Agentic AI is transforming martech, and as retailers try to understand the evolution taking place, a troubling pattern has emerged: many brands are choosing to do nothing about it.
This choice comes from caution rather than indifference. Retailers recognize how quickly the rules of martech are changing. So, they explore their options — they do a deep dive and evaluate email and marketing platforms, investing months of their team’s time in the process. And then, increasingly, they walk away without making a decision at all.
Across industries and companies, the reason is remarkably consistent: With AI changing so quickly, it’s hard to know whether to invest in a modern marketing platform or hold out for an agentic solution.
It’s easy to see why this feels like a binary choice. Platforms offer stability, while AI-native solutions sell a future where autonomous agents handle the work for you. When those are the only two pitches you hear, it’s natural to assume they’re competing categories — and that investing in one means missing out on the other.
But avoiding a black-and -white choice isn’t the same as avoiding risk. Instead, it’s ultimately holding your business back. The real question isn’t, “Should I choose a platform or an agentic solution?” but rather, “Where do the two meet to give me a future-proof foundation for growth?”
The Measurable Cost of Indecision
Staying the course with a martech stack that isn’t built for modern commerce carries real costs that show up in your team’s productivity, your platform’s utilization, and your bottom line.
Your Team Is Paying the Price
The most immediate cost of inaction is felt by the people working with an underperforming platform. When businesses opt to keep legacy solutions, problems like slow manual workflows, data silos, and ongoing platform maintenance don’t go away — they simply pile up as martech continues to get faster, smarter, and more demanding.
Forrester’s research found that marketers using modern platforms send 2x the number of campaigns without adding headcount. Legacy solutions effectively require double the effort for the same output, with exponential time and energy needed to keep up with today’s marketing expectations.
The bottom-line cost is just as stark. Legacy platforms require increasing maintenance over time, often needing custom workarounds and dedicated resources just to keep them functional. Forrester found that Bloomreach customers realized $2.3 million in cost savings over three years simply from retiring legacy technology. The longer you delay migration, the more savings you’re missing out on.
The Utilization Crisis
Beyond outdated processes, many marketing teams aren’t even using the full capabilities of the platforms they’re paying for, which makes the case for keeping them even harder to justify.
According to Gartner, martech utilization has dropped to just 49% of stack capabilities being actively used. That means the average marketing team is paying for an entire platform and only getting value from half of it.
No matter what size your business is, a utilization gap is a problem. Martech accounts for nearly 22% of total marketing spend, and when more than half of that investment sits idle, it doesn’t just represent waste. It actively crowds out the budget that teams need to succeed.
59% of CMOs report they don’t have enough budget to execute their strategy — and every quarter you stay on a platform you’ve outgrown is a quarter of unrealized revenue, efficiency, and competitive advantage.
The Growth To Be Gained by Taking Action
When businesses move beyond legacy platforms and adopt a modern solution — one with unified data, omnichannel orchestration, AI-driven personalization — the ROI is transformational.
The Forrester Total Economic Impact study of Bloomreach’s agentic personalization platform, Loomi, found that customers achieved a 251% ROI with payback in under six months.
That’s the measured result from real customers, and they prove that delaying a migration directly translates to missed opportunities for growth.
Why Platform vs. Agent Is a False Choice
The data shows that agentic AI is here to stay — and that the smartest organizations aren’t treating it as an alternative to a marketing platform. Instead, they’re embracing both.
Agentic AI Is the Priority, While Platforms Are the Foundation
It’s obvious that agentic AI isn’t a passing trend, and the momentum behind its adoption is accelerating.
Gartner predicts that by 2028, 60% of brands will use agentic AI to facilitate streamlined one-to-one interactions. And, according to a 2026 survey from the Futurum Group, autonomous agents grew 31% year-over-year as a technology priority — the fastest-growing category in the survey — while 51% of organizations rank sales and marketing as a top-two priority for agentic AI deployment.
The numbers show that brands are willing to embrace agentic AI, but that’s not the whole story. Those same brands are also adopting unified platforms. 66% of organizations now favor a platform-first strategy over best-of-breed point solutions.
They’re not choosing between platforms and agents — they’re looking for platforms that deliver agentic capabilities.
A Unified Platform Is Crucial for Modern Martech
Agentic solutions aren’t replacing a fully functional, omnichannel marketing platform. They enhance it, and they depend on it to function.
An AI agent can optimize send times, generate content, and personalize recommendations — but it needs a unified customer data layer to know who it’s talking to, channel orchestration to reach them across every touchpoint, and automation workflows to sustain the conversation over days, weeks, or months. It also needs analytics and attribution feeding signals back in to learn what’s working.
Without the infrastructure of a platform, an AI agent is like a brain without a body. It’s intelligent, but unable to act — which is why the platform-first approach is the right move for modern businesses:
- It’s the foundation agents need to deliver. The reliability, compliance, and data infrastructure of a platform aren’t just operational requirements — they empower agentic AI to be effective. An agent built on fragmented tools and disconnected data will underperform against one powered by a unified platform.
- It amplifies revenue per channel. When channels share the same customer data and orchestration layer, each one boosts the others. SMS isn’t just another send — it’s a touchpoint informed by what the customer browsed, what email they opened, and what’s sitting in their cart. Forrester’s TEI study found $2.8 million in SMS revenue growth when SMS was integrated alongside email on the same platform, and omnichannel cart recovery drives up to a 45% recovery rate uplift vs. single-channel approaches.
- It empowers brands to keep pace as AI evolves. A platform ensures campaigns run, revenue flows, and customers stay engaged today — all while agentic capabilities are developed and layered on top. You don’t have to choose between investing in what works now and building toward what’s next.
With the Right Platform, You Can Put Agents to Work Today
Adopting a modern platform doesn’t mean waiting for agents — it means you’re ready to put them in practice on day one.
Bloomreach’s agentic personalization platform, Loomi, is purpose-built to do exactly that. It provides the intelligent architecture brands need to understand every customer, engage dynamically across every channel, and operate at the speed and scale that modern marketing demands.
It does so by combining:
- Unified context — consolidated data profiles that give Loomi the deepest possible understanding of each shopper.
- Real-time infrastructure — data ingestion to activation in milliseconds, so touchpoints reflect the customer’s current moment, not their last session.
- Orchestration across channels — Loomi natively powers 17+ channels all connected to the same intelligence.
- Continuous optimization — real-time testing and learning that contextualizes every interaction, leading to exponential growth over time.
- AI decisioning and agents — proprietary models and AI agents that determine the right experience for each individual.
This last point is where Loomi’s agentic capabilities deliver the future-proof solution that businesses are looking for.
With your data, context, and real-time execution unified in one platform, agents can do all the incredible things that AI promised: act as a personal shopping expert on your website, build complete marketing campaigns from scratch, and more.
Loomi provides these agents today, with ready-to-deploy solutions that customers are already using to prove ROI.
Loomi Marketing Agent
Campaign building has always been a complex, time-consuming process. With Loomi marketing agent, all it takes is a conversation.
Just describe the campaign you want in plain language, and Loomi marketing agent creates a complete workflow, including determining the right audience, channel mix, consent logic, personalized content, and timing. What used to take hours of manual setup can now be shipped in 15 minutes.
Leading brands are adopting Loomi marketing agent to revolutionize their workflows. 260 Sample Sale used Loomi marketing agent to automate its most data-intensive campaigns and saw a 2.4x higher conversion rate and $10K more revenue — while targeting just 18% of their audience.
Loomi Shopping Agent
Loomi shopping agent transforms on-site browsing into a guided, personalized shopping experience.
Through real-time conversations, it meets customers where they are — recognizing a customer’s intent, drawing on their previous interactions, and reflecting an in-depth knowledge of your product catalog to deliver VIP-level shopping journeys that drive measurable conversions.
TFG, the largest fashion and lifestyle retail group in South Africa, deployed Loomi shopping agent on its Bash ecommerce platform during Black Friday — and customers who engaged with the agent saw a 35.2% higher conversion rate, a 39.8% higher revenue per visit, and a 28.1% lower exit rate.
Loomi Connect
Beyond the innovative prebuilt agents that Loomi provides, our agentic personalization platform gives you the foundation to power whatever agentic experience comes next for your business.
Loomi Connect turns all of your business’s insights into an agent-ready intelligence layer, empowering brands to build custom AI agents on top of Loomi’s architecture. Commerce intelligence, customer profiles, product discovery, marketing automation, and analytics all become composable tools that any compliant agent can call on, allowing you to evolve your agentic capabilities on your own timeline, not a vendor’s roadmap.
You can start transforming how your team works with prebuilt agents today while simultaneously developing bespoke agents unique to your business. With Loomi, there is no either/or for driving revenue now and building for tomorrow.
Your Modern Foundation for an Agentic Future
Forward-thinking brands aren’t choosing between a marketing platform and agentic AI. They recognize that modern marketing demands both — and they’re adopting a solution that delivers.
With Loomi, you get an AI-powered platform with the unified foundation you need today and the agentic capabilities that set you up for future success.
The only decision left is how soon your business moves to a future-proof solution. Schedule a demo today and see why 1,400+ brands already have.
