Who owns agentic workflows? Agencies struggle to govern new tools as marketing budgets surge

Execs say they’re in the process of providing guardrails around their own internal systems to prevent over reliance on generative AI for things like presentations or client insights, and vet agentic workflow tools.

The topic came up during Digiday’s Programmatic Marketing Summit in a town hall session, in which attendees are granted anonymity in exchange for candor. Some brand and agency managers are policing agentic workflows on a case by case basis. One brand marketing exec cited copy and pasted AI summaries in places like presentations and client insights as “bad behavior.” Another said their internal teams are uploading datasets into LLMs and passing along “surface-level” insights to leadership, “completely missing the whole purpose of what we do at this point.”

“It’s about us setting a tone for those who don’t want to do that [copy and pasting], who do want to thrive, and then incentivizing that, and then nourishing those team members,” said one of the brand marketing execs.

Another agency-side exec in the town hall said they were put in charge of an OpenAI ads pilot simply because they understood agentic ecosystems. “Why was I in charge of the OpenAI pilot? We didn’t know if it was search or programmatic or social,” they said.

AI ambitions meet reality of preparedness

Deciding how AI is used, vetting tools, shaping best practices and how staff are incentivized to use AI tools are still up for debate internally at agencies. As technology moves faster than marketers can keep up with, marketers risk burning money to chase tools through fragmented experiments.

“What I’m seeing right now is agencies, advertisers and partners now all creating their own agentic workflows, and there’s no governing those different schools of thought,” one agency exec said during the town hall.

As companies wrestle with this, the dollars have already started moving. CMOs are allocating an average of 15.3% of marketing budgets to AI initiatives, according to recent research from Gartner. But while 70% of CMOs prioritize becoming a leader in AI this year, only 30% report having the capabilities to do so, per the research.

Agencies have put spend among AI tools like Google Performance Max (PMax) and AI Max for Search on their search teams. Meanwhile, Meta Advantage+ sits within paid social teams.

“It’s really on our leadership teams to continue to drive and push that innovation [AI adoption and experimentation inside the agency]. Because if we don’t do it, they’re not going to do it,” said a third anonymous exec during the DPMS town hall.

Industry pressure to change

Last month, the IAB Tech Lab formed the Programmatic Governance Council including the likes of WPP, Disney, Magnite, Yahoo, Amazon Ads and The Trade Desk. It’s meant to outline workflows, governance framework and guidance on auction transparency and could provide guidance or structure for agencies.