Episode 53 - Agentic AI Part 3: Organisation

Did someone forward this to you? If so, click to subscribe

📰 TOP STORY: Organisational Shifts Required to WIN with Agentic AI

In the first part of this three-part series, we explored agentic AI and its expected growth. If you didn't catch that episode, you can catch up here. 

For those short on time here's a quick 72-word summary:  

Agentic AI isn’t AI that helps you be better at retention, as a co-pilot. Agentic AI is AI that runs retention for you. Agentic AI acts autonomously: it takes goals, then defines tasks, learns from experience, adapts in real-time, and collaborates with other AI agents across your business and outside your business.  This is a market that is projected to 10x in the next 5 years. 

If you missed part 2, we covered 10 agentic AI retention use cases. You can read more here. To re-cap, these are: 

1. Proactive Churn Prevention 

2. Highly Intelligent Chatbots 

3. Dynamic Loyalty Program Management

4. Retention-Focused Pricing Optimisation

5. Digital Twin Customer Account Manager 

6. Competitive Intelligence Shield

7. Customer Success Autopilot

8. Relationship Health Management

9. Cross-Organisational Retention Intelligence

10. Hyper-personalised contextually evolving experiences 

Activating these use cases will require a significant change in how businesses operate.  

This will come with enormous organisational challenges and business shifts. 

The most challenging of these will be human resistance.

In all areas of life, we like to feel in control, particularly in business. 

And this doesn't just mean the CEO, at all levels, we like to be in control of the work we are responsible for. 

What if the AI agent gets it wrong? Could our jobs be on the line? 

Fear of agentic AI getting ‘it’ wrong will slow adoption. 

This means the technology is likely to be far ahead of adoption. 

In the state of Martech report, which was released on May 6th, 2025, Scott Brinker and Frans Riemersma highlight how AI marketing technology change has already become exponential, while organisational change continues to be much slower. 

Brands that embrace agentic AI quickly and effectively, with the correct failsafes, in a space of freedom and trust to experiment are likely to win in their market. 

Put simply, agentic AI will allow businesses to better serve customers' needs and, therefore, ultimately brands embracing agentic AI will be more successful in their retention-led growth initiatives. 

Here are 7 key shifts we are likely to see from organisations that win. 

1. Risk Tolerance Recalibration. Winners in agentic AI will embrace controlled experimentation, develop sophisticated fail-safes and escalation protocols. They will ensure agentic AI has appropriate oversight, especially during the early days. 

2. Cross-Functional Collaboration. Winners will create ecosystems where AI agents can operate across departmental boundaries.

3. AI First Executive Mindset. The leaders at brands that win will have comfort in AI autonomy and decisioning, based on clear governance parameters, including ethical considerations.   

4. Process Redesign. Winners will reimagine workflows around human-AI collaboration rather than retrofitting AI into existing processes and develop "handoff protocols" that facilitate smooth transitions between agentic AI and human activities. 

5. Effective Feedback Mechanisms. Winners will create feedback mechanisms where humans can rapidly correct or refine agentic AI behaviours. 

6. Skills & Talent Evolution. Winners will develop "AI orchestrator" roles to guide and refine agentic AI behaviour.  

7. Agent Architecture Design. Winners will leverage a portfolio of specialised AI agents with explicit scopes (monitoring, intervention, analysis), making correcting erroneous behaviour easier. 

AI agents will fundamentally transform many people's roles, and that's the challenge: The human resistance to that change will be great. 

However, I do not believe agentic AI will result in mass unemployment. 

It will result in changes in roles and much greater sophistication in managing customer relationships.

Of course there will be much displacement, what is required from an employee today in many roles will no longer be required, since the capability will be fulfilled by AI agents. We will also see a much greater shift towards monitoring revenue or profit per employee as Justin Peyton highlights in this recent post.

However I don’t subscribe to the view that we have a dystopian future ahead of us, as the evolutionary biologist and systems thinker Bret Weinstein suggests in a recent episode of Steve Barlett’s Diary of CEO.

Let’s be honest even the most successful companies in the world are dysfunctional.

Human beings are ingenious and we always find ways to improve our society and our lives. AI agents will provide a platform for even greater technological developments which power an even brighter future.

In retention, it will enable even greater focus on strategy and creativity in managing customer relationships. It will shift resources from production to optimisation, eliminate the more mundane activities and roles, and free organisations to focus on what matters most: the strategic and creative decisions that enable competitive differentiation. 

This graphic (again from the 2025 State of Martech report) perfectly sums up the shift we will see: 

As Scott and Frans so elegantly put it, if we can shift resources away from production, we can exponentially increase the number of ideas we test.

If we do this, our chances of winning will greatly increase because winning is a function of the number of ideas generated multiplied by the number of ideas tested. 

This is why it is so important for those who want to succeed in the age of agentic AI to lean into this shift, adapt to the changes this technology will bring, and ensure you have the right skills to succeed in this new world (My new CRM Marketing Strategy 2.0 course includes a module on AI - learn more).

For leaders, if you are among the first to adopt this change wholeheartedly, you are likely to win in your market because your ability to do things much better than your competition will greatly increase.   

But that window to win is narrowing every day, and the more slowly you embrace the agentic AI change, the more likely you will be playing catch-up. 

Until next week, 

Tom  

Do you need help with Customer Retention?

When you are ready, contact me to discuss consulting, my fast-track retention accelerator, courses, and training. Or if you are interested in sponsoring this newsletter, get in touch via [email protected]