AI agents: 2025 predictions

For many marketers, handing over customer interactions to an automated genAI-powered process requires a leap of faith. The good news is that as more AI agents come to market, the use of this technology to improve engagement and drive revenue will become clearer.

Adoption is already underway. During the 2024 holidays, traffic to retail sites from genAI-powered chatbots increased 13X over the previous year. According to Adobe, chatbot use peaked on Cyber Monday, up 1,950% YoY.

2025 will be the year of the AI agent

Marketers looking to integrate AI agents into customer experience now have several options. Salesforce introduced Agentforce in September 2024, and most recently, SAP announced shopping assistant agents for later in 2025.

Dig deeper: Salesforce Agentforce: What you need to know 

“While 2023 and 2024 [was for] realizing the initial benefits of AI in customer experience, 2025 will be the year where we really start to see the profound impact it will have,” said Jay Patel, SVP & GM, Webex Customer Experience Solutions, Cisco. “This shift will see AI becoming an integral part of customer interactions, with both consumers and businesses embracing its capabilities. 

Patel added: “In 2025, AI will be woven into the fabric of everyday customer service operations — including AI agents that have natural voice capabilities and the ability to act on customer requests. This will drive efficiency, personalization and satisfaction to unprecedented levels. This mainstream acceptance will not only elevate the customer experience but also set new standards for engagement, making AI an indispensable tool in the customer service arsenal.”

Better personalization from AI agents

Advances in agents in 2025 will help brands create personalized AI agents for customers. These AI models, which will include small language models that operate on individual devices, will power highly personalized virtual assistants, according to Patel.

“These assistants will seamlessly interact with brands and service providers, offering a level of convenience and customization previously unattainable,” Patel stated. “The shift towards personalized AI will not only empower users with more efficient and tailored communication but also anticipate their needs, making interactions more intuitive and proactive. This evolution will significantly enhance the overall customer experience, creating a more dynamic and responsive digital environment.”

AI agents reflecting core brand value

“On the flip side, brands will increasingly adopt AI agents that embody their unique values, personality and purpose,” Patel said. “These AI-driven representatives will engage with customers in ways that are deeply aligned with the brand’s ethos, ensuring interactions are authentic, meaningful and memorable. By leveraging AI to reflect their core values, brands will create more consistent and emotionally resonant customer experiences. Moreover, these AI agents will enable brands to maintain a coherent voice and presence across all touchpoints, fostering stronger customer loyalty and trust.

Dig deeper: How genAI can fill the trust gap for brands

Bigger AI investments behind agents

Businesses have committed to AI investments in 2025. Nearly all those organizations surveyed by Invoca said they will increase investments in the year ahead.

“In 2025, AI investments will shift decisively from experimentation to execution,” said Megh Gautam, Chief Product Officer at Crunchbase. “While 2022-2024 saw companies making splashy AI announcements and conducting broad and, in some cases, performative experiments, 2025 will mark the year when AI must prove its ROI. Companies will abandon generic AI applications in favor of targeted solutions that solve specific, high-value business problems.”

Gautam added: “We’ll see this manifest in two key areas. First is the rise of AI agents — agentic AI — handling routine but complex operational tasks. Salesforce’s success this year is powered by this trend. Secondly, the widespread adoption of AI tools that drive measurable improvements in core business metrics, particularly in sales optimization and customer support automation.”

AI agents will increase foot traffic and loyalty

“With the help of AI agents, brands can now have a local extension of their store manager trained and ready to assist digital customers 24/7,” said Monica Ho, CMO of AI-powered marketing technology company SOCi. “AI agents have the ability to bring back dormant online business profiles, increasing foot traffic and bolstering brand loyalty through immersive consumer experiences that resonate. By mitigating human error, AI agents function as reliable, strategic assets, representing brands with a local touch that manual efforts struggle to achieve. For brands, deploying AI agents will be critical to building impactful, scalable, and trustworthy local experiences that set them apart from competitors in 2025.”

Using AI agents to gain customer insights

AI agents engage customers in conversations. These longer queries and responses provide a new stream of data that marketers can draw on to improve experience and drive revenue.

“Leveraging agentic AI, marketers can more easily gain a holistic view of the customer journey from data housed across systems and departments,” said Pedro Andrade, VP of artificial intelligence at Talkdesk, a cloud contact center software company. “In 2025, we’ll see marketers lean on this technology to capitalize on a wealth of customer knowledge.”

The data from these conversations can be analyzed elsewhere in the stack, and resulting insights can be used for more holistic marketing strategies.

“For example, in the contact center, AI agents can connect with existing CRMs and analyze customer interactions in real-time, identify patterns, and proactively suggest solutions or personalized offers,” Andrade said. “By leveraging conversational AI, these agents can anticipate customer needs by autonomously taking decisions on processes to resolve the need.”

Andrade added: “Insights marketers can glean include the leading drivers of customer churn and which competitors are mentioned, the new features or improvements customers ask for during interactions and emerging topics. These agentic AI systems can automate the research on top of the vast amount of data to drive insights and ensure marketers that their strategy resonates with customers, develop more effective and relevant campaigns highlighting customer areas of interest and proactively address issues in their communications.”

Streamlining marketing strategy and functions

With data and insights from AI agent conversations, marketers will have a new streamlined process for improving campaigns. How does this work?

“Agentic AI can monitor phone calls or chats with customers to continuously understand their feelings and attitudes and verify the correlation of these emotions with changes in purchase patterns,” Andrade explained. “Agentic AI can surface sentiment analysis insights to allow marketers to put themselves in the customers’ shoes more easily, and integrate feedback into marketing strategies, campaigns and messaging.”

Keeping humans in the loop

“Virtual assistants and sentiment analysis will change the function of contact center workers, not replace them,” said Titus Jumper, CEO and founder of digital marketing company Sales-Hub. “As virtual assistants handle the majority of routine inquiries, human agents will shift toward ‘humans in the loop’ roles, overseeing and supporting AI in complex or emotionally charged interactions. Rather than managing basic inquiries, these agents will step in when human empathy, nuanced judgment, or specialized knowledge is required, empowering a seamless escalation process.”

With AI agents joining marketing and service teams, businesses will have to implement retraining programs in the new year, according to Jumper.

Dig deeper: AI adoption gap found between executives and entry-level marketers

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