What agentic marketing can learn from the auto industry

As a self-described car nut, I have had a lifelong interest in the auto industry – how it came into existence, how it grew and, because I’m a marketer, how it interacts with its customers.

As AI sweeps into marketing, and in particular as agentic marketing comes into its own, I have realized that there are valuable lessons marketers can learn from the history of automotive manufacturing.

Those lessons are about processes, not manufactured goods or consumer preferences.

And here’s a bonus: The processes that it took the auto industry a full century to develop are available right now to marketers willing to apply them.

Lesson 1: Organize for speed

Once upon a time, manufacturing was done by craftsmen. An individual person handmade an object from start to finish.

Skilled craftsmen might produce objects both beautiful and sturdy, but they didn’t do it very quickly.

As the industrial revolution got underway and mechanization took hold, it became possible to speed up the manufacturing process.

The assembly line, perfected by Henry Ford in the early 20th century, is the best example I know of an industrial process optimized for speed.

Because of the assembly line, the time needed to make a car – the Model T – was slashed from 12 and a half hours to just 93 minutes. And because of the increased speed, prices dropped significantly. The cost of a Model T went from $850 in 1908 to $260 in 1924. That made the car accessible to a much wider market; for a time, the Model T was the best-selling car in the world.

That was an unbelievable advancement in the industry.

Everybody adopted the assembly line and it changed everything. Suddenly, everything everywhere sped up.

The lesson here for marketers is straightforward: By adopting the most advanced processes of your time, you can really increase the speed at which you produce.

Today, the most advanced processes use AI. AI speeds things up even more dramatically than the Ford assembly line ever did. And when you get AI agents using AI tools? Wow! The results can be spectacular!

Lesson 2: Organize for leanness

Speeding up auto production was a big step. A huge step. But it didn’t solve a whole bunch of other production issues. The assembly line was great, but it didn’t permit, for example, any customization of the autos being produced.

As Ford once famously said, the customer can have a Model T in any color, as long as it’s black.

Fast forward to Japan in the years just after World War II.

As Japan recovered from the war and built up its car industry, car industry leaders began giving serious consideration to how they could improve their processes to give the industry an edge.

The result was the process of kaizen, or continuous improvement, first introduced at Toyota.

Kaizen is about making small, continuous improvements to production processes. One of its guiding principles is that employees from every level are encouraged to make suggestions and offer up ideas.

The continuous improvement principle – we might call it iteration today – became deeply embedded in their culture.

What grew out of kaizen was streamlined production, a reduction of waste, and increased efficiency. It also allowed for customization, by creating standardized parts that could be assembled in different ways or in different configurations.

In other words, Toyota became leaner, it became more responsive.

The lesson for marketers is simple: Organize for leanness, for streamlined production, for a minimum of waste. Learn to be efficient; it will give you scope to customize and adapt to your clients’ needs.

Lesson 3: Organize for agility

BMW today offers a great example of industrial agility. Believe it or not, customers can change certain elements of their new vehicle configuration up to six days before the production date.

And customers have a staggering range of options available.

“The BMW 7 Series offers more opportunities for customisation and exclusivity than any of its predecessors,” the company said in a news release. “For example, to meet individual customer preferences, more than 500 exterior paint colours and colour combinations are available, while around 700 equipment and material combinations are currently offered for the interior.”

What’s more, BMW is able to make an internal combustion engine vehicle, a hybrid vehicle and a fully electric vehicle all on the same production line.

That’s pretty wild. But that’s being agile.

Being agile is being able to move quickly, change fast, iterate all the time and offer the ultimate in customization.

These three principles – speed, leanness and agility – work hand-in-hand.

Agility will be less effective if there’s redundancy and waste, if a company is not lean. You won’t achieve speed if you’re not streamlined.

But you can’t automate everything….

Lesson 4: Maximize the value-added from humans

In 2018, Tesla largely robotized the production of its Model 3 in an attempt to maximize production.

That turned out to be a big mistake. Tesla CEO Elon Musk talked about “production hell.” There were all sorts of problems that were fixed only when they put humans back into critical parts of the process.

In particular, they added humans back into what they call the final assembly stages of the Model 3, where a lot of very fine-grained things have to happen – things like mounting bumpers and the hood, inspecting the paint for scratches that might have happened in production and adjusting the gaps between two body panels.

It turns out the robots weren’t good at detecting this kind of detail. They don’t have taste, or an eye for aesthetics.

When they put humans back into the process, volume increased and quality improved.

As Musk noted at the time, “humans are underrated.”

The lesson for marketers is this: Now that agents are able to do so much stuff, figure out where to place humans in the process to maximize the value only humans can bring.

Esthetics and tastes? Of course humans need to be there, as my Tesla example shows. But humans also belong in governance and control.

I want to evoke one final auto industry principle here: the Andon cord.

Developed by Toyota, it was literally a cord that could be pulled to stop production on the assembly line when a worker spotted a problem. Today it’s most likely a button or a switch, but the idea remains the same. It’s activated by a human.

Toyota’s Andon cord was about quality control. When it was pulled, everyone would rush to the place where the problem had emerged and try to figure out how to solve it.

It was Toyota’s way of preventing cars of inferior quality from getting to consumers.

Marketers need the equivalent of an Andon cord in their production systems today – as a way of maintaining control over a largely automated process. It’s a way for humans to provide oversight in a fully automated, fully mechanized, fully agentic world.