• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, 7 hours ago

In particular, agentic AI suffers from “organizational assumptions that do not always align with customer comfort or readiness."

The gap between customer expectations and reality poses a serious challenge for brands. Of the consumers surveyed, half say emails, ads and social media have two to five seconds to grab their attention. 

Accordingly, companies seek to build these capabilities: 

• Highly personalized and anticipatory of customer needs in real-time (80%)
• Seamless across digital and physical touchpoints (72%)

Here are the improvements brands have seen with generative AI:

• Volume and speed of content ideation and production—76%
• Ability for non-creative teams to generate content—70%
• Employee productivity and efficiency—69%
• Experimentation and innovation (e.g. ability to test and scale new ideas and expectations)—67%
• Revenue growth from marketing initiatives—65%
• AI-powered while still feeling human and brand-aligned—60%

Generative AI is also at the front when it comes to best practices in compliance: 

• Guidelines to ensure responsible, ethical use of AI—Generative AI (65%), Agentic AI (37%)
• Tools for connecting different systems or software—Generative AI (72%), Agentic AI  (37%)
• Shared platforms for customer data—Generative AI (71%), Agentic AI (39%)

But agentic AI is advancing. Marketers expect that it will handle these percentages of their customer interactions within 18 months:

• Customer support—78%
• Post-purchase support—70%
• Customer sales and transactions—69%
• Account management (e.g. billing and subscriptions)—63%
• Conversational customer engagement—62%

Unfortunately, executives and practitioners differ in their enthusiasm for key AI goals.

For instance, 61% of top executives want AI to deliver more personalized customer experiences. Only 45% of practitioners agree.

Similarly, 56% of executives expect AI to improve customer satisfaction, loyalty, engagement (e.g. Net Promoter Score), first-contact resolution, acquisition and retention, visits).

But the actual practitioners are more interested in practical applications: 46% want AI to automate repetitive tasks and workflows, versus 41% of exec. And 36% of those in the trenches expect AI to increase and accelerate content creation and activation compared to 14% of the top brass. 

For this 16^th annual edition of its AI and Digital trends research, Adobe and Oxford Economics partnered with Oxford Economics to survey 5,000 executives and practitioners and 5,000 consumers worldwide from October through November 2025.