‘Profound implications for the industry’: Mastercard’s CMO on marketing’s agentic AI future

Mastercard CMO Raja Rajamannar believes that agentic AI will have “profound implications” for the marketing industry and that marketers need to start preparing for that reality.

While much of the hype and focus on AI has centred on generative AI, which can be used to generate text and images as well as trawl through data, it is the developing field of agentic AI that Rajamannar is most excited about.

Agentic AI is an autonomous system that can make decisions without human input, making it as much a partner as a tool, and could be groundbreaking in how marketers approach their work.

“It’s both a positive and a negative,” he tells Marketing Week from the Mastercard Villa in Cannes. “Positive because it takes away the drudgery of all the menial tasks that you have to do. Because even if gen AI does analysis and comes up with some solutions, somebody still has to implement them. Agentic AI will do that work on my behalf.”

B2B buyers consider ‘less than three suppliers’ in gen AI purchase decisionsHe acknowledges, though, that handing over so much control to agentic AI is “scary”, particularly as consumers will have access to similar tools. In the past, he says, a marketer would know exactly who was making the decision, the psychology behind it, the consumer’s feelings, emotions and motivations behind why they choose one brand over another. “That’s hyper personalised, hyper targeted, contextually relevant communication to you,” he says.

But now, or at least in the very near future, consumers will be deploying agentic tech – such as ChatGPT or Google AI Mode – to find product recommendations and move along the buyer journey.

“Now I’m talking to your machine, not you, and your machine has none of your feelings or emotions,” he says. “From being a psychological exercise, it suddenly becomes an algorithmic exercise in how to market to people.”

This becomes doubly confusing if marketing teams are using their own agentic AI to create the campaign to sell to the consumer’s agentic AI. This is a “completely different dynamic” from the one that marketers operate in at the moment and will have “profound implications” on the industry.

He continues: “On an intellectual level, it is very, very stimulating, but at another level, I keep wondering, my God, how much of transformation is going to happen and are we as a marketing community ready for it?”

Brand will matter more than ever

While it would be tempting to believe that an agentic AI future will see brands competing on basic promotional activity in a way to stand out, after all, a machine isn’t going to be swayed by brand promises and lofty goals like brand purpose. Or is it?

Rajamannar is confident that the role of brand will be “more critical tomorrow than it is today” because you cannot “price to win” in a market where everyone is on a similar level. “Like how water finds its level, low pricing finds its level too,” says Rajamannar.

“There might be a ripple here and there, but it becomes very, very flat over a period of time across the entire industry, as all products will be priced similarly because you are catering to algorithms, right?”

YouTube’s real threat isn’t TikTok – it’s an AI you’ve never heard ofWhen everything is equal – and Rajamannar is confident that AI will be somewhat of an equaliser between larger businesses and smaller businesses – then those brand attributes become even more important as it will be those things that will differentiate a product to an agentic AI.

“As long as I’m meeting all the basic requirements demanded by the AI, I’m then able to add that emotion, that feeling, which the agent understands appeals to its master,” he says. “That is going to happen because otherwise it will be a sea of sameness.”

It seems that when it comes to AI – despite the level of change promised by so many – there’s an element that the more things change, the more they stay the same. And good, solid brand building will be just as important as it ever was.

“When the competing field is so level, differentiation is going to happen, not through logical stuff, but through psychological stuff. In spite of the fact there’s an agent making the decision,” he concludes.