How AI Is Transforming Marketing Workflows

Marketing automation workflows have been the backbone of campaign execution for over a decade. From planning campaigns to segmenting audiences, workflows provided the framework for turning ideas into action.

That framework is evolving. AI marketing workflows are replacing rigid, rules-based processes with intelligent systems that learn from customer behavior, adapt in real time, and optimize every step of campaign execution. McKinsey estimates that AI can improve marketing productivity by 5-15% of total marketing spend, and Gartner reports that 49% of marketing leaders cite time efficiency as the primary benefit of generative AI adoption.

The shift is already happening. Here’s how AI is transforming every stage of the marketing workflow process, with real case studies from brands seeing results, and a look at what comes next: agentic orchestration, where AI agents manage entire campaigns from prompt to launch.

AI marketing workflows use artificial intelligence agents to automate, optimize, and continuously refine the steps involved in building and executing marketing campaigns, including audience segmentation, content creation, channel selection, and performance analysis.

What Are Marketing Workflows?

Marketing workflows are the step-by-step processes that marketers use to manage tasks, build out campaigns, and track progress. They’re the traditional foundation of how marketing solutions, campaigns, and customer experiences operate.

Workflows Bring Structure to Customer Engagement

The ability to outline, execute, and monitor campaigns has cemented workflows as the gold standard for marketing processes over the last decade. They allow marketers to plan and build a path for campaigns to follow, using building blocks like rules, triggers, segments, and more to shape a campaign journey.

Workflows Enable Marketing Automation

With fundamental campaign components and a system to put them in place, workflows empower marketers to plan out marketing sequences that don’t require individual sends for each and every message. Campaigns can be automated, which is a crucial capability for modern businesses.

Using marketing automation, marketers can personalize key aspects of the customer experience, which they can’t hope to do without preset workflows. If a follow-up campaign had to be manually sent whenever a customer abandoned items in their cart, saved an item to their favorites, or made a purchase, businesses would be overwhelmed with maintaining the fundamentals of a marketing strategy.

Marketing automation workflows offer a level of efficiency and consistency that companies need from their marketing campaigns, which is why they’ve become available in every marketing platform and every marketer learns to use them.

The Drawback of Standard Marketing Workflows 

The trouble with traditional marketing automation workflows is the time and effort they demand from marketers. 

Setting Up Automation Workflows Takes Time

To build campaigns, marketers have to implement marketing workflow automation one step at a time, manually choosing the right segments to target customers, picking the right channel to reach the right audience, setting up different variations for different customer needs, and so on. 

The more varied and personalized a campaign is, the more steps there are, and creating each condition, trigger, and customer segment is a painstaking task.

Maintaining Automation Workflows Is an Ongoing Challenge

If you want to tailor campaigns to your recipients, you have to maintain your workflows and make sure relevant data is fueling key touchpoints. Any data update, change in plan, or optimization required is the marketer’s responsibility to make happen.

In short, the problem with traditional marketing automation workflows is that they’re only as smart as the rules they follow. They don’t learn, predict, or adapt in real time. 

They give marketers the tools to get the job done, but they can only stick rigidly to preset paths, unable to truly evolve alongside customer needs. 

How AI Is Transforming Marketing Workflows

This is where agentic AI changes the equation.

Agentic AI uses AI agents to autonomously tackle complex tasks. Leveraging large language models, machine learning, and natural language processing, these agents make their own decisions without constant human input, intelligently working toward specific goals.

This ability to assess, adapt, and take action with minimal human intervention makes AI agents powerful tools for transforming marketing workflows. Marketers can deploy AI agents to tackle responsibilities that traditional workflows can’t handle, gaining an autonomous, capable assistant to build and execute campaigns.

That’s the crucial difference between marketing automation, which is the best a traditional workflow can achieve, and AI-driven marketing, which leverages intelligent agents to put the right steps in place for the best campaign outcomes.

Agents Streamline Repetitive Tasks

The most immediate benefit of AI in marketing workflows is its ability to take on attention-demanding tasks. AI agents can handle data entry, campaign setup, and ongoing analytics that marketers are required to manage, even with marketing automation in place. And they do these things faster than any manual process can.

Instead of crunching numbers to report on campaign performance and uncover actionable insights, marketers can turn to AI agents like Bloomreach’s analytics agent powered by Loomi AI to do so in a fraction of the time. You can ask Loomi AI questions about your customer data and get a real-time understanding of your customer relationships, making the process as simple as talking to a coworker.

This application of AI agents offers incredible results for businesses. Hornby Hobbies has cut analytics design time by 70% using Loomi AI, freeing up the marketing team to focus on strategy rather than manual reporting.

AI Agents Enable Faster Time-to-Execution

AI agents process massive amounts of data, identify trends, and put insights into action in seconds, which supercharges marketing workflows and opens up new possibilities to personalize the customer experience.

This is particularly impactful for customer segmentation. Traditionally, segments need to be built, managed, and kept up to date. Marketers have to set the audience parameters, dig through data, and find the ideal audience for every campaign.

And if campaigns are going to be truly personalized, these audiences have a limited shelf life. Every new customer data point changes an audience’s status, and marketers need to constantly reassess and rebuild segments to stay relevant.

AI agents like Bloomreach’s AutoSegments make these difficulties a thing of the past. With the ability to analyze millions of customer attributes in moments, AutoSegments can do all the heavy lifting without constant oversight. All it needs is an end-goal for your segments, and it can identify opportunities, produce actionable audiences, and plug them directly into campaigns.

HMV, the British music and entertainment retailer, uses AutoSegments to optimize its PMAX campaigns with measurable results: a 14% lift in campaign revenue, a 34% increase in impressions, and a 425% increase in landing page views.

AI Can Refine Customer Experiences in Real Time

Traditional marketing automation inevitably hits a ceiling with how personalized campaigns can be. With prebuilt scenarios and conditions required for any variation in the shopping journey, it’s impossible for rule-based workflows to address a customer’s real-time needs at every touchpoint.

But with AI agents tasked with building key points in the customer experience, brands can serve the most relevant content at the most opportune moment to every customer. Agentic AI can learn from a customer’s previous interactions, predict the next step in their shopping journey, and adapt future campaigns to optimize their experience. 

Marketing automation workflows no longer need to be a rigid, yes-or-no structure. Agents can autonomously change the framework of a customer’s journey when refinement is necessary, serving them content that caters to their individual needs and hits your business goals. 

Agents can launch campaigns on a customer’s preferred channel, send them at the optimal time, and even contextually personalize touchpoints to offer the right incentive, messaging, and product highlights to different customers. 

United Fashion Group harnessed AI to contextually personalize its on-site experience and saw a 43.75% increase in conversion rates and a 57.31% increase in AOV.

AI Marketing Workflows in Action

The case studies above demonstrate the results. But what does an AI-powered marketing workflow actually look like in practice?

Gartner reports that 81% of marketing technology leaders are either piloting or have already implemented AI agents in their organizations. Here’s how those agents handle specific workflow steps.

Audience Segmentation

Traditional segmentation requires marketers to manually define audience criteria, pull data, and rebuild segments as customer behavior changes. AI-powered segmentation flips this: agents analyze millions of customer attributes, identify high-value segments that humans might miss, and keep those segments current as new data flows in.

With tools like Bloomreach’s AutoSegments, a marketer can describe a goal (“find customers likely to churn who’ve purchased in the last 90 days”) and the AI builds the segment automatically. No SQL queries, no manual data pulls, no stale audiences.

Campaign Analytics and Reporting

Reporting is one of the biggest time sinks in marketing. AI agents like Bloomreach’s analytics agent replace dashboard diving with conversational data access. Ask a question in natural language (“Which email campaign had the highest conversion rate last quarter?”) and get an answer immediately, complete with visualizations.

This shifts analytics from a periodic review task to a continuous, real-time feedback loop where insights inform decisions as they happen.

Campaign Creation and Execution

The newest evolution in AI marketing workflows is campaign agents: AI agents that build campaigns from a simple prompt. Describe your objective, and a coordinated team of agents handles segmentation, messaging, channel selection, scheduling, and personalization.

Where traditional workflows require hours of manual setup for each campaign variation, campaign agents can produce a ready-to-review campaign in minutes. Marketers review, approve, and refine through conversation rather than clicking through workflow builders.

Content Personalization

AI agents enable contextual personalization at a scale that manual workflows could never support. Instead of creating a handful of content variations and assigning them through rules, AI generates and selects the right content, offers, and product recommendations for each individual customer based on their real-time context.

A returning customer browsing winter coats sees different recommendations, messaging, and offers than a first-time visitor looking at the same category. That level of granularity used to require dozens of workflow branches; now it happens automatically.

Channel and Send-Time Optimization

One of the most impactful AI workflow improvements is automated channel and timing selection. Instead of a marketer guessing whether an email, SMS, or push notification will perform best, AI agents analyze each customer’s engagement history and select the channel and send time most likely to drive a response.

This optimization compounds over time. As the AI collects more data on customer preferences, each subsequent send becomes more precisely targeted.

The Future: From Workflows to Agentic Orchestration

With AI agents taking on specialized roles at every stage of the marketing process, the next evolution is already here: agentic orchestration, where intelligent agents manage the entire campaign lifecycle.

Traditional scenario builders become less necessary when marketers can prompt agentic AI to create conditions and define campaign triggers for them.

The conversational interface that agentic AI provides is becoming the most essential tool for modern marketing. It translates business goals into ready-to-launch campaigns faster than any workflow can.

What Agentic Orchestration Looks Like in Practice

With the right agentic personalization platform, orchestrating these cutting-edge campaigns is a straightforward process. 

Using a conversational interface, marketers prompt agentic AI with a goal: boosting sales for a new product line, building customer loyalty, increasing abandoned cart recovery for one-time purchasers, or whatever the strategy calls for.

A full cohort of AI agents then gets to work. One builds the right customer segment while another identifies entry and exit criteria. Another creates the messaging, another ensures continuity with the customer’s previous brand experience, and so on until the campaign is mapped out and ready to launch.

This fleet of agents accomplishes all this in moments, harnessing customer data and machine learning to assess campaign possibilities, predict outcomes, and make the right decisions.

After the campaign is built, more AI agents refine the campaign structure to make sure every send is personalized for recipients. Agents pick the ideal channel for each customer, tailor the content and messaging, add individualized product recommendations, and continue optimizing with every delivery.

This is the next evolution of the marketing workflow process: agentic orchestration where intelligent, autonomous AI agents optimize continuously. 

What This Means for Marketers 

The shift from rule-based workflows to AI-driven orchestration changes how marketers approach their daily work, how campaigns reach customers, and how businesses grow.

Marketers Can Be More Strategic

Agentic orchestration pulls marketers out of the operational details and lets agents handle the campaign-building process. But this doesn’t mean marketers aren’t needed. The distance between their ideas and execution is much shorter, empowering them to accomplish more.

Marketers still set the strategy for campaigns and make sure every step aligns with their vision. They review AI’s campaign briefs, decision summaries, and content. If revisions need to be made, they happen through prompts instead of painstaking workflow editing. 

If a marketer wants to add personalized product recommendations to an email, they ask the AI. If a campaign needs to be more visual, less busy, or completely reworked for brand consistency, it happens through a goal-oriented dialogue with agentic AI.

Marketing automation technology has reached the level that marketers have always wished for: the freedom to be more efficient, creative, and impactful in their daily work.

Marketing Moves at the Speed of Customer Behavior

With agentic AI, 1-to-1 personalization is possible at every single customer touchpoint.

The scale of this effort is significant. With traditional marketing automation workflows, it would require thousands (if not millions) of campaign variations to achieve. Agentic personalization makes it possible.

With autonomous agents building and refining campaigns in real time, every customer interaction informs the next one. Each campaign recipient, no matter the size of the audience or the scope of the journey, gets a relevant, personalized experience.

Your marketing efforts don’t react to customer behavior after the fact. They learn from it, adapting future communications to serve your audience better and drive stronger results.

Embrace the Future of Marketing With Bloomreach

AI-powered marketing workflows are redefining what’s possible for marketing teams.

Bloomreach is pioneering this new era with Loomi AI, the agentic platform for personalization. Our comprehensive solution acts as the mind behind the best minds in marketing, employing campaign agents and comprehensive marketing automation capabilities designed to connect touchpoints across the customer journey, from emails and apps to ads and search.

With unique, seamless experiences crafted for each individual consumer, brands can work smarter, execute faster, and achieve the AI-powered interactions that customers expect.

See how Loomi AI delivers marketing automation that adapts in real time, without the manual configuration overhead. Request a demo today.