How personalized can a customer experience really be?
This question has always troubled businesses, and for years, the answer depended on the number of preset rules, back-end configurations, and manual tweaks you had in place.
It took a lot of time, energy, and hands-on execution to get close to a personalized experience. But agentic personalization has changed the game.
Using agentic AI, brands can now personalize every step of the customer journey, creating experiences that evolve with each new interaction — without adding extra burden on your team.
Here’s how.
Defining Agentic Personalization
Agentic personalization is a strategy that utilizes AI agents to deliver tailored customer experiences on a large scale.
At its core, this approach is powered by agentic AI, a form of artificial intelligence that can independently optimize customer touchpoints, creating seamless personalization across the entire customer journey.
To understand exactly what this means and how businesses can capitalize on agentic personalization, let’s explore what agentic AI is, how it differs from traditional AI, and why it’s a game-changer for customer experiences.
What Is Agentic AI?
Agentic AI describes artificial intelligence systems designed to make autonomous decisions aligned with specific goals.
While traditional AI tools require explicit prompts to generate results, agentic AI leverages machine learning, natural language processing, and large language models to analyze situations, develop solutions, and take action without manual intervention.
Simply put, agentic AI doesn’t just respond to user inputs — it proactively works to achieve objectives, incorporating context and adapting to new information to make informed decisions.
This level of autonomy is possible through the use of AI agents. Working within agentic AI systems, AI agents independently handle tasks by assessing data and making real-time adjustments to optimize outcomes.
And with the right agents working together in an agentic AI system, businesses can harness these intelligent tools to create personalized experiences that set a new standard for commerce.
Agentic AI vs. Traditional AI
Agentic AI possesses key characteristics that set it apart from traditional AI:
- Goal-directed behavior – It can set, modify, and pursue objectives
- Adaptability – It can learn from new information and adjust its actions accordingly
- Self-directed problem-solving – It can generate solutions rather than just executing predefined instructions
- Autonomy – It can operate independently without constant human intervention
Unlike traditional AI models, which passively wait for user commands, agentic AI can make decisions and execute complex tasks with minimal human intervention.
This is groundbreaking for brands looking to leverage AI in their customer journeys. By bridging the gap between rule-based personalization and true intelligence, agentic AI can be used to personalize experiences at an unprecedented speed and scale.
Agentic AI can act as an always-on customer relationship strategist, constantly working to achieve your goals. It analyzes millions of data points at any given moment, scanning for relevant opportunities to engage customers, refine campaigns, and optimize journeys.
Whether it’s identifying the perfect moment to send a promotional offer, adapting on-site recommendations to match evolving shopper preferences, or adjusting ad spend to maximize ROI, agentic AI can reliably spot new possibilities for growth and act on them, without the need to prompt your way through every step of the process.
The Benefits of Agentic Personalization
Agentic personalization doesn’t just change how brands engage with customers; it redefines what personalization can achieve, creating a win-win for both businesses and their audiences.
Enhanced Customer Experiences
Agentic AI can understand and solve problems independently, which has the power to completely recontextualize customer relationship management.
Instead of a reactionary customer experience — which can be a challenge to maintain even with traditional marketing methods — agentic AI can build a proactive journey for each customer. It can predict their individual needs, tailor touchpoints without manual input, and streamline customer journeys in real time.
Deeper Personalization at Scale
Creating personalized experiences for all of your customers can be a daunting challenge. You need to write the rules, put the right triggers in place, and map out what you hope is the ideal customer journey.
But with agentic personalization, brands can analyze vast amounts of data and craft tailored experiences on a massive scale, all without requiring extensive manual input. AI agents can independently assess the right message, channel, and timing for each customer based on their individual preferences, making prewritten journeys and workflows a thing of the past.
Every customer interaction shapes the next one, which means every customer, no matter the size of the audience, gets a relevant, personalized experience.
Real-Time Decision-Making
The ability to make decisions in real time, autonomously, is what truly sets agentic AI apart from traditional AI systems.
Agentic AI can continuously process live customer data, like browsing behavior, clicks, and purchasing patterns, and use it to shape every interaction with your customers. Individual context can be woven into your campaigns, your search bar, and your on-site browsing experience — it can all be personalized with up-to-the-minute insights.
Increased Revenue and Retention
This level of personalization doesn’t just enhance the customer experience. Agentic AI directly impacts a business’s bottom line, increasing revenue and fostering customer loyalty.
By deploying agentic AI that is fully aligned with your business goals and understands customer context, you can ensure that every decision that agentic AI makes is revenue-driving and focused on building lucrative customer relationships.
You get a tool that ceaselessly works to identify growth opportunities and is empowered to act on them, offering extensive, lasting results.
Applications of Agentic Personalization
Proactive, autonomous AI opens up incredible personalization opportunities for businesses. Here are three cutting-edge ways that brands can apply agentic personalization and elevate their customer experience:
Autonomous Search
Imagine a search bar that understands customers as well as a seasoned sales associate — that’s what autonomous search brings to the table.
With the power of agentic AI, your search functionality can be so much more than a navigational tool. It can identify the intent behind every query, provide results that are tailored to each shopper’s individual preferences, and turn the search bar into an interactive experience instead of just a transactional one.
An autonomous search bar understands your customer’s past behavior and takes these insights into account as it generates results. It can respond to nuanced questions and conversational searches like “What are the best running shoes for marathons?” or “Show me eco-friendly furniture options.”
It can even make suggestions, learn from real-time input, and adapt the search experience to give your customers exactly what they’re looking for.
In essence, your search bar can think for itself, and this can be achieved without the need for extensive rules, manual rankings, and constant configurations on the back end. Agentic AI proactively makes these search experiences happen, continuously fine-tuning its functionality to best serve your audience.
How Sur La Table Caters to Individual Customers With Autonomous Search
These applications of AI-powered search aren’t just theoretical. Forward-thinking businesses like Sur La Table are harnessing autonomous search today to personalize their search experience.
The well-known kitchenware retailer leveraged Bloomreach’s autonomous search functionalities to optimize for customer behavior and saw immediate results, including an 11.5% boost in average order value (AOV) and a 6.6% increase in search add-to-cart rates.
Autonomous Marketing
Agentic AI is ushering in a new era of autonomous marketing — one where AI agents proactively create dynamic, customer-first, and deeply personalized campaigns.
Instead of waiting for prompts to help with key marketing tasks — like building customer segments, analyzing campaign performance, or determining the ideal channel to reach a customer — AI agents can do the job independently, optimizing your customer experience in real time and more efficiently than ever before.
This is the difference between traditional marketing automation, which relies on predefined workflows and manual setups to build a customer experience, and autonomous marketing, which shapes and adapts customer journeys in real time.
With Agentic AI, marketing campaigns can grow alongside your customer relationships. These AI tools continuously learn from every customer interaction, adjusting strategies on the fly to ensure the most relevant, timely, and effective engagement.
Hyper-personalized campaigns, which have always been a dream for marketers, are now possible with agentic AI, and the brands that are embracing this fact are already seeing success.
How HMV Optimized Customer Segments With Autonomous Marketing
Using Bloomreach’s autonomous marketing capabilities, the music and entertainment retailer HMV created hundreds of high-value customer segments in real time and used them to optimize Google Ad campaigns — a task that would’ve been incredibly time-consuming before the help of AI agents.
This produced fantastic results for the brand: a 14% lift in revenue, a 34% increase in impressions, and a 425% surge in landing page views.
Conversational Shopping
AI-powered conversational shopping agents are the most widely known application of agentic AI, and for good reason. These groundbreaking systems open up a whole new dimension of online customer engagement.
Acting as virtual shopping assistants, conversational AI agents are designed to elevate the shopping experience by offering real-time, personalized interactions as customers shop.
While they might seem like traditional chatbots at first glance, they are light years ahead of what came before — conversational AI agents can answer nuanced questions, offer tailored recommendations, and proactively step in when customers need assistance. And, with the right conversational solution, you can go beyond the chat window and embed a conversational experience directly within product listing pages (PLPs), the cart, the search bar, and more.
What makes these AI agents truly remarkable is their ability to incorporate critical context into every conversation. They seamlessly personalize interactions, offering expert advice that aligns with a customer’s preferences and past behaviors.
Plus, these agents can recognize when and where a conversation will have the most impact. For instance, they can welcome back a returning site visitor and remind them about items left in their cart, or prompt a shopper who is clicking back and forth between two products and help them decide which is best for them.
Not only does this open up new ways to engage with online shoppers, but it also represents a powerful shift in how businesses personalize customer interactions.
Operating autonomously, these agents personalize touchpoints that were previously taken for granted in the customer journey and turn them into standout moments. And businesses that are adopting conversational shopping strategies are quickly seeing how lucrative this transformation can be.
How TFG Boosted Conversions With Conversational Shopping
By leveraging Clarity, Bloomreach’s conversational AI agent, the specialty retail group TFG incorporated conversational shopping into its on-site experience and saw immediate results during the busy Black Friday period.
With a helpful, proactive agent engaging with shoppers at key points as they browsed products, TFG saw a 35.2% increase in online conversion rates, a 39.8% rise in revenue per visit, and a 28.1% reduction in exit rates.
Agentic Personalization Is Possible With Bloomreach
Agentic AI offers incredible opportunities for businesses, and those that embrace these intelligent systems to deliver deeply personalized, real-time customer experiences are poised to gain a competitive edge.
These aren’t tools that offer marginal gains — AI agents can help you upgrade every aspect of your customer relationships, fostering unmatched customer loyalty and achieving long-term, sustainable growth.
If you’re ready to leverage agentic AI and exceed your business goals, look no further than Bloomreach, the agentic platform for personalization. Built on Loomi AI, our comprehensive solution is designed to help you personalize the entire customer journey:
Deliver relevant, revenue-driving search results with autonomous search.
Guide customers to the perfect purchase with conversational shopping.
Orchestrate marketing campaigns that optimize in real time with autonomous marketing.
We’re building an agentic future for personalization with autonomous AI tools that break the limits of yesterday’s customer journeys.
Ready to see what Bloomreach can do for you? Visit our website to learn more.
