For decades, Customer Marketing & Advocacy (CMA) has been the unsung hero of B2B growth. It’s the engine behind those success stories that inspire prospects, the whispered endorsement that tips a deal in your favor, and the subtle force that makes your demand gen campaigns land with credibility.
Yet, for most organizations, CMA has been chronically underfunded, short-staffed, and—let’s be honest—often underappreciated. To too many executives, CMA looks like a cost center. Something “nice to have.” Something expendable when budgets get tight.
For those of us who have lived and breathed CMA, this is maddening. We’ve seen the magic: customers who speak at your events, advise buyers based on real-world experience, and turn your sales cycle into a trust-building exercise rather than a cold pitch. When an executive *gets it*, the possibilities are endless. Unfortunately, there just aren’t enough of those executives.
If CMA has struggled to get attention from the c-suite, the current AI frenzy may just change the game. Boards are pressuring leadership teams to turn AI into ROI—fast. Executives are leaning on managers to show tangible progress—if not results. Suddenly, there’s appetite for experimentation, and the once-overlooked CMA function has a shot at the spotlight.
This is our moment. But it comes with a twist.
Agentic AI—the emerging class of AI tools that can act autonomously, interact conversationally, and adapt to situations—is unlike the automation of the past. Automation was predictable, procedural, and safe. Agentic AI is…well, a little “schizophrenic.” It hallucinates. It can produce five different answers to the same question. In domains like CMA, where trust and relationships are currency, that’s not a small risk.
Still, in this rare season of executive curiosity (and tolerance for AI’s warts), CMA leaders can step into a new era—if they balance ambition with caution.
Let’s imagine how the role of a CMA program manager will evolve as agents become capable teammates rather than just tools. Take for example, the ongoing chore of discovering customers ripe for advocacy.
Recruiting advocates today is notoriously time-consuming. It depends on your relationships with sales reps, CSMs, product marketers, and executives—and that’s before the first outreach email goes out.
In a mature agent-driven environment, much of that manual work could be offloaded. Imagine an agent that:
It sounds magical—and in some ways, it will be. But designing this magic requires deep CMA expertise, in addition to competent interaction design. Without it, the agent might create social faux pas that damage relationships instead of nurturing them. AI providers acknowledge that humans are often better suited for dealing with customers in marketing, sales, and customer success. Human employees are essential for managing and resolving sensitive matters with customers, and what’s more sensitive than asking a customer to put her reputation on the line for your company?
As agents handle more operational tasks—candidate identification, outreach, data collection—the CMA program manager’s role shifts. Tomorrow’s CMA leader will:
Think of it as moving from an assembly-line role to a command-center role. Tools like Salesforce’s emerging Agentforce Command Center will make it easier to track performance and refine agents. Because agents need direction, it will be incumbent on program managers to invest more in strategic planning and program design than in the pre-AI world. The consequences of not doing so will be dramatic, visible and fast within an organization.
No matter how smart the agent, there will always be gaps in the data. For example:
These situational nuances require human judgment. A savvy program manager will design workflows where agents flag these scenarios for human intervention, preserving the buyer experience—and the deal.
For the first time, CMA program managers have a shot at scaling their programs without scaling their headcount. Agents can become true virtual team members, freeing program managers to do what they’ve always wanted to do:
But this will only work if we combine deep CMA expertise with smart agent design. Without that foundation, organizations risk over-rotating on AI, frustrating customers, and undermining trust—the very currency of advocacy.
At Point of Reference, we’ve poured over 20 years of CMA experience into our agent design principles. Technology may power the future, but empathy and context will be our north star.
The CMA program manager of the future won’t just manage relationships—they’ll manage the agents who manage the relationships, elevating both the human and digital sides of advocacy. And for those ready to embrace this shift, the sky’s finally the limit. For more on the role of AI in Customer Marketing, check out this podcast with Sunny Manivannan.
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