
Darren Woolley
I like the watermark idea, though the first thing I found was an AI that could remove watermarks. Perhaps burying it in the metadata is better, as AI doesn’t seem to touch that.
Angela Tangas
Indeed, these are interesting observations. It’s not necessarily visible; it’s all in the meta tagging.
Darren Woolley
Jack, you made the point that this changes how we think about brands. If the goal is not just to protect IP, but to create content that influences all AI LLMs—so that consumers searching for my product find my brand first —that’s very different from our current attitude, which is obsessed with ownership and trademarks.
Jack Smyth
Absolutely. I think it’s a really exciting evolution of how you define a brand because it is somewhat more democratised. A brand is now defined for different audiences: human and AI.
When marketers recognise it’s not a zero-sum game, they gain a different perspective. We talk about tracking your share of voice, your share of market, and your share of model. Growing your share of model is key because it will become a leading indicator for your share of market as trust in AI recommendations grows.
We saw this with a CPG client using agents for a pre-flight test. The agent learned from the assets, which included beautiful food photography with chopped chives. Consistently, the model reported it wasn’t a good fit for a working parent, reasoning that no one has time to chop chives after work. There’s a pleasing humanity to the way these agents think because they fundamentally try to help you.
Darren Woolley
The AI is learning more based on feedback. This moves toward fuzzy logic, where they start to understand emotions. One great lesson from behavioural economics is that we are predictably irrational, which will always be a challenge for software.
Angela Tangas
That’s why you need the people. You can have brilliant agents running the workflow, but humans must take the insights and intelligence produced by the agents and use them to create new pathways to value. This means new ways to connect with consumers and build a brand world where customers want to live the brand.
Brand equity is still valuable. The orchestration of the workflow is all about the humans. Humans elevate the way we leverage the agentic workflow to drive new value for the critical customer connection.
Marketing’s Operational and Cultural Shift
Darren Woolley
If embracing agentic AI requires collaboration across business functions , how does it fundamentally change the marketing function’s focus on driving growth?
Angela Tangas
Exactly. The Oliver side of Brandtech helps marketers design, build, run, and optimise operating models. By partnering with customers on the inside, we get brilliant access to their marketing organisation and how it interfaces with sales, product, compliance, and PR teams.
With a more AI workflow, we advise clients on:
- The evolving shapes and types of talent they need now versus next.
- The necessary skills that result.
Marketers are increasingly looking to return to the craft of marketing. This means focusing on driving market share and creating wonderful customer experiences. They want to step back from tasks like media planning or buying and concentrate on ensuring the brand connects with the customer at every moment. That’s the exciting opportunity: evolving their marketing ecosystem to focus more on the top and bottom line.
Evolution or Revolution?
Darren Woolley
Is this an evolution or a revolution? Digital marketing evolved over 20 good years. But AI is only three years in and making massive changes. Should we be thinking revolution?
Angela Tangas
This is the trillion-pound question, as it impacts global GDP. Every existing company still has a business to run. Meanwhile, new, disruptive organisations are emerging, built 100% on AI foundations. This creates competitiveness challenges between traditional and nimble organisations.
I see this as helping organisations think in a two-speed manner. You can’t change your operations while trying to achieve growth simultaneously. You must be smarter about partnering and directing the right resources toward what’s next.
AI use cases change almost daily. The quality of GenAI TVC content produced in record time means you don’t necessarily need a traditional advertiser for fantastic TV production anymore. You could create your own TVC.
This brings us back to the operating model. It must be built with discipline. Discipline is vital because you know technology will keep evolving.
We don’t have the luxury of big transformation budgets like we did before. Many previous investments, like in CRM during COVID, led to “tech debt”. We shouldn’t repeat that mistake.
This all circles back to data. How many organisations have the data maturity needed to make the most of AI today, let alone tomorrow? That’s why the operating model needs disciplined construction.
Democratising Creativity
Darren Woolley
For 50 years, the creative department was the neat source of all creativity in advertising. Agencies still use that term. Yet, AI is becoming a fantastic creative provocateur, a workplace for exploring ideas in real-time. What is your view on AI’s ability to finally liberate or democratise creativity? (I’ve always found the idea of a ‘creative department’ a bit of an anathema, as all humans are creative.)
Jack Smyth
Starting with the premise that every human is creative and we shouldn’t ring-fence it is wonderful. Agents are incredibly empowering. It has never been easier to go from zero to one.
I use an agent for initial research to build confidence in a direction. I might then use another to generate more than mocks; I can build an entire app during a meeting to show the client the customer experience. This is a great leveler: if you have the idea, you can now start to build it.
The truly revolutionary aspect is the agent that helps you stand out. We call them zigzags. These agents are designed to provoke and even aggravate ideas. They challenge ideas by saying, “Someone else has done that,” or “This is where everyone else was ending up”. Having an infinite group holding you to account—like a creative person surrounded by agents that not only make them more effective but also ask, “Is this the best you could do?”—is an interesting dynamic that creative people respond well to. The agent is an instigator and collaborator, not just automation.
Darren Woolley
A zigzag would be anathema to the creatives who used to look through the Cannes book for inspiration. They were happy to be inspired by category norms. People often think AI replaces creativity , but it works much better as that provocateur or stimulant to push people outside their normal boundaries.
Angela Tangas
Exactly. There’s industry discussion about the “market of lemons” due to the rapid creation of content, and the view on all this “AI slop”. The important thing is brand differentiation. Creativity is always needed to enhance the brand, and the power of storytelling takes on a new meaning to connect with customers. The creative process is arguably becoming even more valuable now.
Darren Woolley
And using an AI agent to refine or test that creativity is vital.
Attracting and Retaining Talent
Darren Woolley
What role will AI agents have in attracting and retaining good talent? We hear stories that AI will make us so efficient we’ll need fewer staff. But it’s becoming more of a talent game where attracting the best people is key.
Angela Tangas
The shape and characteristics of the talent base are shifting. We’re seeing demand for more strategists, creatives, and data scientists. A new archetype is emerging: the agent architect. This person looks at all the ways to leverage agents for better, faster outcomes.
What AI is surfacing is the importance of EQ and critical thinking. Problem-solving is the core game. Curiosity is what will differentiate you in being a fantastic user of agentic AI. The ability to demonstrate new value to the company is why EQ and critical thinking become a superpower.
A Methodology for Transformation
Darren Woolley
What should marketers be thinking about now? Many feel pressure to change but lack a clear vision or process. How can they avoid investing heavily and ending up with tech debt? Do you have a methodology for this evolution?
Jack Smyth
One helpful process is to map out the existing customer journey and identify where agents will have the greatest influence. This helps prioritise where to focus:
- Does it help people understand why they need our brand?
- Does it help people have a better buying experience?
Agents will play a role at every stage, but this creates a hierarchy for focus. Agents are a multiplier for great talent and allow you to find solutions across your entire roster.
Angela Tangas
The first question is: Is the market clear on where they need to win first? Clarity is key. Marketers need clarity on winnable spaces or defensive moves to maintain competitiveness.
Once clear on where to win, you work backward: what outcomes are needed? Then, you look at the workflow.
It’s common to see brands invest time in pilots without translating them into scaling solutions. This happens when they haven’t figured out where to unlock the most workflow value.
The commercial piece is fundamental, involving two parts:
- Drive as much efficiency as possible in the marketing workload.
- Reinvest that efficiency into driving market share, customer growth, or revenue.
It cannot be either/or; it must be sequential. Everyone must maintain and ideally grow the business for the future.
Darren Woolley
As you mentioned, Angela, this transformation spans all organisational aspects, not just marketing. Few marketing departments control all customer touch points. It’s an organisational opportunity. The danger for marketers is not proactively presenting a methodology for this overall transformation, leaving them as a secondary consideration. Marketing is central to the customer experience. The twin benefits are efficiency and enhancing the customer experience to make it “sticky”.
Angela Tangas
Marketing is the growth catalyst of the organisation. Part of its responsibility is driving new revenue shapes, which comes back to the customer experience, understanding the customer intimately, and brand importance.
Scaling Beyond Pilot Purgatory
Darren Woolley
How do you scale this for growth, moving from pilots to full organisational adoption?
Jack Smyth
A key part is aligning at the start how many teams will benefit. Second, be honest about how you evaluate the pilot. Being faster with AI isn’t enough; did it lead to a new consumer insight or more effective assets? Third, training is essential. Our business, Jellyfish, finds training to be our fastest-growing product. It empowers teams to embed the pilot experience into their daily work. By following those three phases, you avoid pilot purgatory—being surrounded by cool ideas that aren’t quite proven or embeddable.
Darren Woolley
I love that: pilot purgatory. What a terrible place to be. Angela and Jack, thank you for joining me today on Managing Marketing to discuss agentic AI. It is the hot topic of 2026. You presented it in the most accessible, interesting language possible.
Before we go, one final question: are there any downsides to all this? We hear doomsayers talk about the destruction of humanity coming from AI. Do you have one of those to share?
