When Anthony Chiulli talks with lifecycle marketing teams, he rarely hears marketers having a shortage of campaign ideas. Instead, he hears about the campaigns that never get the chance to launch.
According to the Product Marketing leader for lifecycle at Hightouch, marketers don't struggle with creativity. They struggle with the lengthy workflows, approvals, and handoffs required to turn ideas into customer experiences.
"The workflow itself was the problem. ," Chiulli said.
As an agentic marketing and customer data platform (CDP), Hightouch helps organizations activate customer data to power personalized marketing across channels. After more than 16 years in marketing technology, Chiulli believes AI represents an opportunity not simply to create marketing faster, but to fundamentally change how marketing gets done end-to-end.
"What's different this time is the pace," he said. "AI is innovating so quickly and changing so rapidly that it's forcing change at an unprecedented rate."
The Workflow Is the Problem
Chiulli describes today's campaign creation workflow as a "50-step process" involving multiple handoffs across campaign briefs, content creation, design, coding, legal reviews, and approvals before a campaign ever reaches customers. That lengthy workflow makes it difficult for brands to respond quickly to customer behavior, test new ideas, or react to cultural moments while they're still relevant. Agentic marketing has the potential to reinvent lifecycle marketing and compress the process from days or weeks into minutes.
Hightouch believes AI agents can automate much of that manual work, allowing marketers to focus on strategy instead of execution.
"Every marketer should be a manager of agents," Chiulli said.
Instead of spending their day coordinating revisions or managing handoffs between departments, marketers become directors of AI agents, defining a campaign’s goal, reviewing AI-generated recommendations, and ensuring campaigns align with customer needs and brand standards. Marketers can shift their focus on strategy and desired outcomes while AI handles much of the execution. For loyalty teams, that means spending less time managing processes and more time creating meaningful customer experiences.
Context Drives Better Personalization
While generative AI has become widely available, Chiulli believes successful marketing depends on something much deeper than writing good prompts.
"The single most important factor in the quality and output of AI is context," he said.
For AI to generate production-ready campaigns, it needs access to the same information marketers already use every day, including brand guidelines, customer data, creative assets, campaign history, product catalogs, and approved templates.
Without that marketing context, AI may generate content that looks polished but doesn't accurately reflect the brand. With it, marketers can create cross-channel email, sms, and mobile campaigns that require less manual revision while maintaining consistency across every customer touchpoint.
The impact is especially significant for loyalty and CRM teams. Resource constraints have traditionally limited marketers to only a handful of personalized campaign variations. Agentic marketingchanges that by making it possible to personalize at a much greater scale without dramatically increasing workload.
"When you give agents access to your brand, your legal guidelines, your product catalog... they're so much better at analyzing that at scale across millions of subscribers than any marketing team could do single-handedly," Chiulli said.
Start Small, Think Bigger
Organizations are already seeing measurable results from this approach.
Chiulli points to their client, Thumbtack, an online home services marketplace, which reduced campaign launch timelines from four to six weeks down to just days while expanding the number of campaign variations it could produce. The company also saved approximately 30 hours of work per campaign by using agentic marketing workflows.
For marketers who are interested in AI but unsure where to begin, Chiulli recommends focusing on one opportunity instead of trying to transform everything at once.
"Just start somewhere," he said. "It's a huge opportunity for businesses to learn about."
As customer expectations continue to rise, Chiulli believes AI's greatest value won't be replacing marketers; it will be helping them spend less time navigating manual workflows and more time building personalized customer experiences. For loyalty leaders, that shift could mean faster execution, deeper personalization, and more agility as customer needs continue to evolve.