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Sustained Impact of Agentic Personalisation in Marketing: A Longitudinal Case Study

Artificial Intelligence 2026-04-13 v1 Human-Computer Interaction Machine Learning

Abstract

In consumer applications, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has traditionally relied on the manual optimisation of static, rule-based messaging strategies. While adaptive and autonomous learning systems offer the promise of scalable personalisation, it remains unclear to what extent ``human-in-the-loop'' oversight is required to sustain performance uplift over time. This paper presents a longitudinal case study analysing a real-world consumer application that leverages agentic infrastructure to personalise marketing messaging for a large-scale user base over an 11-month period. We compare two distinct periods: an active phase where marketers directly curated content, audiences, and strategies -- followed immediately by a passive phase where agents operated autonomously from a fixed library of components. Our results demonstrate that whilst active human management generates the highest relative lift in engagement metrics, the autonomous agents successfully sustained a positive lift during the passive period. These findings suggest a symbiotic model where human intervention drives strategic initialisation and discovery, yet autonomous agents can ensure the scalable retention and preservation of performance gains.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.08621,
  title  = {Sustained Impact of Agentic Personalisation in Marketing: A Longitudinal Case Study},
  author = {Olivier Jeunen and Eleanor Hanna and Schaun Wheeler},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.08621},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

To appear in the 34th ACM International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP '26) Industry Track