US hotels kick off World Cup summer with a solid revenue goal
US hotels kick off World Cup summer with a solid revenue goal
Rate-driven growth intensifies as tournament begins
Haiti players walk off the pitch after the 2026 World Cup Group C match between Haiti and Scotland at the Boston Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, on June 13. (Getty Images)
https://www.costar.com/article/1842351965/us-hotels-kick-off-world-cup-summer-with-a-solid-revpar-goal?
U.S. hotel performance surged in the first week of the FIFA World Cup, with demand reaching a new 2026 high of nearly 28 million rooms sold during the week of June 7-13.
The lift in demand pushed occupancy to 69.9%, the highest level of the year, while average daily rate (ADR) rose 4.9%, marking 15 consecutive weeks of rate growth. The result was weekly revenue per available room (RevPAR) of $120, the highest level since 2024 and a 7% increase year over year, as ADR growth continued to outpace room demand gains.
While ADR-driven growth remained the primary story, weekend hotel performance reasserted itself after a four-week stretch in which weekday gains had led. Weekend RevPAR increased 15.3%, driven by a 9.1% rise in ADR alongside a 6.2% increase in demand and a 4.1-percentage-point lift in occupancy. The shift aligned with the start of the World Cup, although performance gains extended well beyond host markets.
Much of the weekend’s volume growth occurred outside the 11 World Cup host markets. Excluding those markets, weekend hotel RevPAR across the rest of the country rose 13.6%, with 96 markets reporting double-digit growth. These non-host markets accounted for 97% of the increase in rooms sold, supported by a 7.2% gain in demand. In contrast, host markets recorded stronger top-line growth, with RevPAR up 23%, but that performance was almost entirely rate-driven. ADR in host markets increased 22.5%, while demand was relatively flat (+1.1%).
The World Cup began play in the U.S. on Friday, June 12, and through the week of June 7-13, four matches were held across Boston, Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco. Early results from these markets reinforce expectations that event-driven compression will favor ADR over hotel demand. Combined, these four markets posted a 31.9% increase in weekend RevPAR, driven by a 26.9% gain in ADR. Demand rose just 4.8%, with San Francisco the only market to report double-digit growth (+17%).
Across this initial sample, hotel performance gains were highly concentrated around match timing, with the largest increases occurring on the day prior to and the day of each match. San Francisco posted the strongest weekend results, with RevPAR up 44.4% for the match between Qatar and Switzerland. The market reached $181 in RevPAR and 78.2% occupancy, both sizable increases year over year, but well below peak compression levels seen ahead of the Super Bowl earlier this year, when RevPAR reached $529, and occupancy climbed to 86.7%.
New York recorded the second-largest increase among host markets, with weekend RevPAR rising 36.8% as ADR reached $395 and hotel occupancy climbed to 87.5%. Despite the World Cup lift, weekend performance trailed weekday levels, as the market also benefited from the NBA Finals and multiple business conferences earlier in the week.
Outside of the World Cup, Chicago and Washington, D.C., posted some of the largest performance gains of the week. Chicago recorded its second consecutive weekend near 93% occupancy, driven by overlapping business, leisure, and event demand, which pushed RevPAR up 37.4%. In Washington, D.C., a similar convergence of events, including the lead-up to the UFC Freedom 250 event, supported a strong weekend performance.
Early World Cup results point to a clear pattern of ADR-led growth, with hotel demand gains concentrated in non-host markets and around specific event windows. As more matches are played and host markets rotate, the extent to which demand broadens — and whether ADR continues to outpace occupancy gains — will be key to sustaining the current pace of RevPAR growth. While we continue to assert that the World Cup will be an ADR-led event, our forward-booking data shows that markets with early matches had a surge in last-minute bookings. As World Cup fever gets higher, we could be surprised on the demand side as well.
Global RevPAR is flat as multiple countries are down
Based on comparable hotels and on a constant USD basis, excluding the U.S., global hotel RevPAR was flat during the week (-0.3%) on falling occupancy (-0.9 percentage points) and a slight increase in ADR (+0.9%). Like last week, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries were responsible for the decrease, as global RevPAR without them was up 3.2% on rising ADR.
Besides the GCC decline, several other large hotel markets were also down, including Canada, France, Mexico, and the U.K. Australia and China were flat. Countries seeing RevPAR advance included the Caribbean, Germany, India, Japan, and Spain.
Germany alone was responsible for more than 130 basis points of the global RevPAR increase, excluding GCC. Its RevPAR rose by 34.6% with nearly all markets, except three, reporting double-digit growth. Stuttgart led the country with 89.8% increase on nearly equal gains in occupancy and ADR. That was true for the country, too.
Mexico’s RevPAR continued to retreat, falling 10.1% this week as key tourist markets continued to decline, with Cancun down 29.6%. However, Mexico City and Monterrey saw RevPAR increase due to World Cup matches. RevPAR in Mexico City grew by 44.3% during the week, with the measure up by more than 115% on Wednesday and Thursday. As expected, World Cup-induced RevPAR was led by ADR as occupancy was flat to down.
Cole Martin is an Analytics and Insights Specialist at STR, and Isaac Collazo is the Senior Director of Analytics at STR.
Braemar's path forward remains 'a little complicated,' analyst says
After years of challenges, the publicly traded hotel REIT sector is seeing some upside
On its path to self-management, Braemar Hotels & Resorts will need to pay off $480 million and $25 million termination fees. To do so, the REIT intends to sell off two to three more hotels. The Ritz-Carlton, Lake Tahoe is among the company's portfolio of high-end properties. (CoStar)
https://www.costar.com/article/1343997964/braemars-path-forward-remains-a-little-complicated?
By Bryan Wroten
Braemar Hotels & Resorts changing course from a planned sale of the company to become self-managed came as a surprise to both shareholders and industry analysts.
Braemar shared late last week that it was no longer pursuing a sale of the company, as it announced in August 2025. Instead, it plans to cut ties with its external adviser, Ashford Inc., and pay off its $480 million advisory agreement termination fee and $25 million master agreement termination fee through selling two to three more of its hotels. It intends to go forward as a publicly traded hotel REIT with a portfolio of six to eight high-end properties.
The market was already pricing in that the luxury hotel-focused real estate investment trust sale would happen, said Michael Bellisario, senior research analyst at Baird. Baird acted as the financial adviser to Braemar’s special committee during its strategic review process.
“Based on the stock reaction, I think that’s true, that people assumed the liquidation would occur,” he said. Braemar’s stock is currently trading at $2.07 per share, down from $2.53 at closing on June 11, the day before the news broke.
The hotel transaction market has been “pretty robust” lately, and luxury resorts and other high-end performing hotels have been attracting buyers, Bellisario said. The pricing Braemar has achieved in recent hotel sales was solid. His team expected Braemar to continue down the sales path and potentially turn into a liquidating trust.
The news of the new direction is still fresh, and it will take time for Braemar's plans to transition into action. In the meantime, there are many yet-to-be answered questions, including whether this will be the right move for the REIT and its shareholders.
Analyzing the play
Just because a plan is announced doesn’t mean that’s the way it’s going to go. Braemar’s August sell-off plan is one such example.
To move toward self-management, Braemar has to sell off a few more hotels to generate enough cash to pay off its termination fees, Bellisario said. On top of that, there are processes that need to be figured out. All of these things take time.
“What does the balance sheet look like of a six- to eight-hotel REIT?” he asked. “What do the [general and administrative costs] look like? When does the board get picked? When does the shareholder meeting occur?”
This sort of transition doesn’t happen in a week or two, Bellisario said. It will be months before there’s any form of finality.
Since its August announcement, Braemar has closed on or made moves toward selling six hotels: the Marriott Seattle Waterfront, the Clancy in San Francisco, the Park Hyatt Beaver Creek Resort & Spa, the Ritz-Carlton Sarasota, the Hotel Yountville, and the Bardessono Resort & Spa. To pay off its termination fees, the REIT will need to sell more hotels to cover the $480 million and $25 million required.
The wrinkle is that with the exception of Braemar's hotel in Beverly Hills, each hotel deal following its sale of the Beaver Creek property has mortgage debt attached to it, Bellisario said. The most recent deal, the three-hotel portfolio selling for $437.5 million, will result in about $330 million cash after accounting for their respective debt loads.
“Which is why they still need to sell a couple more hotels,” he said. “When they sell one or two or three more hotels, each of those hotels also has debt that needs to get repaid, too.”
The detachment of Braemar from Ashford will benefit the REIT, Bellisario said. A lot of the company’s stock performance can be attributed to the dollars it’s paying Ashford. Similarly, if it weren’t for the termination fees, in theory, the stock trading at about $2 a share could be up to $9 a share, and its market cap would be 4.5 times its current size.
Moving forward as a self-managed REIT without an external adviser or termination fees hanging over it makes Braemar a smaller, more bite-sized target for acquisition, he said. The challenge for the buyer, though, is that all of the REIT’s properties that are easiest to sell will likely be sold to pay off the termination fees. The remaining hotels, though higher-end, are in challenging markets.
Braemar's Beverly Hills hotel has negative cash flow because it’s a tough market, Bellisario said. Chicago is generally viewed as a lower-value, tougher market with less buyer interest. Washington, D.C., is another challenged market.
“It would be very interesting if there were a couple of Ritz-Carltons left and a Four Seasons, but that stuff has been sold,” he said.
Another potential wrinkle: unhappy shareholders. Al Shams Investments, a Bermuda-based private investment company and the REIT’s largest shareholder, wrote a letter to Braemar’s outside members of its board of directors, accusing them and Ashford Inc. Chairman and CEO Monty Bennett of “one of the most brazen acts of self-dealing” by moving forward with its recent three-hotel deal that he said triggered the termination fees requirement.
“Braemar was already among the most leveraged lodging REITs in the sector,” Wafic Rida, owner of Al Shams, said in the letter. “You have now saddled the company with an obligation that exceeds the net proceeds of the very sales that triggered it. This is not a business decision; it is, in our view, an act of financial recklessness carried out for Mr. Bennett's personal gain.”
Al Shams said it will pursue all available legal remedies against the board members, Bennett and other parties involved. It will also nominate a full slate of new, independent directors at the company’s annual meeting this year.
In response to the letter, a Braemar spokesperson shared a statement calling the letter an attempt to mislead shareholders and that the company has since its initial investment in Braemar tried to push the REIT to breach its advisory agreement with Ashford.
The company has implemented suggestions Al Shams has made, including refreshing the board, installing an independent chairman, becoming a self-managed REIT, and separating from Ashford, it said. The company is using an independent third-party search firm to select new board members without any involvement from Bennett.
The statement also pointed to questions raised about Said's compliance with United Kingdom campaign finance rules and investigations by the government into an arms deal transaction in the 1980s.
"The bottom line is we do not believe this is an individual with the best interests of all shareholders at heart,” the statement concludes.
The move isn’t up for a shareholder vote, but litigation could delay this transition process, Bellisario said. Other shareholders could oppose the transition as well. There are a lot of questions about how this could play out without any answers yet and none coming soon.
Though publicly traded hotel REITs have not exactly been hot tickets in recent years, there is still some value in this type of business. A public company has a certain amount of fixed costs regardless of whether it has five or 25 hotels, Bellisario said. Presumably, the G&A load will be somewhat efficient.
Still, the cost of capital will be higher because Braemar will be a smaller company. It has geographic and concentration risks for any problems that arise at one of its hotels or markets. It’s too soon to know who will be on the new board and who will be on the new management team.
“The one way to think about it is, are they hitting the reset button here and saying, ‘We're starting over. We're going to have six to eight hotels, and we're going to do it right,” Bellisario said. “But … does the market have an appetite for a ‘new hotel REIT?’”
A hotel REIT’s ability to grow its portfolio through acquisitions and issuing equity is dictated by the market, the cost of capital, and how receptive investors are to the strategy and capital allocation, he said. That’s a high bar because there are multiple other hotel REITs to choose from that now have a much-improved cost of capital, a longer track record, and larger hotel portfolios.
There was some talk in August after Braemar made its initial announcement that maybe someone would take the REIT private, but that didn’t happen, and it’s likely because that was too big a check to write and too complicated a situation, Bellisario said.
“Maybe there's an appetite for that after the fact, when it is cleaned up, and it is six to eight hotels, and it is internally advised, and maybe the stock doesn't perform well,” he said.
That’s when a take-private deal becomes an option, but even then, the motivation would be different, Bellisario said. The REIT wouldn’t have its Remington Hospitality contracts or Premier Project Management contracts to maintain, so it would be almost the same as buying hotels. The synergy wouldn’t necessarily be there.
“The moral of the story is, it’s been complicated. It remains a little complicated and, frankly, a little uncertain, too,” he said.
The current REIT environment
When there are a number of paths forward for a small hotel REIT, what exactly is the value in staying a publicly traded hotel REIT?
“Hotel REITs are having a moment,” said C. Patrick Scholes, managing director of lodging and leisure equity research at Truist, who does not cover Braemar as a company. He added that the sector in general is seeing a bit of a sunnier outlook lately.
Year to date, hotel REITs generally have seen some of the best stock performance in a six-month period that he can recall, Scholes said. Excluding the post-pandemic and Great Recession bounces, the only other time outside of their normal periods in which the segment's stocks were doing this well was in the lead-up to the Great Recession, when there were a lot of private equity buyouts.
In the current environment, the hotel REIT sector isn’t exactly well-liked by investors, Scholes said. The top reason is that revenue per available room has been lethargic at best over the past couple of years, and that coupled with higher costs means lower margins.
“With decent RevPAR now, you might actually see some margin expansion here for the first time in a number of years, at least since those easy COVID comparisons,” he said.
The transaction market isn’t hot, but it is warmer than it has been, Scholes said. Buyers have accepted the interest rate environment for what it is, and they’re not waiting for rates to go down further.
“There might actually be thinking interest rates might actually go up slightly, so maybe that gives you a little bit of a sense of urgency,” he said.
On the seller’s side, there are hotel owners out there who have delayed capital expenditure projects and would rather part ways with the property than invest further into it, he added.
One reason many investors have had a less favorable view of the sector is that some hotel REITs made diluted acquisitions or chased markets that struggled after the pandemic, Scholes said. That has changed somewhat as more REITs have turned to selling properties or paying dividends instead of buying a hotel.
Even so, activist investors have become more vocal with their grievances, including those diluted trophy acquisitions, he said.
“I do think as the activists were heard, and given where the share prices and valuations were, I think management teams heard that as well,” he said.
What’s helping hotel REITs now is that the decoupling of GDP growth and RevPAR growth seems to be ending, Scholes said. Typically, those two move in the same direction, but over the past couple of years, the mid-single-digit GDP growth wasn’t matched by any RevPAR growth.
“Now it seems to actually get some pretty strong RevPAR growth here in a similar real GDP environment,” he said.
The publicly traded hotel brand companies, such as Hilton or Marriott International, are seeing high valuations, by comparison, and that’s no surprise, Scholes said. However, if investors are looking for out-of-favor sub-sectors, the hotel REITs do check that box. That hotel REITs’ revenues are doing better than expected is helpful.
“What are you buying here for? You're buying that investors will look more favorably on the sector, give it a bit of a better multiple, and also raise your revenue numbers,” he said. “So, you have those two powerful drivers to stock price: Give it a better valuation multiple and potentially raise your revenue numbers.”
Editor's note, June 16, 2026: This article has been updated to include a statement from Braemar Hotels & Resorts about the Al Sham letter.
Be passport-prepared this upcoming vacation and business-travel season
The eradication of globalization means national security databases will remain standalone
https://www.costar.com/article/1498039177/be-passport-prepared-this-upcoming-vacation-and-business-travel-season?
The rules for United Kingdom and European Union travelers to go to and from each other have changed notably over the past year.
As someone who did not vote for Brexit, I regard these changes as highly annoying, not because they complicate crossing a border but because the implementation of these new hurdles and the causes that allowed them just seem juvenile or petty.
Authority never misses a chance to be more authoritative.
I have always loved the quote from Blaise Pascal, which goes, “all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
Security is key, evidently and obviously, but the rapid move to isolationism, I believe, is fueled mostly by politicians’ hubris.
The perceived fear of immigration has been a key talking point of many countries’ elections, and it seems to me the ease of travel has been eroded because of that and the need to keep some voters pacified.
I lived in the U.S. for two decades; my wife, whom I met in New York City, is Italian and now lives in London with me, and her twin sister and her family live in Spain, her partner and their daughter, our niece, being Spanish.
The twins’ mother was Greek American, with that side of the family hailing originally from Lesbos and, before that, we believe, from Turkey, or more correctly, from the Ottoman Empire.
My English next-door neighbor was turned away from the airport last month for not having six months’ validity on her U.K. passport.
That is, I think, a known requirement, but the confusion seemed to come in yet another change, this time in U.K. law.
Her 10-year passport would have been issued prior to 2018, and prior to 2018, the U.K. allowed “extra months” to be added to a new passport if the holder renewed early, for the entirely sensible notion of encouraging people to be proactive.
My neighbor’s passport was valid for 10 years and eight months, but airport officials now ignore those extra months and strictly cap a U.K. passport “lifespan” as 10 years from the date of issue.
For the last few months, U.K. passport holders have had to go through extra steps of identification at the border arrival point before entering EU territory.
Again, that is not a new idea.
As a Green Card holder in the U.S., before I gained citizenship, I was used to that, but the new requirements have delayed entry and are yet another component that can make travel a frustration, not a joy.
My wife always takes her “right for U.K. settled status” documentation with her when she leaves the country.
That, too, is a relatively recent piece of legislation.
Most travelers in that same group, I am pretty sure, do not bring it with them.
In addition, EU citizens coming to the U.K. have needed to have a visa to enter the U.K., although we Brits do not need one to go the other way.
That is, we do not need one yet, but that will change, perhaps by the end of 2026, but more likely in 2027.
The European Travel Information and Authorisation System visa will, at last reckoning, have a £20 cost and last for three years. It will be able to be gained online, so, like all visas worldwide, it is merely a cash-generating exercise.
Some of the above is me griping, and so far, I have not had a single mishap at an airport, so I am one of the following things — prepared or lucky —, but as we have just officially entered the summer, these are things to bear in mind.
We all work hard in an ever-complicated world, and the last thing we need is a ruined vacation or nonattendance at an important work event abroad.
Hoteliers talk often about the elimination of pain points and guest friction.
Surely, we possess the technology to eradicate half or nearly all the hurdles of travel, although I suspect future solutions will be offered with fat, annual processing fees.
The sprint towards isolationism will likely continue to mean there is probably no desire to link up countries’ passport-check and security systems.
Reinventing marketing workflows with agentic AI
https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/reinventing-marketing-workflows-with-agentic-ai?
Dianne Esber is a senior partner in McKinsey’s Bay Area office, where Eli Stein is a partner; Julien Boudet is a senior partner in the Southern California office; Kelsey Robinson is a senior partner in the Boston office; and Nilay Shah is a consultant in the New York office.
For marketers, AI-enabled workflows will fuel new levels of growth, speed, and efficiency. What is your activation plan?
The future of marketing will be defined by how well organizations operate in an AI-mediated world. Consumers are discovering, evaluating, and purchasing through increasingly intelligent systems; attention is fragmented across proliferating platforms; and expectations for relevance, personalization, and immediacy are rising at once. Marketing is no longer confined to campaigns and channels—it is becoming a real-time growth engine that integrates insights, content, commerce, and performance in a continuous loop. In this environment, advantage will accrue to those who can learn faster, personalize at scale, optimize across the full funnel, and design experiences not only for people but also for the AI systems that guide them. The role of the CMO is expanding accordingly—from steward of brand and demand to orchestrator of data, technology, and AI-enabled execution.
That kind of execution is no simple task—and marketing organizations understand this better than most. Marketers, after all, have been among the earliest adopters of gen AI, piloting use cases from copy generation to image creation. Many tools have gained traction, yet because they typically solve isolated tasks, the result has been a patchwork of disconnected pilots and systems that increase activity (for example, more early-concept images produced) while delivering few meaningful enterprise-wide benefits. Much of this fragmentation reflects legacy marketing technology architectures—multiple CMS, digital asset management, CRM, and analytics systems that were never designed for real-time agentic workflows or shared data models. It’s the “gen AI paradox”: The technology can increasingly be found everywhere—except on the bottom line.
Agentic AI—systems built on foundation models capable of acting and executing multistep processes—has the potential to address this problem because it offers the opportunity for organizations to fundamentally transform the way work gets done. Rather than relying on practitioners using isolated tools to boost individual productivity and effectiveness, organizations can create hybrid human–agentic workforces—in which people design and oversee networks of AI agents that handle most of the execution. In this model, one marketing professional can supervise a team of agents, potentially driving growth, boosting productivity, and freeing human colleagues to focus on higher-level tasks like creativity and strategy. Realizing this shift requires a modernized technology foundation: unified identity and data layers, flexible model-serving infrastructure, and content and activation systems that expose reliable APIs for agents to act on.
Realizing this potential value is only possible through the reimagining and rebuilding of workflows around agentic AI. This is no simple task, which helps explain why companies so far have struggled to extract significant value from AI agents. Organizations that fail to do the hard work needed to reinvent workflows risk creating suboptimal human–agent collaborations and systems that fall far short of delivering on the technology’s promise.
While we are still in the early days of agentic AI, a recipe for how to reimagine and rebuild marketing workflows is emerging. This article will examine the five-step process for creating an agentic marketing workflow.
The value of agentic AI in marketing
We estimate that agentic AI will come to power as much as two-thirds of current marketing activities, enabling tasks such as automated content generation, synthetic audience testing, and audience-based media planning (Exhibit 1).
Exhibit 1
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Ultimately, an agentic workforce has the potential to transform marketing operations in three key ways:
Powering topline growth. Organizations that are implementing agentic workflows in marketing can expect to see 10 to 30 percent revenue growth from hyperpersonalized marketing, according to McKinsey research. Much of this new marketing activity will be self-serve due to always-on, AI-enabled campaigns with improved cross-functional collaboration across teams and channels.
Enabling speed. We estimate that agentic systems will accelerate the creation and execution of marketing campaigns by ten to 15 times, by speeding up both the brainstorming and vetting of ideas, leading to faster testing and sharper optimization.
Fueling working spend and growth. Powering more work with AI agents will allow resources previously spent on processes and operations to be reallocated toward directly reaching consumers. The result: humans focusing on the more important tasks and higher ROI from data-driven marketing, media, and creative performance.
These gains, of course, are by no means certain. They will only be realized by reimagining the way marketing is accomplished. Below, we explain how leading organizations are doing just that.
Creating an agentic marketing workflow
Designing an agentic AI solution generally requires a five-step process—from identifying the tasks that can be accomplished with agents to rethinking human roles for proper oversight (Exhibit 2). As they navigate this process, leaders must be aware of several factors that add to execution complexity. Some agentic solutions, for example, can be applied to similar tasks across multiple functions and should be built for reuse, with the ability to upgrade as the technology evolves and new models emerge. Agentic systems will also need to be designed to scale. And in all cases, companies will need to reimagine workflows based on business goals.
Exhibit 2
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Step 1: Create a detailed taxonomy of key marketing activities
Creating tomorrow’s agent-driven workflow, of course, cannot be done without first developing a granular understanding of the way work gets done today. An important first step in that process is to break down priority workflows into the full chain of key activities involved. This mapping must include the underlying systems—customer relationship management, content management systems, digital asset management, analytics, and data pipelines—that support each activity, since system constraints often shape how agentic workflows can be designed. This will serve as the foundational current state that eventually will be translated into the future-state “clean sheet” agentic workflow.
This is how many companies across industries have begun. Take, for example, one leading consumer brand that sought to redesign the process of creative ideation and production. Historically, this was an often complex undertaking that could take months of effort, with numerous stakeholders, both internal staffers and outside agencies, engaged in iterative cycles of feedback and rework. To determine how AI agents might help, the organization first created a comprehensive list of activities involved in the process, encompassing ideation, concept creation and testing, content production, content versioning, content optimization, and agency management. Those activities were then further broken down into hundreds of individual microtasks. Within concept creation and testing, for example, the team identified subtasks like concept image generation, pretesting with focus groups, assessing risk, and more. This detailed taxonomy provided executives with a more comprehensive understanding of its workflows—an understanding that later informed the build-ready specifications for agents.
This taxonomy should also include the insights function within marketing—activities such as synthesizing data, generating hypotheses, interpreting consumer signals, and translating findings into action. These activities form a critical part of the marketing process, and many can be augmented or accelerated through agentic workflows without replacing the human judgment required to make meaning from them.
Step 2: Define agent archetypes
After establishing a baseline understanding of organization-wide tasks, the next step is to classify these tasks into agentic archetypes, which will serve as reusable blueprints to guide where and how agents are deployed within workflows. In marketing organizations, some of those archetypes might include “extracting knowledge to build context and reasoning,” “analyzing data to define outputs,” and “generating materials across media with variations.”
Leaders at the consumer brand above, for example, classified scores of marketing tasks into six agentic archetypes—content generator, knowledge, localization, analyzer, planner, and operator—which were subsequently used to define the modular, scalable individual agents to be deployed and reused across the marketing process (Exhibit 3).
Exhibit 3
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Step 3: Determine the full set of agents needed across workflows
After identifying key tasks and classifying them into distinct archetypes, tech and business leaders must determine the specific agents needed within those archetypes to transform a workflow. Teams must also confirm that agents can technically integrate with required systems—data platforms, content repositories, and activation platforms—since system interoperability, not model design, is often the limiting factor.
One key agentic archetype identified by the consumer brand, for example, was content generation. Within that archetype, executives identified almost 100 individual modular agents—that is, individual agents that can be inserted into the creative process across multiple workflows. A short-form text-generation agent, for example, could be used in different ways across tasks like creative-content development, sales-collateral development, e-commerce/web optimization, and co-marketing with business partners. Some marketing technology platforms, including Adobe and HubSpot, now offer AI agents that can be embedded directly into creative workflows. These agents can generate and refine copy and design variations, tailor assets to audience segments, and update content across channels based on real-time behavioral signals. Marketers remain responsible for brand integrity and strategic guidance, but the agents orchestrate much of the ongoing production work. Early pilots show shorter production cycles and an increased ability to respond quickly to changing market conditions.
Step 4. Define future-state workflows with clear roles for humans in the loop
Of course, as AI agents are increasingly inserted into workflows, human roles will need to change. In marketing, that will mean focusing more time on tasks like developing marketing strategies based on qualitative factors like “taste” that are not prone to automation; developing a deeper understanding of what will resonate with audiences; sustaining and building relationships with stakeholders; and engaging on tasks best handled in person, such as marketing activations.
Marketers will also need to oversee the technology infrastructure powering these workflows: data quality and schemas, content metadata, orchestration rules, and API governance that ensures agents operate safely and consistently. This will require brands to invest in talent capable of fine-tuning off-the-shelf foundation models to brand context and upskilling human employees to redefine ways of working. Among the new skills humans will need to master:
- prompt engineering: knowing how to structure instructions so agents can produce desired outputs
- collaborating with agents: understanding handoffs between agents and marketers, and steering agents to formulate new strategies
- quality monitoring: ability to monitor agent activity, spot anomalies in quality, compliance, and so on, and track agent tasks
- refining ideas with human expertise: assessing and enhancing AI outputs with human instinct and experience
- data and AI fluency: ability to prep and clean datasets and validate AI-generated insights against real-world performance
- machine learning modeling: knowledge of applied machine learning, data engineering, experimentation, and workflow orchestration
Consider the concept generation and testing workflow at the consumer brand cited above. The future-state agentic process the team created includes squads of agents that collaborate with human colleagues. Agents focus on generating concepts and content, cross-checking with risk guidelines, pretesting content, and writing first-draft plans. The human workers focus on what they do best: prompting and managing agents, reviewing output, enhancing ideas with instincts and insights drawn from years of industry and market experience, and then sharing outcomes with key stakeholders (Exhibit 4). This new workflow allows the consumer company to generate and test a greater number of creative concepts in parallel, accelerating learning cycles and freeing marketers to spend more time refining the ideas that resonate with consumers.
Exhibit 4
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Step 5: Prioritize in waves, focusing on high-value workflows to drive adoption
After identifying and mapping future-state workflows, organizations will need to prioritize their development and rollout; they also must determine whether to build custom tools or deploy off-the-shelf solutions. The first priorities should include areas with the highest efficiency potential, to get quick wins, or workflows based on organization-wide goals related to effectiveness and business growth. Prioritization should reflect technical readiness, as some workflows cannot be automated until data pipelines, metadata structures, and key execution systems are prepared for agentic orchestration.
The consumer brand introduced its agentic marketing system in three waves. The first wave focused on building an ideation engine, with agents continuously generating and refining campaign ideas and assets, providing the team with a steady stream of new content to test. The second wave added further intelligence and safeguards, with agents running rapid pretests of creative concepts and automatically checking content brand, legal, and risk compliance. The final wave extended the system globally, enabling agents to adapt messages for local markets and coordinate scalable testing and rollout.
Together, these waves transformed a slow and manual process into a fast and data-drive system that, in some content creation pilots, increased the speed of the end-to-end process by four times versus traditional workflows.
Agentic systems are also beginning to emerge in media execution. One advanced advertising platform is now building AI agents to autonomously optimize campaigns across major digital channels, continuously evaluating performance, adjusting bids and budgets, pairing creative with audiences, and generating new message variants. These agents operate in real time, managing thousands of microadjustments that previously required constant manual oversight. Early adopters report faster optimization cycles and measurable improvements in return on ad spend, highlighting how agentic execution is reshaping modern media operations.
Fueling growth and adoption, while limiting risk
End-to-end agentic workflows will help marketing organizations capture value by producing more consumer experiences far more quickly, while powering top-line growth and fueling working spend. But facilitating this change is no simple task, requiring leaders to execute in key ways across the organization. Brands will need to set a top-down vision (led by the board and CEO), with strong governance to ensure adoption and scaling, while limiting brand and legal issues. Leaders also must understand that agents are only one tool in the AI playbook; other tools, including scripting, robotic process automation, and machine learning, also need to be considered. Focusing too narrowly on agents alone can leave significant efficiency gains on the table when scaling.
Nor is this process without risk—especially in marketing, which directly affects consumer-facing content and brand perception. Marketers will need to pay close attention to potential brand and legal vulnerabilities, above and beyond the technology and data risks posed by agentic AI across all functions. Marketers seem to understand the novel risks AI presents. A McKinsey survey of 35 CMOs of Fortune 250 consumer and technology companies found that executives were primarily concerned about brand and legal governance, human capability challenges, technology under investment, and data bottlenecks. Insights teams will also need new governance mechanisms to validate AI-generated insights, establish confidence thresholds, and ensure accuracy before findings inform major brand or investment decisions.
Nearly 90 percent of CMOs are experimenting with AI use cases across various points of the marketing process, but less than 10 percent have captured value across end-to-end workflows, McKinsey research has found. Agents can help move the needle. But as they begin to deploy agentic AI, marketers also must grapple with a fundamental question: Will the future of marketing be defined by the ability to orchestrate complex networks of AI agents, or will human intuition and creativity continue to sit at the helm of the systems that drive success?
The answer lies not in replacing human marketers but in augmenting their capabilities to create unprecedented levels of personalization, efficiency, and innovation. Human-led insights—grounded in cultural understanding, qualitative sense-making, and strategic judgment—will remain essential complements to the precision and scalability that agentic AI enables. The real challenge will be in navigating the uncharted territory where human judgment and creativity intersect with AI-driven precision and execution, and in doing so, redefining the very fabric of marketing itself.
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