If there’s one thing that Nicole DiNicola wants everyone to know about marketing, it’s this: marketers have not been — and will not be — replaced by AI.
The global vice president of marketing at Smartcat has been outspoken about her views on the influence of AI on marketing strategies, particularly when it comes to AI agents, which are designed to autonomously perform tasks on behalf of a human.
“In short, AI agents are intelligent, task-driven teammates that work alongside your human workforce,” DiNicola explained in a blog post on Smartcat’s website. “They may sound futuristic, but they’re here now, and companies that integrate them effectively will gain a significant edge.”
But according to her, there’s a caveat: AI agents should be instilled with the right privacy frameworks. This issue came into view during a recent Coca-Cola marketing campaign, through which AI agents sent personalized promotions to consumers in Saudi Arabia on third-party mobile apps.
In a story published on Ad Age, DiNicola was quoted saying that the Coke campaign would have been “impossible” without the use of AI agents. Yet, she cautioned, marketing initiatives like this one shouldn’t solely be run by autonomous technology; rather, they should be crafted by both man and machine.
At Smartcat, DiNicola focuses on responsibly integrating AI agents into marketing strategies. With over 15 years of experience in the B2B technology space, she has learned what does — and doesn’t — make a marketing campaign succeed.
AI agents also play a critical role in powering Smartcat’s platform, which is designed to turn content in any format into any language. With the help of AI, the technology enables organizations to improve employee retention and engagement, deploy products more quickly and more.
So as Smartcat empowers businesses to thrive with the use of AI agents, DiNicola is committed to finding even more ways to harness their power to enhance marketing initiatives. For her, the effectiveness of AI agents depends on the expertise of the marketers behind them, making marketing a human undertaking at its core.
Below, DiNicola shares more about the influence of AI agents on marketing and how they enable Smartcat to unlock impact for other organizations.
On what defines AI agents:
“AI agents are generating a lot of buzz. Often described as ‘digital employees’ or ‘virtual teammates,’ they’re already reshaping how companies work. However, without structure, they can make mistakes, break processes, or take the wrong actions. Like humans, they need onboarding and training. You teach them your voice, values and workflows. Then they get to work. Connected to the right systems and knowledge, AI agents can perform like your top employees — across every team, region and language.”
On how AI agents solve marketing challenges:
“Marketers today are buried in data — campaign metrics, customer segments, performance dashboards — and are still expected to be creative geniuses on top of it all. AI agents step in as execution powerhouses. They can write and test email campaigns in real time, detect shifts in audience behavior and pivot your ad strategy before performance dips, and automatically personalize content across geographies and channels in every language. They don’t replace marketers — they amplify them. AI agents handle the high-speed operations so teams can focus on storytelling, strategy and big ideas.
“AI agents handle the high-speed operations so teams can focus on storytelling, strategy and big ideas.”
“Traditional training programs are often either too slow and resource-intensive or too fast and forgettable. Neither works in a company that’s growing and changing constantly. AI agents turn training into a living, breathing system. They can identify skill gaps and recommend learning resources tailored to each person’s role, adapt training content based on real-time job performance, and nudge employees toward upskilling opportunities without manager intervention. With AI agents, learning becomes continuous, contextual and personalized — at scale.
“Product teams are always balancing art and science, relying on a balance of user behavior, testing, execution and feedback. But traditional development cycles are slow, and insights often come too late. AI agents improve the speed and quality of iteration. They can analyze real-time user feedback and surface actionable information, run live A/B tests and adjust based on results, and identify workflow inefficiencies before they become bottlenecks. With agents, your product teams can stop reacting and start iterating faster than ever before.”
On how AI agents unlock impact at Smartcat:
“Smartcat is your organization’s living knowledge hub for global content creation: a space where both humans and agents can learn, create, grow and evolve together. It ensures everyone creating content, human or agent, has access to the same standards, training and context. Our agents don’t just translate; they understand context, maintain brand voice, and adapt content dynamically for different regions and channels. By combining AI-driven automation with human expertise, Smartcat ensures businesses can create, localize and distribute content at scale without compromising quality.”
The Need for Human Oversight
Considering how powerful AI agents can be, it’s key for brands to ensure human oversight. In the same Ad Age article in which DiNicola was quoted for commenting on the Coca-Cola marketing campaign, she also expressed her thoughts on the need for marketers to establish checkpoints in AI agents’ workflows, which allows them to interrupt automation and ensure agents are acting properly. She also believes that brands need to consider what kinds of consumer permissions they give AI agents, including the kinds of signals they are allowed to collect on consumers.
On how AI agents are shaping the future of work at Smartcat:
“From day one, our vision has been to live in a world where there is equal access to global innovations and ideas, enabling companies to communicate with more people, faster, across more markets. What’s the one commonality between how humans and agents learn and work together? Language.
“We wake up every day thinking about language. With Smartcat, you’re getting an entire system built on thinking global-first. Every employee, every market, everything you want to create, build, design or teach is ready in every language — bringing your business to every part of the world you want to reach.
“Succeeding with AI agents isn’t just about using them; it’s about knowing how to integrate them into the fabric of your business. The organizations that succeed will be those that have a clear strategy for training and leveraging AI agents, incorporate them into existing workflows rather than treating them as standalone tools, and leverage AI to complement human expertise, rather than replace it. We’ve been laying the groundwork for this transition since 2012. Now, we’re ready to help you build a workforce that’s truly built for 2030 and beyond.”
