"Agentic AI" is the buzzword everyone's throwing around in 2026. The promise is AI that doesn't just answer questions but autonomously executes multi-step tasks. The reality for small marketing teams is a bit more complicated than Silicon Valley would like you to believe, though.
Instead of you telling AI to write an email, agentic AI supposedly finds the contact, drafts the message, schedules it, and follows up without you having to touch it.
For enterprise companies with massive marketing operations, this is apparently the next big thing. Early adopters claim 3x ROI improvements and significant cost savings. The agentic AI market is expected to grow from $7.55 billion in 2025 to nearly $200 billion by 2034.
Impressive numbers, and it's clearly big business. But the problem is that very little of that applies to teams like ours.
We're a small marketing agency working with B2B IT companies. Our projects are custom, our clients are specific, and our timelines change based on real-world factors.
In our case, setting up sophisticated workflow automation takes longer than just doing the task ourselves. And we'd spend more time checking if the automation worked correctly than we would have spent doing it manually.
The people obsessing about agentic AI are solving different problems than we are, at a different scale. They're managing hundreds of campaigns across dozens of markets. We're creating targeted content for specific personas in niche industries.
With all that being said, there are a few small-scale use cases where the "agentic" concept genuinely helps.
Notice the pattern? These are all cases where AI does mechanical synthesis, not strategic thinking.
At our scale, setting up automation takes more time than just doing the work. That's not efficiency, that's procrastination with extra steps.
Tools like n8n (open-source workflow automation) and Zapier (the more user-friendly option) are on our radar for connecting different tools together.
But we're cautious. Very cautious.
The temptation with these tools is to automate everything. Connect your CRM to your email tool, to your social scheduler, to your analytics platform, to just about anything. Build elaborate workflows that trigger based on complex conditions.
And then spend three hours debugging why the automation didn't fire or checking every output because you're not quite sure if it worked correctly.
For now, we're sticking with manual processes we understand over automated processes we have to babysit.
Our rule of thumb: automate the repetitive stuff that doesn't need your creative input.
Good candidates:
Bad candidates:
If the automation saves you 10 minutes, but it takes 20 minutes to set up and 5 minutes to verify, you haven't saved time, you've wasted it.
Agentic AI is real, and it's impressive. For enterprise companies with the scale and resources to implement it properly, it's probably a game-changer. But for small marketing teams working on custom projects with specific clients, the ROI isn't there yet.
We're keeping an eye on it. Maybe in a year or two, the tools will be simple enough and reliable enough that they make sense at our scale. But today, we're focusing on using AI to work faster, not on building complex automation that we have to maintain.
Want to talk about how we use AI practically, without the hype?
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