The Future of Marketing Automation: AI for Customer Engagement

This is the second part of our series on the future of marketing automation with AI agents. In Part 1, we focused on the back office: how autonomous agents take on the operational work that keeps campaigns moving.

In Part 2, we’re moving to the front line: where customers are actually talking to you.

Because if operations is where marketing work happens, engagement is where marketing value is created.

Marketing teams are drowning in conversations

Customer engagement in 2025 doesn’t look like a simple funnel. It’s a messy web of:

• DMs on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook
  
• Comments on organic posts and ads
  
• Emails, SMS replies, and chat widgets
  
• Conversations you are not even a direct part of, such as reviews, Reddit posts, etc

All from customers who expect answers in minutes, at any hour.

Marketers are already juggling 12–20 tools in a typical stack, and fragmented systems make it hard to deliver a consistent experience. The result is familiar: social teams working late “just catching up on DMs,” growth teams copying emails and phone numbers into CRMs, high-intent comments going unanswered, and chatbots that technically “reply” but can’t flex to your brand voice, your offers, or your stack.

The gap between the experiences you’d like to deliver and the ones you actually can isn’t a creativity problem. It’s the reality that most “automation” stops at sending a message or firing an alert, instead of driving the whole outcome.

From chatbots to autonomous engagement agents

Most marketers have already experimented with conversational tools: a FAQ bot on the website, a basic DM responder, a form-based flow for lead capture. They help at the margins, but they don’t really understand your goals, respect your commercial guardrails, use your real data, or update your downstream systems.

Autonomous engagement agents are different.

A Tildei AI agent behaves like a software teammate. It perceives what’s happening across channels, reasons using your goals, rules, knowledge and brand voice, and then acts to move a conversation toward an outcome: reply sent, email captured, appointment booked, purchase completed.

You give it a clear objective (“book qualified appointments from DMs”, “capture email + SMS from high-intent visitors”) and a few guardrails. The agent listens, responds, updates profiles and pushes the workflow to completion, not just the first reply.

Engagement use cases: from trigger to outcome

Just like in operations, Tildei’s engagement agents follow the same backbone:

Trigger → Agentic resources → Outcome

Below, we cover how it plays out in external, customer-facing journeys. 

1. Conversation Management – always-on, on-brand replies

Take a real example from Big SNOW, the indoor ski resort we work with (you can dive deeper in their case study). Their inbox was full of questions like:

“Which ticket do I need for Park After Dark tonight? Is it included in my Snow Day ticket?”

With Tildei’s Conversation Management agent in place, that now looks like:

• A guest sends a DM on Instagram or Messenger
  
• The agent pulls from Big SNOW’s knowledge graph (tickets, events like Park After Dark, policies) plus their brand voice and guardrails
  
• It then replies instantly, on-brand:  “Great question! Park After Dark isn’t included in a standard Snow Day ticket, but you can add it on for tonight’s session. Want me to send you the link to the right pass?”

The experience feels like a human conversation with someone who knows the product inside-out, but it’s handled end-to-end by the agent.

2. Appointment Booking – from DM to calendar, no handoffs

A different conversation:

“Can I talk to someone about getting a fitting / demo / consultation?”

Usually, this triggers a messy back-and-forth about time zones, availability and links. Somewhere between “Does Tuesday work?” and “Here’s my calendar,” you lose the lead.

In the Appointment Booking use case, your engagement agent:

• Detects that the intent is to book time.
  
• Checks your rules and systems (who can take the meeting, which calendar to use, which slots to expose).
  
• Offers a small set of options that fit your constraints.
  
• Confirms the booking, sends a confirmation message and writes everything back to your tools.

No one on the team has to touch the process, but the customer experiences a smooth, human-like interaction.

3. Email/SMS Capture – turning conversations into subscriptions

You’re running a seasonal promotion. A prospect DMs: “I’m looking for a backpack. Any good deals?”

Your engagement agent doesn’t just answer the question; it uses the moment to grow your list:

• It responds with the current offer and a relevant product suggestion.
  
• It checks your success criteria (“grow email and SMS subscribers from high-intent conversations”).
  
• It follows up: “We’re also giving an extra 10% off your first purchase if you join our newsletter. Want me to send you a code?”
  
• When the customer says yes and shares their email/phone, the agent:
  
  • Validates the details and confirms consent
    
  • Updates the CRM and marketing platforms
    
  • Adds them to the right welcome / promo journey
    
  • Confirms back in the DM with the discount code

What used to be a one-off DM about a discount becomes a clean, consented subscriber, with zero manual copying, tagging, or list maintenance from your team.

4. Shopping Concierge – a product expert in every DM

Now imagine a higher-consideration purchase:

“I have questions about these two watch models. Why is one more expensive?”

Your engagement agent acts like a knowledgeable store associate:

• Pulls product knowledge (features, specs, pricing)
  
• Answers follow-up questions clearly and confidently
  
• Handles logistics (“Do you ship to Spain?” → checks policies and responds)
  
• Switches language when needed
  
• Nudges the customer toward checkout when they’re ready

This isn’t a “chatbot script”. It’s a guided conversation aiming at a real commercial outcome.

5. Social Conversation Responses & Analysis – comments that turn into campaigns

Your brand posts a new product photo on Instagram. Among the comments:

“Love the launch and the old-school flavours. I’d love to try this on my channel. Where are you sold?”

Here’s what your engagement agent does:

• Replies in the comments with where to buy
  
• Analyses the commenter’s profile (reach, relevance, past interactions)
  
• Flags them as a potential influencer
  
• Sends a follow-up DM offering a sample pack
  
• Logs the opportunity and reports on how many similar profiles it found this week

What used to be “just community management” becomes systematic opportunity capture.

Why Tildei for engagement?

So why layer agents like this on top of your existing channels instead of adding yet another chatbot or point solution?

1. One agentic backbone across ops and engagement

Your customer doesn’t care which team “owns” the interaction. With Tildei, the same agentic layer that powers social listening, profile enrichment and reporting on the operations side is also handling inbox replies, appointment booking, email/SMS capture and comment-to-DM flows.

You get one coherent system that connects signals, decisions and actions across both internal operations and external engagement, which is how you truly build powerful marketing agents and activate them everywhere, not just in one channel at a time.

2. Brand-safe, outcome-driven conversations

Tildei agents are wired into your brand voice, your guardrails and your definitions of success. They know what “good” looks like, whether that’s a booked call, a qualified lead, a completed order or a published review, and they steer conversations in that direction without going off-script or off-brand.

Every interaction is judged on business impact, not just “responses sent”.

3. Fast path to visible impact

You don’t need a massive replatforming to get started. Most teams begin with one or two high-impact use cases, for instance, handling the majority of Instagram DMs, booking qualified appointments directly from social, or capturing emails from high-intent conversations.

From there, you can expand as you see results, mirroring the same Day 1 / Day 30 / Day 60 journey you followed on the operations side.

Build powerful marketing agents. Activate them everywhere.

Marketing automation started as scheduling emails and deploying basic chatbots.

Now, you can delegate entire conversations, from first DM to booked appointment, from comment to conversion, to AI agents that think and act like seasoned members of your team.

In Part 1, we showed how those agents take on the operational busywork.

In this Part 2, you’ve seen how they show up on the front line as 24/7 brand ambassadors across DMs, comments and conversations.

That’s the future we’re building at Tildei: Build powerful marketing agents. Activate them everywhere.

If you’re ready for your customer engagement to move from reactive to autonomous, without ripping out your stack, let’s talk about what your first engagement agent could do. Book a demo here.