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By Amir Daftari
News Reporter
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Artificial intelligence is becoming embedded in business, with adoption accelerating across industries. Nearly nine in 10 survey respondents said their organizations used AI in at least one business function last year, up from 78 percent a year earlier, according to management consultancy McKinsey & Company.
The technology itself is evolving too.
Alongside tools that assist with writing, research and analysis, autonomous AI agents are emerging that can plan and execute tasks with limited human intervention. Their growing use is creating new opportunities for businesses, but also raising questions about whether greater automation can deliver measurable commercial value.
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Marketing is among the areas where companies are putting these agents to work, using them to plan campaigns, analyze performance, create content and optimize workflows.
The potential gains in speed and efficiency are significant.
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More Content, Lower Costs
A growing opportunity lies in the vast amount of marketing content businesses already produce but rarely reuse.
Webinars, conference presentations, podcasts and interviews can contain hours of material that, with the help of AI agents, can be repurposed into shorter content for different platforms.
A recent survey by video technology company Kaltura found that 41 percent of 600 senior marketing professionals said their organizations repurposed long-form digital content into shorter clips. The findings suggest that businesses are already looking to extract more value from existing material, giving AI tools scope to accelerate the process.
New York-based startup Leo AI is developing technology to help businesses get greater mileage from their content.
Lera Leonteva, founder and chief executive of Leo AI, told Newsweek: "Every company has hours of footage sitting in a drive. Our video agents turn it into content people want to watch, using the same data a growth team would—every day."
The company recently began working with Podtopia Network, which operates 67 podcasts and more than 18,000 episodes. Speaking to Newsweek, Joe Massa, CEO of Podtopia, said: "The next step for us is scaling on-brand clips across all of our channels, and getting that consistently right is a big build."
Leo AI estimates that a four-hour library of spoken video content can generate dozens of short-form videos, while editing costs can fall from tens of dollars per clip to less than a dollar in some cases.
The company also tracks the performance of the clips it publishes, allowing businesses to see which posts generate traffic, leads and sales opportunities. This gives marketing teams a way to assess whether repurposed content is delivering measurable returns, rather than simply increasing output.
For organizations looking to produce more material across multiple platforms, the potential efficiency gains are clear.
Proving Value
Yet tracking clicks, leads and sales opportunities is not the same as proving that AI has improved overall business performance. That distinction is becoming increasingly important as companies assess the returns on their investment in the technology.
"There is growing experimental evidence that AI can improve marketing outcomes, including sales and conversion rates. However, much of this evidence concerns generative AI assistance rather than autonomous AI agents," Oguz A. Acar, professor of marketing and innovation at King's College London, told Newsweek.
Acar points to a gap between increased productivity and improved campaign performance.
"In one experiment, teams working with AI agents produced 50 percent more advertisements per worker, without a significant overall improvement in campaign performance," he said.
For Acar, the challenge is determining whether greater efficiency is leading to stronger customer engagement and better financial results.
"What we know much less about is whether giving AI greater autonomy creates additional commercial value, particularly once we account for oversight costs and longer-term customer relationships."
That uncertainty is something businesses are encountering in practice.
At global drinks manufacturer The Berry Company, CEO Khaled Yafi said AI had helped streamline some marketing activities and improve the use of data, but proving a direct financial impact remained difficult.
"Ultimately, marketing needs to deliver commercial results. AI can help us understand audiences and identify opportunities, but attributing increased sales directly to AI is proving difficult for us so far," he told Newsweek.
"We need to look at the bigger picture, rather than assume more efficient marketing automatically means more revenue."
Pressure on Agencies
Beyond individual businesses, these changes could also reshape the marketing industry as a whole, particularly for agencies whose revenues depend on work that AI agents are increasingly capable of performing.
For decades, agencies have largely charged clients for labor, production and campaign management. If AI agents take over more of that work, those business models could come under pressure.
At the same time, agencies increasingly face competition from the platforms where advertising budgets are spent.
"Google, Meta and Amazon are developing systems that automate aspects of campaign planning, execution and optimization," Acar said.
For agencies, the growing capabilities of these platforms could add pressure to demonstrate what they offer beyond campaign delivery. Strategy, creative direction and an understanding of clients' wider business goals may become increasingly important as more routine tasks are automated.
And the challenge extends beyond agencies. Businesses will also need to judge these tools by their contribution to broader commercial objectives, rather than the volume of work they produce.
"Ultimately, an AI agent can excel at the metrics we give it while undermining the outcomes we actually care about," said Acar.
For businesses and agencies alike, the distinction between doing more and achieving more remains central to the debate over AI in marketing.
Contact Newsweek editor on this story: Mike Hirst.
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