AI-powered assistants are firmly embedded in B2B technologies and workflows, engaging prospects and customers in conversations across channels and automating back-end tasks to improve marketing and sales productivity. They’ve facilitated and learned from billions of interactions with prospects, customers, and go-to-market teams. Now they’re smarter, capable of functioning at a higher level, and gaining autonomy as adoption increases and agentic AI capabilities evolve.
While most AI “agents” on the market now are not truly agentic, today’s AI assistants are rapidly evolving into tomorrow’s agents, with increasing levels of autonomy and adaptability. Specialized AI agents will further enhance digital experiences and support the work of human teams across functions. Within three years, agentic AI will impact every area of the business for both buyer and seller, transforming human and nonhuman interactions throughout the purchasing journey and post-sale customer experience.
AI coworkers such as virtual assistants, agents, copilots, and autonomous workplace assistants continuously learn to analyze, interpret, and take action on data in context of the systems and processes used to communicate and get work done. Already, 83% of automation decision-makers at B2B and B2B2C organizations expecting to accelerate their investment in AI agents or digital coworker technologies in the next 12 months say that genAI capabilities would have a greater impact on their investment decision, according to Forrester’s Automation Survey, 2024.
B2B organizations that embrace AI agents and agentic processes to create better experiences for their buyers, customers, and partners — and their internal teams —will outperform their competitors and create long-term, sustainable growth, because they can:
- Improve marketing’s ability to remove friction for buyers and customers. Prospect- and customer-facing AI agents play a crucial role in meeting modern B2B buyers where they are in the complex purchasing journey and enabling the next step. These AI coworkers empower self-directed buying, acting as a personalized concierge that understands, guides, and supports buyers and customers across delivery channels and modalities. In some scenarios, the AI agent itself will act as the customer.
- Increase efficiency and effectiveness in sales prospecting and opportunity management. AI agents act as an extension of revenue teams, automating outreach while working in the background to coordinate and schedule meetings, provide feedback and coaching through role-play, and forecast deals. Agentic process automation will enable B2B organizations to sense and respond to more nuanced buying signals from natural language interactions to help progress opportunities and increase win rates.
- Elevate product innovation and guided experiences. With computer use capabilities, AI agents will become the new digital experience and software product end users, accessing and using interfaces just as a human would. You should already be considering the agent UX in addition to the opportunity for product-led growth companies to deliver more personalized, self-serve experiences in their products. AI agents will be instrumental in monitoring and influencing product value recognition.
With multiple AI agents in play across marketing, product, and sales, orchestration will be critical: They need to cooperate with one another to plan and take action on multistep processes, choreograph their sequences of steps within those processes, share data and generated outputs in real time, and resolve any conflicting next-action recommendations.
Learn what it takes to create lasting value with AI agents at our upcoming B2B Summit North America event in Phoenix, March 31–April 3. Join us on Wednesday, April 2, for the session and panel discussion, Agency, Adaptability, And Authenticity: What An Agentic Future Means For B2B.
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