Nohar Zmora leads marketing at Kaltura. She is passionate about helping marketers create creative and data-driven digital experiences.
ChatGPT went mainstream in November 2022, bringing generative AI (GenAI) to the masses and catalyzing a whole new wave of the AI revolution. But it wasn’t until 2024 that organizations, my own included, really began deriving business value from GenAI technologies. According to recent McKinsey research, 65% of organizations were using GenAI regularly as of May 2024—nearly double the percentage reported just 10 months prior.
Among the numerous new AI tools organizations have embraced in the past year are AI agents.
AI agents are autonomous systems designed to carry out specific tasks on behalf of a user or another system. These systems—also known as “agentic AI” tools—are programmed to make decisions independently and interact with their environment, just like a human employee, learning from data, adapting to new information and executing complex functions.
Agentic AI presents an enormous opportunity for businesses. But simply adopting AI agents isn’t enough. Rather, companies must create and deploy agentic AI tools that “understand” their specific workflows and unique operational nuances.
Fine-Tuning Models With Proprietary And Video Data
Many early-stage AI systems are trained on broad, generic datasets, which don’t necessarily reflect the intricacies of a particular business.
To create the most effective AI agents, companies need to fine-tune their models using content that reflects proprietary best practices, industry-specific regulations and company culture. Just like new hires, the best AI models will require a structured onboarding process—starting with an overview of the company, moving on to role-specific training and, finally, learning from real organizational scenarios.
This is where video-based training data is becoming a critical resource, as it captures not just information but tone, context and other nuances that can be difficult to convey through text alone. The use of video for training is no longer an outlier: Eighty-eight percent of large companies and 77% of midsize ones use video to train new employees, taking full advantage of the benefits and, in turn, creating growing datasets.
By training AI models on your recorded meetings, product training videos and customer service interactions, the resultant AI agents will best understand how to behave like a company employee. Instead of relying on non-defined AI tools, companies can develop AI agents that communicate in their voice and tone, align with internal decision-making processes, proactively solve challenges and improve efficiency.
Personalized AI Agents In Sales And Marketing
Once trained, AI agents can impact a wide range of industries and business areas—among them, sales and marketing.
As a marketer, I can attest that my company is beginning to see the impact of agentic AI as it autonomously analyzes customer data to create highly personalized marketing campaigns for different audience segments at scale. We have been using AI agents to actively assist in continuously monitoring market trends, social media sentiment and competitor activities. They provide real-time insights and strategic recommendations for my team and me to best respond to or take advantage of an emerging trend.
We are also seeing how they can be used to independently craft marketing assets—including ads, blog posts and emails—and optimize them based on their performance, something that used to be an incredibly time-consuming task.
Beyond aiding behind-the-scenes marketing, chatbots and virtual assistants powered by agentic AI can dynamically engage with customers—responding to complex issues and questions without employee input or supervision. Use cases are growing in other industries as well, such as finance, with AI agents finding information and answering customer questions faster and more accurately.
However, interacting with customers still requires a human touch. The good news is that, as agentic AI streamlines sales operations, this frees up sales representatives to focus on more important responsibilities that do require a human touch.
Along the way, by analyzing customer data and wider consumer trends, agentic AI not only tailors sales pitches to increase the likelihood of conversion but can craft more effective sales strategies overall.
The Age Of Agentic AI
As enterprises explore the potential of agentic AI, they’re being met with both promise and complexity. Unlike earlier AI systems, agents operate with greater independence, making it a greater challenge to predict behavior. They require oversight to ensure alignment with business goals, ethical standards and organizational values.
Successful adoption of agentic AI requires a thoughtful, deliberate and flexible approach: starting with narrow, low-risk use cases, establishing strong guardrails, maintaining human oversight and investing in training to integrate these agents as trusted collaborators—not just tools.
The real value of AI agents lies not just in their standalone capabilities but in their ability to be an extension of your trusted workforce. By training agentic AI on other internal proprietary data, such as videos, businesses can build AI that is a true extension of their workforce—one that communicates in their voice, makes decisions based on their principles and proactively solves challenges specific to their industry.
Organizations that invest in not just adopting but keenly developing their agentic AI tools will better ensure that AI not only supports their operations but actively drives success and innovation. Any tool that drives efficiency rewards not only early adopters but especially those who invest the time to master it. Organizations and individuals who learn to train, harness and continuously refine agentic AI will operate more efficiently, achieve better outcomes with less input and gain a lasting competitive edge over those who don’t adapt.
The future of AI-driven business is about more than merely using AI—it’s about building AI that truly understands and works for your business.
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