We are now firmly in the agentic era: Google’s Satya Raghavan

If the last decade gave every consumer problem an app, the next one will give every marketer an agent. That was Satya Raghavan’s central argument at Google’s keynote on the agentic era—a session at Goafest 2026 that was equal parts demystification and rallying.

Satya Raghavan, Director of Marketing Partners at Google India, opened the session by painting a picture of a consumer who has outgrown the funnel entirely. Across six generations, now sharing a single household—from Boomers to Gen Beta, born from January 2025—people are simultaneously searching, streaming, scrolling, and shopping. “Consumer needs have changed, but the consumer itself is changing,” he said. And his solution to all of that is—a line he jokingly called his own patented statement— “There is an agent for that.”

Before selling the idea, he stripped away the jargon. An agent, as per the dictionary, is simply someone who acts on behalf of someone else, like travel agents and Ad agencies. “We’ve been working with agents from time immemorial,” he said. The only new thing is the software.

Raghavan added, “An agent is useless without the right use case—and you know the best use cases better than I do.”

His framework, illustrated through an AI hotel-booking demo, mapped three agent relationships that marketers should care about: brand to consumer, customer to platform (a Google shopping agent finding Father’s Day deals while you sleep), and agency to platform via Google’s own Ads Advisor, which lets teams build and optimise campaigns through conversation alone.

The practical pitch came towards the end. Google has pre-built a suite of free agents for media and creative agencies—covering ad variant creation, asset reformatting for Shorts, and campaign optimisation, among others. Havas Media, given early access three to four weeks prior, had already improved the base agents and was building new ones on top. For those wanting to go further, Google’s Agent Development Kit (ADK), within the Gemini environment, requires no coding—just instructions.

“Two years ago, we were talking about the generative era,” Raghavan said. “We are now firmly in the agentic era.” He concluded the session, mentioning that the marketers who figure out their use first, won’t just be early adopters. They’ll be the ones building the playbook that everyone else will follow.