AI Trends for 2025: The Rise of Agents and Adaptive Experiences

2025 is set to be the year that organizations evolve how they use AI, moving beyond introductory use cases to advanced initiatives that drive innovation in CX. Winning brands will no longer just use AI as an analytics tool or CX co-pilot. Adaptive experiences will see more adoption and AI agents will take center stage in 2025 as they take on more complex tasks, personalize our experiences, and become increasingly integrated into many aspects of our daily lives.

To reach this level of maturity, brands will need to embrace pivotal AI advancements, requiring a mix of native features and potentially custom or purpose-built solutions that redefine how they operate and engage with their customers.

For leading brands, here are our three predictions for where AI will create the biggest shifts for CX in 2025:

1. AI will accelerate the shift from traditional marketing to adaptive experiences.

This year, brands will move beyond traditional marketing strategies toward creating adaptive experiences. An adaptive experience is a personalized interaction tailored to an individual’s preferences, behaviors, and needs. It uses real-time data and machine learning to adjust content, recommendations, and responses dynamically, ensuring a more relevant and engaging user experience. This approach enhances satisfaction and efficiency by continuously learning and adapting to the user’s unique context.

We have been talking about personalization for many years. Customer data platforms (CDPs) brought the promise of personalization, which revolved around delivering highly tailored customer experiences using centralized and comprehensive customer data. However, as we stated in our ebook, CDPs bring with them “lots of promise – and plenty of challenges” that have limited their success in delivering on the personalization. Thanks to suboptimal implementations and gaps in data and identity, the path toward 1:1 marketing has been difficult and slow.

Caption: The historical approach to personalization maturity

So, what can be done differently in 2025?

GenAI and agents can boost marketing maturity towards adaptive experiences as the New North Star. Brands can move beyond traditional marketing strategies toward delivering adaptive experiences by leveraging AI to understand and anticipate customer needs, preferences, and behavior. By utilizing real-time data and machine learning, brands can dynamically adjust content, recommendations, and interactions to provide a more personalized and engaging experience. Caption: The new path to personalization maturity, accelerated by AI

2. A shift from copilots and AI assistants to smart agents will revolutionize customer interactions.

In 2024, as the use of Copilots and Assistants was gaining momentum, we were introduced to a new world of agents. Copilots and AI assistants were a good starting point for assisting humans with suggestions and insights. They provided an easy way to interact with natural language interfaces and data democratization. However, these assistants were designed for assisting and were reactive with little or no autonomy. This gap is addressed with the third wave of AI, referred to as the era of AI agents.

Also Read: AiThority Interview with Jeff Geiser, VP of Customer Experience at Zenlayer

What’s an AI agent?

An AI agent is an advanced software system engineered to autonomously execute tasks by utilizing artificial intelligence to analyze data, make informed decisions, and carry out actions.

In 2025, we will see a surge of AI smart agents that will perform specific tasks. This will pave the way for a new generation of software – “Agentic Solutions,” where multiple AI agents will be interconnected to accomplish complex tasks. There will be sub-agents that use smaller models (sLM) vs. LLMs with multi-modal capabilities to seamlessly blend text, voice, video, and other data modalities.

In marketing, smart agents are poised to revolutionize customer service, in-store representation, and advisory roles. These AI-driven agents will enhance customer experiences with service departments by providing personalized, efficient, and consistent interactions. Smart agents can handle routine inquiries, allowing human representatives to focus on more complex issues. In retail, in-store smart agents will assist customers with product information and recommendations, creating a seamless shopping experience. Advisors powered by AI will offer tailored advice based on real-time data, ensuring that customers receive the most relevant and timely information.

To drive adaptive experiences, smart agents will be able to anticipate customer needs and preferences. Agents will be able to understand customer behaviors and signals and adapt customer experiences.

By utilizing real-time data and machine learning, brands can dynamically adjust content, recommendations, and interactions to provide a more personalized and engaging experience. This approach will not only enhance customer satisfaction but also build stronger, long-term relationships. Adaptive experience will ensure that every touchpoint is relevant and meaningful, driving higher engagement and loyalty.

2. Combining CDP and content at scale will drive adaptive experiences.

The key to unlocking the full potential of adaptive experiences lies in integrating Customer Data Platforms (CDP) with content creation at scale. Here’s the role each piece plays:

• CDP: Consolidates customer data from various sources, providing a unified view of each customer.
• Content at Scale: Enables the creation of a vast library of personalized content variations.
• AI: Analyzes CDP data to determine the most relevant content for each individual and delivers it across multiple channels, ensuring a seamless and personalized experience.

By integrating the CDP with advanced AI capabilities, brands will be able to harness the power of data to deliver personalized content across multiple channels. This integration will allow for a deeper understanding of customer journeys and the ability to create highly targeted and relevant content.

When you layer in content creation at scale, you get an approach that enables brands to efficiently manage and scale their content efforts while maintaining a high level of personalization. This not only improves customer engagement but also drives significant business outcomes.

How Brands Can Start Small, Then Expand

Here are two examples that highlight how AI can be implemented incrementally, starting with basic automation and progressing toward sophisticated personalization that caters to individual customer needs and preferences.

1. Intelligent AI virtual assistants that automate tasks

Brands can build and deploy AI assistants to improve information access. These could be used on a website channel as a start for a siloed use case and then expanded to other channels like Apps, Phone, etc. The first use cases could be based on limited data for specific actions. The later expansion could utilize the agentic approach with additional structured and unstructured data sources to handle autonomous tasks and automation.

2. Utilizing RT data and sentiments to drive the next best experience (NBX)

Brands can build and deploy a new kind of AI assistant for their customer service reps that provides them a guided welcome script based on known information for new customers or from historical data and conversations from past interactions. The later expansion could utilize the agentic approach to adapt the promotion offers, creative, and emails, as well as drive dynamic landing pages.

Conclusion

AI is driving a paradigm shift in personalization and customer experience. By embracing agents and adaptive experiences powered by CDP and content at scale, organizations can build deeper, more meaningful relationships with their customers, fostering loyalty and driving growth in the age of intelligent automation in 2025 and beyond.

Also Read: AI’s Modern-day Gold Rush: Seizing Opportunities in an Era of Rapid Innovation