5 ways to help your B2B organization succeed with AI agents

More AI agents are coming, and your team needs to be planning for it right now. A new report from Forrester offers guidance for marketing leaders.

Table of Contents

    Spy on Any Website

    Get traffic data and keyword intel on competitors instantly.

    There’s more evidence that AI-powered tools are transforming go-to-market (GTM) strategies by augmenting human capabilities and addressing shifts in buyer behavior.

    As the Forrester B2B Summit kicked off this week in Phoenix, the analyst firm released a report called “AI Agents: What It Means For B2B Marketing, Sales, And Product.” The report explores the rapidly evolving role of artificial intelligence agents within B2B operations. 

    In addition to discussing the near-term benefits of using AI agents to improve marketing, sales and product innovation, the report offers guidance on successful AI agent implementations while cautioning against potential pitfalls like over-reliance on hype and neglecting the human element. 

    Preparing your organization for AI agent success

    The report touches on five critical things B2B marketing leaders need to do to prepare their organizations for success with AI agents.

    Invest in understanding and strategically planning for AI agent integration

    The report emphasizes that B2B marketing is undergoing a significant transformation due to AI agents. As such, marketing leaders need to clearly understand what differentiates these agents, their capabilities (such as reflection, memory, planning, tool use, multiagent collaboration, and autonomy) and their potential advantages for your GTM functions. 

    What to do now: It is crucial to stay competitive by proactively identifying how AI agents can augment your current marketing efforts and address changing buyer behaviors.

    Focus on leveraging AI agents to enhance the buyer experience

    AI agents can improve the customer experience and enable more self-directed purchasing journeys. The Forrester report highlights the potential of AI agents to act as personalized concierges that understand, guide and support buyers across various touchpoints. 

    What to do now: Identify specific points in the buyer journey where AI agents can remove friction, provide personalized information and facilitate the next step. Consider how AI agents can empower self-directed buying and even act as the customer in specific scenarios to gather and analyze data.

    Dig deeper: Salesforce Agentforce: What you need to know

    Prioritize the implementation of AI agents to automate tasks

    AI agents can generate deeper insights and improve marketing productivity and pipeline generation. The Forrester report notes that AI agents can automate BDR/SDR outreach, improve productivity, engage in context-aware interactions and automate digital processes.

    What to do now: Explore use cases where AI agents can streamline repetitive tasks, allowing your team to focus on more strategic initiatives. Leverage AI agents to mine vast amounts of data for relevant insights, enabling more informed decision-making and the delivery of role-relevant guidance. AI agents can also assist in generating meaningful pipeline through various marketing activities.

    Establish clear guidelines, governance, and rigorous testing protocols

    Forrester’s report strongly advises against haphazard adoption and stresses the need for guidelines and governance. To prevent undesirable behaviors, you must implement rigorous testing and validation processes before exposing AI agents to customers.

    What to do now: Your human teams will need to upskill to effectively build, customize and interact with AI agents, focusing on articulating SMART goals rather than step-by-step instructions. Plan for multiagent systems and agent-to-agent interactions to maximize their potential.

    Prepare your data infrastructure and marketing strategy to account

    AI agents are the new stakeholders in the buying process and sources of new data. As B2B buyers increasingly use genAI tools, your AI agents can interact with vendor content on their behalf. Additionally, AI agents can become end users of products, generating new “buyer” data. 

    What to do now: Expand your understanding of the signal universe to include these AI agent interactions and ensure your data strategy can capture, analyze, and leverage this new information to refine your marketing efforts.

    Dig deeper: AI agents will infiltrate your martech stack

    Fuel up with free marketing insights.

    Email:


    MarTech is owned by Semrush. We remain committed to providing high-quality coverage of marketing topics. Unless otherwise noted, this page’s content was written by either an employee or a paid contractor of Semrush Inc.

    Mike Pastore
    Head of Content & Media

    Mike Pastore is the Head of Content & Media at Third Door Media, the publisher of the Martech and Search Engine Land websites and the producer of the SMX and MarTech Conferences. In nearly three decades in B2B marketing, Mike has worked as an editor, writer, and marketer. He first wrote about marketing in 1998 for internet.com (later Jupitermedia). He then worked with marketers at some of the best-known brands in B2B tech, creating content for marketing campaigns at both Jupitermedia and QuinStreet. Prior to joining Third Door Media as the Editorial Director of the MarTech website, he led demand generation at B2B media company TechnologyAdvice.

    View Author Profile