Three lessons from building marketing agents

Three pieces of advice for marketers who want to build marketing agents, from my own hands-on experience.

You cannot prompt your way out of hallucination

LLMs will fill data gaps with confidence unless you design guardrails.

• Constrain to approved enterprise data
• Embed business rules it cannot override
• Introduce an audit agent dedicated to auditing outputs
• Keep humans involved for high impact decisions

Expect a long cycle for production ready

Switching it on is simple. Making it trustworthy takes time.

• Run structured quality control
• Test real workflow scenarios
• Tighten boundaries through feedback
• Refine repeatedly before scaling

Expanding connectors will surface real issues

You need connectors and data access for real impact. As you expand use cases and integrate more tools, existing infrastructure and data gaps will show up.

• Fragile APIs disrupt orchestration
• Inconsistent definitions distort outputs
• Data latency affects responsiveness
• Broader scope increases coordination effort

A compound game

The impact of marketing agents is a compound game. Efficiency and effectiveness build across many small workflow improvements. Before agents, during, and after.