Agentic AI is coming fast, and one ASX pure-play is aiming for the bullseye

• Agentic AI steps out of GenAI’s shadow
• Fear keeps most firms stuck on the sidelines
• Decidr emerges as the ASX’s lone pure play

We’ve all gotten used to generative AI.

You give it a prompt, and it spits back an answer or an image. Useful, yes, but still reactive.

Agentic AI flips that equation.

Instead of feeding it instructions one by one, you give it an outcome, and it works toward that goal like your digital colleague.

It’s the next big step in the AI story. If generative AI was the warm-up act, agentic AI is about to be the headliner.

And while marketing is one of the first places it’s showing up, the technology isn’t limited to writing copy (for the record, it had no part in writing this copy) or planning campaigns.

It’s designed for any outcome-driven task: reconciling invoices, running recruitment pipelines, optimising logistics – essentially entire workflows that normally require multiple hands.

“Agentic AI does not require prompts,” Saul Marquez told Stockhead.

Marguez is the San Diego-based founder of Outcomes Rocket, and a widely quoted voice on AI in healthcare and marketing.

“Agentic AI requires a command with an end point, and you take it to it.

“For example, I have an end goal of a click-through rate, at a cost per click for a particular segment, achieve it and then your agentic AI does your advertising optimisation.”

In other words, for marketers, agentic AI is like hiring a campaign manager who runs the whole thing end to end.

Adoption gap

So why isn’t everyone already doing it?

Marquez’s team surveyed more than 1,200 marketers this year.

The results are telling: 93.5% are already using generative AI daily, but only 24.3% have ever touched agentic AI. Two-thirds of organisations haven’t experimented at all.

“And that is exactly the opportunity we see, as in, right now,” Marquez said.

“Wherever there is uncertainty and fear, there’s opportunity. It’s just by doing the research that you get beyond that uncertainty.”

That fear – of the unknown, of AI going rogue, of getting it wrong in front of customers – is the main reason adoption is lagging, he added.

But while many companies are still frozen on the sidelines, the early adopters are already capturing value, and being bought up by larger players.

Salesforce, for instance, has already placed strategic bets – acquiring Convergence.ai and Informatica for billions to make agentic AI viable at enterprise scale.

The dartboard strategy

Marquez uses a dartboard analogy to explain how adoption will unfold.

The outer rings are non-critical tasks like admin, billing and marketing. That’s where agentic AI is already making inroads.

The bullseye is sensitive areas like healthcare, power, or patient-facing systems. Those won’t see adoption until years down the line.

“Agentic is really making inroads from the outside in. And I would argue that marketing is on the outside right, working its way,” he said.

And in some industries, the shift is already real.

One of Marquez’s healthcare clients uses agents to handle the messy back-and-forth of insurance approvals.

This includes calling insurers, faxing forms, checking records, and only passing cases to a human once approval is almost guaranteed.

It’s complex, but shows how agentic AI can take on jobs that once drained entire back-office teams.

That matters for investors because the outer rings – marketing, HR, sales ops – are also the largest sandpits for enterprise spend.

And they’re ripe for disruption right now.

Jobs on the line

Of course, this shift won’t be painless.

Outcomes Rocket’s research shows 88.9% of marketers believe AI will cost jobs within the next two to three years, with junior roles the most vulnerable.

At the same time, 62.7% see AI more as a co-pilot than a replacement, and 86% report saving nearly five hours a week thanks to AI tools.

“The thoughtful humans that leverage AI as a tool will not be replaced,” Marquez said.

“And I also say the same thing with the thoughtful businesses that engage with and leverage AI, they will not be replaced.”

But he warns against rushing in blindly.

Companies, he said, need to think about governance, privacy and brand integrity before letting agents loose.

His reminder to clients: tactics without strategy “are the noise you hear before the war is lost”.

The ASX’s only pure play on agentic AI

For all the noise about agentic AI being the next megatrend, there’s actually one pure-play stock on the ASX giving investors direct exposure: Decidr Ai Industries (ASX:DAI).

While most marketers are still stuck on the sidelines, Decidr has launched DecidrOS, a platform built to turn agentic AI theory into daily practice.

Instead of asking clients to rip out their systems, DecidrOS starts by building a clean digital twin of the business.

It ingests data from Salesforce, Hubspot, Shopify, Xero – merging duplicates, reconciling details and creating a single source of truth.

On top of that foundation, it integrates agents that can run real workflows across the business, no coding required.

The agents could be launched through Decidr’s Onboarding Studio in minutes, the company said.

Decidr has placed itself squarely in the “outer ring” of Marquez’s dartboard: marketing, HR, admin.

These are the areas where agentic AI can be safely deployed today, where adoption is low but opportunity is massive.

And with ASX investors hungry for real-world AI exposure, Decidr’s timing may be spot on.

Don’t wait for perfect

For Marquez, though, the advice to business leaders is blunt.

“Don’t wait,” he said.

“If the business next door is optimising cost with AI and you’re not, they’re going to be more competitive, and the money that you’re spending on a line item, they start spending it on advertising to steal your clients.”

His timeline for mainstream adoption is five years, with the biggest value creation coming in the next three.

Early adopters won’t just be more efficient, they’ll be acquisition targets.

“Don’t be tactical, be strategic … Don’t wait for perfect.”

Because if agentic AI really is the bullseye, the darts are already flying.

At Stockhead we tell it like it is. While Decidr AI Industries is a Stockhead advertiser, it did not sponsor this article.

This story does not constitute financial product advice. You should consider obtaining independent advice before making any financial decision.