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TCS Interactive
Humanizing Technology to Create Iconic Experiences
HIGHLIGHTS
- Agentic AI and generative AI together enable retailers to deliver hyper-autonomous and rapid marketing campaigns that anticipate customer needs.
- Agentic AI proactively manages and optimises campaigns, while GenAI excels at fast and creative content generation—making them a powerful duo for efficiency and growth.
- Retailers using these AIs see higher response rates and faster execution, but must ensure ethical, transparent, and enterprise-grounded AI to build trust.
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Smarter retail
Retail customers today have high expectations. They want attention from the moment of engagement until they make a purchase. To meet those expectations, retailers must identify the right target audience, create engaging and personalised content at the right moment, assess campaign tactics before execution, and run campaigns with predictable outcomes. For CXOs steering retail brands, excelling in this environment means embracing advanced strategies and technologies that not only meet but also anticipate evolving consumer expectations. In this crowded marketplace, delivering true value is what fills the cart and secures enduring customer loyalty.
Consider these four critical elements required to pull it off:
- Hyper-personalisation and context-sensitivity- Modern consumers want brands to recognise their unique needs and preferences. Retailers can utilise AI to identify the ideal target audiences, create content that resonates, and evaluate campaign strategies before launch. Hyper-personalisation, delivering the right message to the right person at the right time, should be at the core of every marketing initiative.
- Seamless omni-channel experience- Customers interact with brands across multiple channels, expecting a seamless and unified experience. Retailers should ensure that campaigns are integrated and consistent, regardless of where the customer engages, whether online, in-store, or via mobile. AI-driven tools can optimise these touchpoints, creating a frictionless path to purchase.
- Faster delivery, dynamic pricing, tailored promotions- The pace of retail is accelerating. Brands must be able to deliver faster, dynamically adjust pricing, and offer promotions tailored to individual shoppers. AI enables real-time decision-making, allowing retailers to respond instantly to market changes and customer behaviours.
- Ethical and transparent AI use- Brands must obtain explicit consent, protect customer data, and ensure AI-driven decisions are fair and unbiased. Regular audits and transparent reporting build trust and accountability with consumers.
Transform with two AIs
Retailers once relied on manual methods, static segmentation, and traditional analytics to run campaigns, an approach that was labour-intensive and lacked agility. Now, AI automates these steps, enabling real-time personalisation, predictive modelling, and autonomous optimisation. Specifically, the combined power of agentic and Generative AI (GenAI) is propelling marketing into a proactive era.
Agentic AI empowers marketing with hyper-personalisation, guided selling, and autonomous orchestration of campaigns, leveraging capabilities that exceed what GenAI alone can achieve. That’s not to downplay GenAI. While it can’t act independently, GenAI is still critical for rapid content generation and creative ideation. Bottom line? GenAI lowers the cost of creation, while Agentic AI lowers the cost of action. Together, they deliver marketing that anticipates, acts, and accelerates growth.
Agentic AI vs GenAI
Agentic AI vs GenAI
Proactive shift
What if marketers could identify opportunities based on internal and external triggers, easily discover their target audience, and create effective campaign concepts and briefs? What if they could automatically orchestrate end-to-end campaigns across the marketing lifecycle? Moreover, what if marketers could validate and fine-tune the campaigns before they go live using AI-based experimentation and testing?
By equipping marketers with a holistic platform that harnesses agentic AI, GenAI, and other next-gen technologies, retail marketers will be able to create, execute, and manage campaigns that aren't just AI-assisted but intelligently orchestrated and optimised. In fact, in proof-of-concept trials combining agentic AI with GenAI, conducted by TCS Interactive, were able to deliver up to 5× higher response rates and showed potential to double revenue. Automated content supply chains boosted production by 60–80%, while improving quality and engagement by 20–30%. Such a platform built on intelligent agents would understand user intent and adapt dynamically. Whether you need end-to-end orchestration or just content generation, the platform could respond to your specific ask—ideation, strategy, creation, proofreading, or all of the above. This flexibility can be paired with risk-free experimentation using digital twin technology, which enables thousands of 'what-if' simulations before execution.
Human creativity and AI precision
While GenAI accelerates content generation and ideation, and agentic AI drives orchestration, outcome measurement, and customer-centric customisation, humans still play a critical part. They are responsible for kick-starting AI-powered campaigns with the intent and purpose. They’ll also need to ensure the AI models don’t produce information that is not grounded in reality or their training data. AI models can sometimes invent facts, create fake citations, or generate nonsensical content while presenting it confidently as true. Therefore, an AI marketing platform must provide sources and citations for its ideas and research, allowing marketers to verify them, which serves as an essential safeguard to ensure the AI is not hallucinating.
The best AI platforms for marketing will be grounded in enterprise data—customer profiles, customer interactions, campaign history, conversion rates, product catalogues, and more—layered on top of advanced large language models (LLMs) for contextual accuracy. To unlock their full potential, retailers will need to prepare and structure relevant enterprise data for AI consumption.
Marketing is on the brink of a significant evolution. Today, AI systems work with limited enterprise data. Still, tomorrow they’ll be fully enterprise-ready, capable of autonomously executing tasks and delivering high-quality campaigns in days, not weeks or months. Future-ready AI will democratise marketing, empowering employees to act like seasoned experts without needing deep domain knowledge or coding skills. Intelligent agents won’t just automate tasks; they’ll upskill marketing teams, making them faster, smarter, and more effective at driving results.
As AI matures, retailers will be able to activate any agent, assign a task, and watch it perform autonomously, turning complexity into simplicity and speed. Agentic AI is like having a smart assistant in your marketing toolkit, designed to automate tedious tasks. So, you can focus on what really matters: Crafting innovative strategies and connecting with customers. It’s all about efficiency and streamlining processes like targeting, content creation, and analytics so you don’t have to lift a finger once the campaign starts.