Why AI Agents are the Next Focus of Your Content Strategy

Agentic AI will demand marketers reshape their content strategies to cater to AI “buyers” that are capable of autonomous action.

We’ve already written extensively about the need for tech brands to build their media strategy for an AI-first audience. This is because most B2B buyers now use AI in their decision making process. If your brand isn’t being cited in search summaries, then your media strategy needs to shift – and fast.

However, what we’re seeing now is only the tip of the iceberg. Until now, buyers have used genAI tools, which are essentially little more than fancy search engines, returning information to users in nice natural language summaries rather than as links to webpages.

Now, however, we are entering the age of agentic AI, a technology that promises to be exponentially more powerful. As agentic AI comes to the fore, content marketing will need to cater to agents every bit as much as to human buyers. 

What is agentic AI?

AI agents are autonomous systems capable of carrying out tasks for users. They split user prompts into tasks and multi-step plans before executing on them by engaging with apps and tools.

For example, say I want to book a holiday to Venice. With genAI the chatbot can provide me with a shortlist of hotels that meet my criteria, dramatically cutting down the research phase of planning my trip. 

With agentic AI, on the other hand, all I need do is tell the agent my criteria and they agent can then book the whole trip for me, working with a fleet of other agents to book flights, arrange extra carry-on luggage, book a seat with extra leg room (I’m fairly tall, after all), lock in my transfer, and reserve me the right room at a suitable hotel.

This isn’t some far-off dream. AI agents are already here. According to McKinsey, 40% of large organizations report scaling AI agents, up from 27% last year. Consumer-facing agentic tools are already available, and proving popular. Meta’s new Muse AI is an agent, and by all accounts it’s a pretty impressive system, so long as you don’t mind giving it unfettered access to your digital life. And sure, the tech isn’t perfect yet (there are reports of Muse making unauthorized transactions, for example), but given just how fast AI is developing there’s no doubt it will soon be much better.

This isn’t some far-off dream. AI agents are already here.

How does agentic AI change content marketing?

If you’re a brand, the rise of AI agents is a significant challenge to your marketing efforts. The question is this: how do I ensure my brand content influences AI agents when they make decisions and act on behalf of their users? This goes well beyond Answer Engine Optimization (structuring content to make it more likely to appear in AI search summaries). The era of agentic AI means using content to try and influence agents to buy your products on behalf of users.

Over the next few years we can expect increasing numbers of brands The era of agentic AI means using content to try and influence agents to buy your products on behalf of users.to come up with machine-focused content strategies. This will require a very different approach.

The era of agentic AI means using content to try and influence agents to buy your products on behalf of users.

What does content for AI agents need?

Any marketer worth their salt today will explain that good content needs to resonate on an emotional level. If you can make people care, you’re well on the way to making a sale. AI agents, of course, don’t feel emotion. Instead, content will need to appeal to them on a logical basis, providing them the data they need to be able to trust your brand’s messages and easily compare your proposition to market alternatives. This content needs to include clear, data-driven proofpoints.

Marketers will also need to make their content easily consumable by machines. That means using machine-structured data to describe product, pricing, inventory and other such data, as well as making this easy for agents to access through APIs and web scrapers.

We are heading towards a world where machines will be trusted to compare competing products before executing on purchase decisions for businesses. The degree to which AI agents are trusted to this without having a human in the loop will differ from company to company and use case to use case (you might, for instance, be happy to leave an AI to book office supplies with little or no intervention, but much less so to leave agents in charge of purchasing your cybersecurity software work without strict oversight and control). But the direction of travel is clear: AIs are fast becoming your number one content consumer. You need to start now thinking about what that means for your content marketing strategy.