The Biggest Agentic AI Trends at CES 2025

If you’ve been coming to CES for the past decade and hit the marketing panels and keynotes, you would think that every year promises a transformation for our business. This year, the pablum finally feels real and potent; artificial and augmented intelligence applied to marketing and advertising dominated the discussions on the stages and in the suites. Apparently, and finally, the future is here. 

As one mainstage keynoter stated, 2023 was a “wow” year for marketers and AI; 2024 was a “how” year of figuring it out; and 2025 is a “now” year to start implementing it. Unlike other transformations in our business—the web, mobile, social, metaverse—this one is more seismic, more limitless, more exciting. 

Beyond real-time

Consider the typical workflow of the agency creative process: strategy, ideation, concept, testing, production, launch, measurement. Consider this workflow to soon be over.

AI-enabled iterative loops can discover insights, make creative, test the work, refine it, and deploy it with constant adaptability and scale. Marketing is now beyond “real-time;” it can be done “within time.”

Beyond real

AI-driven synthetic personas will be our new influencers.

Not that human influencers and celebrities will no longer matter; they will matter more than ever to deliver authenticity, trust, and vibe. But the fact that consumer-created AI agents interfacing with brand-created AI agents in the near future did not freak out the hundreds of marketers and media professionals in the ballroom of another keynote, where an extremely well-known authority declared that “bots will be marketing to bots”—that’s the quiet part said out loud. 

Beyond scale

Adobe estimates that brands and businesses will need to produce 5 times more content in the next two years in order to accommodate for the onslaught of generative AI content that will fill our feeds. Coca-Cola, Cadbury, and Virgin Voyages have already proven the ability to generate hundreds of thousands of ads that adapt in uber-personalized ways (time, place, medium, need state, environment, language, etc.) to the audiences they are trying to persuade.

It’s still unclear how brands can meet this demand, but AI-assisted consumer co-creation may prove to be the best way to produce content at the speed of culture. 

Beyond personalization

AI unlocks troves of latent data that can radically catalyze brand communications and experiences for uber-personalization—a word that currently applies to one person. But a majority of Gen Alpha reports having multiple personas online, on social, or in gaming platforms.

Agentic AI creates an obvious conclusion: We will soon be personalizing for personas, not persons. 

Beyond purpose

For many years, according to the marketing leader of the world’s No. 1 cosmetics brand, the internal brand rally cry was “beauty for all.” Today, because of the promise of AI, it has changed to “beauty for each.”

This evolution speaks volumes to how brands will begin to show their value in culture and society beyond their purpose creds. Audiences will no longer buy a brand because of its “why”—the purpose it espouses—but instead because of who they can become because of the brand.

Whereas GPT-based AI can help people accomplish tasks, agentic AI will allow brands to help people achieve their goals and aspirations. 

Beyond experience

CES is the kind of place where marketers and agency pros pick up new parlance to describe our work—ads became campaigns, campaigns became solutions, solutions became platforms, platforms became stacks.

The dominant word this year was “experience.” Brand experience, customer experience, user experience, member experience, employee experience—the experience is the message. The advent of AI now enhances any touch point or engagement into an experience with no dead ends. In other words, “AI is the new UI.” 

Beyond web3

The hype cycle for blockchain and web3 applications of 2023 may have worn off, but web3 never went away. And the advent of AI is making the promise of the metaverse so much more appealing.

For instance, Lotte Technologies introduced AI into its metaverse platform called Caliverse that lets users self-create (and sell) products in the virtual world by simply filming real-world products with a phone or using AI to create them from scratch. 

Beyond ‘AI’

Marketers may love AI (for the most part), but it is still unclear how much people will.

There is an acknowledgement that a majority of consumers don’t yet trust it, don’t know how to use it, and are worried about privacy and technological intrusion. To accommodate, brands may want to rethink how to call it.

This year, LG’s crown-jewel unveiling and the centerpiece to its announced strategy is indeed AI: Affectionate Intelligence. That is the softer term to explain how the brand uses AI to connect home, screen, and lifestyle.

Expect more reframing of AI for other products, platforms and experiences—much like used cars became certified preowned and global warming became climate change.

Perhaps the biggest surprise winner at CES, however, was the positive mood—or rather, the lack of fear that other tectonic tech changes brought with them. There is little hysteria compared to previous years when VHS was going to kill Hollywood, social was going to kill media, the deprecation of the cookie was going to kill programmatic, etc. Most marketers and agencies are thrilled with AI, looking toward its potential without perhaps understanding the path to get there. 

Make no mistake, the advent of generative and agentic AI (artificial, augmented, or affectionate) into the marketing and advertising ecosystem is revolutionary. And you cannot have a revolution without blood in the streets, metaphorical or not. There will certainly be job replacement—that is in essence what efficiency and machine scaling means in our business. At the same time, the best way to train AI is with human-based data and human-applied insights, making humans empathetically understanding other humans a paramount differentiator for great work. 

And finally, perhaps most importantly, we have yet to grapple with how to organize around AI. If the technology is going to radically change workflow, clearly it will radically change how we build teams and processes to get to the work. And if creative output will undoubtedly be fully automated, how will we find, harness, and celebrate creativity itself?