Dentsu Digital Charts the New Currents of an AI-Agent Driven Marketing Era Part 1: AI-Hacked Marketing at the Forefront of Evolution

In recent years, AI has evolved at an unprecedented pace, beginning to rewrite the established norms across various industries.

By 2024, generative AI had achieved multimodality, enabling more accurate and nuanced reasoning. In the first quarter of 2025, the emergence of “Deep Research,” a new capability that enhanced AI’s ability to conduct multi-step reasoning, as well as advancements in image and video generation accuracy, marked the beginning of widespread societal recognition of AI agents.

An AI agent is a software system that can can complete tasks autonomously or semi-autonomously.  It makes decisions, takes actions toward defined objectives, and produces the required outcomes.

Furthermore, a new concept known as “multi-agent” has emerged, in which multiple AI agents interact and collaborate to optimize entire business processes.

In the field of marketing, for example, we are seeing a world rapidly becoming a reality in which agents specializing in areas such as data science, research, sales management, and customer engagement can now work together , enabling the entire marketing process to be autonomously driven.

Since the early 2010s, the Dentsu Group has focused on the potential of AI technologies, developing practical systems utilizing machine learning such as automated copy generation for advertisements, TV viewership prediction, and automated banner ad creation. More recently, the group has worked on building the “People Model,” aiming to create “100 million personas,” or detailed virtual profiles of consumers based on data from longitudinal surveys of 150,000 people. At Dentsu Digital, the in-house product “∞AI” (pronounced Mugen AI, meaning “infinity” in Japanese) was launched in 2022. With ongoing enhancements to the product’s features and integration of AI agents, its scope of application continues to expand.

The emergence of multi-agent systems represents a paradigm shift in marketing, with an impact even greater than that of the advent of databases or the internet. At Dentsu Digital, we see this as a shift from “Data Driven Marketing” to “AI-Hacked Marketing.”

Data Driven Marketing is built on a two-layer model, where humans directly utilize data. In contrast, AI Hacked Marketing introduces AI between humans and data, creating a three-layer structure in which AI autonomously operates across all business processes.

Specifically, it can be visualized as illustrated in the diagram below（in Japanese）

To realize this three-layer model, it is crucial to build a marketing AI agent that is optimized for your company.

A marketing AI agent should be assembled from a wide range of options, including specialized AI products like ∞AI and AI solutions offered by major platform providers.

The key to achieving AI-Hacked Marketing lies in optimally orchestrating these various options to create an AI layer that best fits your organization.

Dentsu Digital is evolving into an AI-native agency, working alongside client companies to implement and nurture the optimal marketing AI solutions together.

Our strength lies in our deep practical expertise across all aspects of marketing operations. In addition to the know-how and experience we’ve accumulated over years of supporting client projects, we bring creative expertise and proprietary data into our own AI products. We have also developed capabilities in introducing and leveraging third-party products through partnerships with major platforms. Furthermore, we possess expertise in preparing metadata and building operational infrastructure essential for effective AI utilization. By combining these strengths, we can serve as a true partner to our clients, supporting them across the entire spectrum of marketing.

To drive marketing transformation with AI, we offer two main entry points:

The first is basic planning. This involves taking a holistic view of all marketing operations, clarifying resource allocation and bottlenecks, identifying areas to prioritize for AI integration, and then formulating an overall roadmap and implementation strategy.

The second is a Proof of Concept (PoC) for specific tasks. Here, we focus on particular operations—such as creative production—and conduct a PoC to test how AI can transform specific operations, enabling us to develop practical strategies for company-wide adoption in the future.

The use of AI is no longer limited to a handful of leading-edge companies. Implementing and utilizing AI agents in marketing is now becoming a realistic option, and the speed of adoption is becoming a key factor in competitiveness.

At Dentsu Digital, we are committed to being a strong partner for our client companies as you take that important first step into the world of AI.