AI workers and an audience of bots: The biggest takeaways from ANA Masters of Marketing

Orlando, Fl. — The advertising job market is great right now — if you’re an AI agent.

At the ANA Masters of Marketing conference in Orlando last week, nearly every marketer on stage seemed to talk about how AI agents had become the secret sauce to their brand’s success in 2025 and an inevitability going forward.

It makes sense why these tool-employee hybrids were top of mind. Earlier this month, several companies across the advertising industry formed the Ad Context Protocol (AdCP), designed to connect an apparently growing network of AI agents now being used to streamline this new era of advertising.

The focus of the onstage conversations wasn’t just “why” marketers should be adding AI agents, however. It was also the “how.” Specifically, how marketers should be managing this new class of AI employees, as well as the benefits — and potential complications — that can come from leading a combined team of humans and AI effectively.

‘Lead the agents the way you lead your teams’

Finding the perfect applicant takes time — so does nurturing the perfect AI agent.

“Agents are intelligence decoupled from consciousness. They are literally synthetic employees,” which means they need to be onboarded as such, said Shelly Palmer, president and CEO of The Palmer Group, during his Thursday morning keynote.

Palmer cautioned marketers to “beware of agents” before adding them to their team. There are critical decisions to make about the role they will have, including what information they will have access to, how long they will be in use, how they will be kept up to date and how the agents will comply with their companies’ existing data governance.

Perhaps most importantly, he said, marketers will need to decide who is responsible for making these decisions and managing these agents.

“This is not a technology problem. … This is a leadership challenge,” he said.

This sentiment was echoed by other speakers who’ve been tasked with implementing AI operations within teams, like Trinadha Kandi, the managing director of the advertising, marketing and commerce practice at Deloitte Digital.

“We all know that transformation is not only about technology or tools. It’s bigger than that. It’s about the process; it’s about the talent; it’s about strategy,” Kandi said.

And because it’s a leadership task, managers are often in the best position to build a high-performing team of AI agents.

Palmer, whose consultancy has worked with dozens of companies on AI leadership training, said that it’s the “wizened warriors” of the organizations that know exactly what questions to ask their AI agents to get impactful outcomes because they have the management experience.

While younger, digitally native teammates may be more comfortable with the idea of AI colleagues, Palmer said they are more likely to generate AI “work slop” — poorly directed output — because they don’t have the delegation and management experience.

Marketing to bots

Despite the excited discussion about honing teams of AI agents, the masters didn’t seem concerned about being replaced.

There’s simply too much work to be done to reach a new, crucial audience: AI bots.

Just look at the changes to consumers’ search behaviors over the past year and the recent announcement of OpenAI’s in-app shopping feature, Instant Checkout. Marketers need to start optimizing their brand’s advertising strategy for answer engine optimization (AEO), not just SEO.

“There is no version of the world coming where we’re not going to be marketing to bots,” Palmer said.

That doesn’t just mean maintaining discoverability by churning out 200% more content than was necessary even four months ago, said Nicola Grant, senior vice president of global brand and advertising at Mastercard. It also means figuring out more nebulous tasks, like how to translate her brand’s trustworthiness to an AI agent.

“Let’s go forward 18 months where we’ve got lots of little agents running around on our behalf. … How are they going to know to seek out my solution for their human? Because I’ve got to convert what we do well … into some kind of code that will be understandable by those agents,” Grant said.

Melanie Huet, president of home and commercial at Newell Brands, said that the reality of marketing to bots is already reshaping her company’s marketing department, estimating upward of five to eight times more media needed to drive growth.

There is a “massive explosion of content requirements to do business digitally,” she said.