Tim Lillyman and Louise Cummins.
The rapid rise of agentic AI is outpacing marketers' understanding of what it means in practice, according to the Australian Centre for AI in Marketing (ACAM).
Insights from ACAM's upcoming 2026 AI Marketing Benchmark, to be released in July, suggest execution, capability building, governance and value creation now matter more than access to tools.
A 2026 Adobe survey of 3,000 executives and practitioners in customer experience roles found 63% of organisations expect agentic AI to give employees more time for strategic and creative work, with 42% planning to design distinctive AI agent personalities for different audiences.
Despite this, a majority of respondents reported no active use of agentic AI and fewer than a quarter said they were running limited pilots.
A separate Adobe report found one in five Australians have already used agentic AI, with 42% expecting to use it in their daily lives this year. AI assistant use is growing across online shopping (30%), travel (29%) and banking (23%).
Tim Lillyman, head of marketing and AI automation at XPON Technologies Group and lead instructor at ACAM, said there was a big gap between knowing agentic AI was important and doing something with it.
"Organisations getting ahead are those rethinking how their teams work and where agentic AI can take on real responsibility," he said.
“But increasingly this isn't just an organisational play. Individual marketers will eventually run their own agents built around their role, so understanding the foundations now is what will help them succeed as agentic AI becomes more standardised.”
Jodie Sangster, co-founder of ACAM, said agentic AI was the clearest example yet of a topic where hype had raced ahead of real understanding.
"There is plenty of talk, but not enough clarity on what marketers should actually do. At ACAM, our purpose is to demystify AI and make it genuinely accessible for every marketer, not just those inside the largest enterprises," she said.
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