Solution
TCS Interactive
Humanizing Technology to Create Iconic Experiences
Highlights
- AI is driving two revolutions: One in customer experience (CX) and another in marketing.
- In CX, AI interfaces are replacing search as the primary method for customers to discover and initiate engagement with brands.
- In marketing, agentic AI accelerates and augments marketing operations, shifting the focus from execution to cognitive strategy.
- New metrics measuring generative engine optimisation (GEO) effectiveness and intent coverage are crucial for gauging brand visibility in AI-generated experiences. These metrics assess how well content addresses user intent within AI interfaces.
- Success requires AI-ready technology, adaptive processes, and AI-literate teams.
On this page
A new era
The old playbook built around keyword-based search, website visits, and mobile app interactions is giving way to a significantly different model, where AI becomes the foundation of customer engagement and organisational transformation.
Two interconnected revolutions are fuelling this shift. One is transforming how customers discover and engage with brands. The other is redefining how marketing organisations operate internally. Together, they signify a structural change that will impact every aspect of marketing strategy and execution.
These two revolutions are two sides of the same transformation. The same technology system that interprets intent and delivers personalised experiences for customers will automate workflows and optimise decision-making for marketers. This convergence means marketing leaders must think holistically. It is not enough to adapt to new customer behaviours. Organisations must also re-imagine their processes, platforms, and talent to thrive in an AI-orchestrated world.
The CX revolution
For decades, customer journeys began with a search bar and ended on a landing page. Marketers optimised for traffic, click-through rates, and conversion funnels. Success meant ranking high on Google and driving visitors to owned channels.
That model is being replaced by a new, meta-interface: AI. AI interfaces are not just conversational. They are reasoning engines designed to understand context, interpret human intent, and respond with empathy. When a customer engages with an AI assistant, they are not simply typing keywords. They are sharing goals, questions, and preferences in natural language. The AI interprets these signals, considers possible solutions, and connects back to brand ecosystems to assemble the optimal experience.
This orchestration involves multiple layers. The interface captures intent and context, then draws from a brand’s content, product information, and offers. It synthesises these elements into a cohesive response that feels personal and relevant, often before the customer has fully formulated a transactional intent. This ability to reason and anticipate needs fosters instant empathy, positioning the interface as a trusted advisor from the outset of the customer journey.
The implications are profound. The gateway to your brand is no longer your homepage but the AI interface. Many customers will start and end their purchasing journey in the AI layer. They no longer follow a predefined experience pattern by the brand. AI decides which products and services appear and how they are represented. Visibility will depend on how well the brand is understood and recommended by AI, not on keyword rankings or ad spend. Marketing success will hinge on new or evolved tactics, such as GEO, to ensure your brand appears in AI-generated answers.
Marketing intelligence
The second revolution is powered by agentic AI, which refers to autonomous AIs that can plan, reason, and take action to complete tasks with minimal human oversight. It is becoming an active collaborator that augments human productivity, accelerates decision-making, and unlocks new levels of creativity. Intelligent agents can analyse data, generate insights, and even propose strategic actions, freeing marketers from repetitive tasks and enabling them to focus on higher-order thinking.
This capability truly accelerates execution and experience delivery for marketers. Campaign workflows that used to take many weeks can now be orchestrated in hours. Content variations, personalisation, and optimisation happen dynamically, allowing marketing organisations to respond at the same level of speed and scale. As execution becomes faster and largely automated, the operating model shifts dramatically as a result. Marketing evolves from being execution-heavy to strategy-centric, where cognitive efforts, such as intent mapping, experience design, creative engagement, and governance, take centre stage.
This revolutionary change also redefines the measures of success. Traditional KPIs such as click-through rates and impressions will remain relevant but will become less central. There is no single industry-standard definition of metric yet, but there is growing alignment on how GEO should be measured in practice. Today, GEO can be calculated through automated, prompt-based analysis. Typically, brands define high-value customer intents, execute those prompts across AI interfaces, and measure intent coverage (brand presence), visibility, and position of mentions, as well as their accuracy/consistency. These signals are weighted and combined into a composite GEO score that can be tracked over time.
These new metrics will take precedence, such as intent coverage and the GEO index, a composite measurement of how visible a brand is in an AI-initiated digital experience that includes key variables like brand mentions, positioning, attribution quality, referred traffic, accuracy, and intent match. Intent coverage is measured using prompt-based AI analysis tools, which test defined intent sets across AI interfaces/platforms and report the frequency of brand appearance and the context in which it occurs.
Another is the human intervention rate, a benchmark for efficiency and reliability that measures the quantified proportion of AI-driven marketing operations that require manual human review, correction, or approval. The new measures will reflect a future where marketing performance is judged by how well AI understands, recommends, and assembles your brand experience.
A new blueprint
To thrive in the era of AI-orchestrated experiences and operations, marketing organisations must evolve their strategies around three key dimensions: technology, process, and people.
Technology forms the foundation. The MarTech stack must evolve into an AI-orchestrated ecosystem. At its core is an orchestration layer that connects intent signals to content, offers, and experiences in real time. Digital asset management (DAM) and content management system (CMS) solutions will evolve into modular content hubs, structured to support atomic assets and semantic tagging. Offer engines will become dynamic, adjusting bundles and pricing based on context. Transactional systems will shift to API-first for seamless integration. Governance and insights layers will ensure agility, compliance, and performance.
Once the technology foundations are in place, processes must adapt. Agentic AI flips the old ratio of strategy to execution. Marketing moves from linear campaigns to adaptive loops, prioritising intent mapping, orchestration design, and embedded governance. Execution accelerates through AI agents, enabling rapid experimentation and continuous optimisation.
Finally, transformation is completed by people. Each marketer will evolve into an AI-augmented pod where humans and AI agents form self-sufficient, purpose-led units. New roles, such as AI experience strategist or content modularity specialist, will emerge, and AI literacy will become essential. Culture will shift from asset production to insight-driven design, making human creativity the differentiator in an AI-powered world. Marketers will expect to be multi-disciplinary and fluid in their roles for agility and resilience.
Set the course now
The future is here. Brands are already seeing early signs of change; some may even be experiencing its impact. Marketing leaders must formulate their vision and act on it today. The primary step in navigating this disruption is to focus on its impact. Identify the intents that matter most (e.g., the questions and goals that define high-value journeys) and ensure your brand is visible in AI answers. From there, think about readiness. Is your content modular and tagged for dynamic assembly? Are your teams equipped with AI literacy and governance principles?
Rather than trying to do everything at once, start small and prove value quickly. Pilot orchestration for one critical journey, measure results, and scale from there. The goal is not just to adopt AI. It is embedding it into the operating model so marketing becomes adaptive, strategic, and resilient.
This is a defining moment for marketing. The fundamentals, such as creating value and building trust, remain, but the rules of engagement have changed. Success now depends on agility, intent alignment, and the ability to orchestrate personalised experiences at scale, leveraging AI. Your ambition deserves momentum. It’s time to turn vision into reality and position your brand to thrive in the era of AI-driven engagement.