• by Joe Mandese , Yesterday

I began this year by publishing a column entitled “Happy New Epoch,” because we started entering one midway through 2025 and it has only been accelerating since.

It’s the agentic epoch -- not just for the advertising and media industry -- but every facet of humankind. It’s just that the advertising and media industry has been the earliest to begin adopting it, because the biggest initial impact of LLMs has been on the tools of the ad trade: search, navigation, discovery, content, data, analytics, all of which have already been transformed by the interjection of agents.

And while it will take time for the industry to fully understand and adapt to the role of agents in what has broadly been described as agent-to-agent (A2A) marketing, the reality is that it already is impacting almost every facet of the relationships between consumers and brands.

But even I was surprised when former Interpublic-now-Omnicom CRM shop MRM unveiled its new AI Relationship Management (ARM) practice. But it also made immediate sense, because AI agents have already begun mediating the relationships that consumers have with brands.

“That was the starting point,” recalls MRM Global CEO Grant Theron, “because in an AI-mediated world, how can you have a solid, valuable, long-term relationship between a consumer and a brand?”

While that might sound aspirational, the MRM team quickly began developing the concept, and by the time of its September 2025 launch, had already begun engineering it by organizing and assessing the data it would use to power the practice.

After all, CRM -- or customer relationship management -- already was a nearly $100 billion category built largely on managing data that enables brands to understand who the best consumers are for a brand, what they want and how to keep them coming back for more.

As an industry, we tend to think of it as old-school list management and loyalty programs -- something that has taken on more importance and new luster due to the need for consumer opt-in “first-party” databases. But in the end, CRM already had evolved into one of, if not the most, sophisticated data-centric facets of the overall marketing industry.

But because it is so reliant on understanding the needs, wants and identities of human beings, it also faces the greatest possible disruption for agent intermediation.

“And it’s happening far faster than anyone might have thought,” Theron acknowledges, citing a conversation with one of his clients who shared that traffic to the its commerce website was down 30%, due largely to the role of LLMs redirecting how consumers relate to brands.

The launch of MRM’s ARM practice could not have been better timed, because other simultaneous developments also promise to reshape the relationship that consumers have with brands and the role agents will play in it.

By year-end 2025, electronics industry trade association IEEE developed a new technical standard — P7012 – that will enable machine-readable data transfers directly between agents representing consumers and brands.

The standard -- which consumer advocacy group Project VRM has branded “MyTerms” -- will roll out this year in the form of specific applications that enable consumers to set the terms of their exchanges with agents representing brands.

While the exchanges will largely be based on data, that will serve as proxies for the exchange of values forming the basis of the relationship between consumers and brands -- as well as how sustainable they are.

Proponents of MyTerms believe it will fix one of the biggest problems and greatest inefficiencies in the entire consumer marketing industry -- information asymmetry -- by enabling a bidirectional exchange between agents on both sides.

If that sounds overly technical and a little bit heady, it is precisely the kind of hard work and engineering that will determine long-term, sustainable relationships between consumers and brands in a future where agents will increasingly determine outcomes.

Or as MRM recommends in its new ARM tagline: “Your customers trust AI. Make AI trust your brand.”