Crawl, walk, run: Uplevel customer engagement with BrazeAI Operator™

Today, more than 1.6 billion people are using large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, or Google Gemini every week—a massive number that likely includes more than its fair share of marketers. But while the average consumer might well be using AI to find out how long it takes to drive from Sydney to Melbourne (just under nine hours) or when the War of 1812 ended (technically 1815), many marketers see an opportunity to leverage LLMs to answer essential questions about their customer engagement efforts and to make their marketing more efficient and effective.

Here at Braze, we’ve worked to make it easier for marketers to leverage this technology to uplevel their customer engagement efforts through the launch of the BrazeAI Operator™. Let’s explore how this powerful, intuitive tool works and take a look at a selection of different use cases that it makes possible.

What is BrazeAI Operator™ (and what does it mean for customer engagement)?

For years, marketers have been asked by their leadership teams to do more with less—and to do it with no end in sight. In many cases, that requires marketers to bridge that gap by working more hours with fewer resources, raising the risk of burnout and declining returns. The rise of AI offers brands a way out, allowing marketers to hit—and even exceed—their goals.

The Operator brings the power of LLMs right into the larger Braze customer engagement platform. Because the BrazeAI Operator™ is built natively within Braze, it's easy to apply its findings and automations to improve your campaigns and customer journeys—and to do it without the inefficiency or hassle of leaving the the Braze platform

That efficiency is powerful, but it’s just one part of the equation. Operator is purpose-built for the specific environment that it operates within and has unique access to Braze tools, knowledge, and expertise. It's more than just a knowledge assistant—this connection to Braze makes it possible for it to take direct action to support your customer engagement strategy, from building segments and generating HTML to creating images. So while it may not be the LLM you’d want to ask about concert tickets or the stock market, it is purpose-built to maximize marketing efforts within the Braze platform. The result? Quicker campaign velocity, more deeply personalized experiences, and fewer unanswered questions.

"I felt like I was talking to someone who worked for Braze. It’s my thought partner. I’m kind of addicted to it. It’s not exactly time savings. I’m doing things that would have been completely impossible without the Operator."

Elaine Armbruster

Director of Digital Experience, American Diabetes Association

Uplevel your customer engagement with the BrazeAI Operator™

Using the BrazeAI Operator™ is simple. Open the chat built into the Braze platform and ask it a question, then take it from there. This ease of use can be powerful, but it might be a bit of an adjustment for some users, since it represents a new way of working and interacting with Braze. To help you get started, our team has created three specific ways you can “crawl, walk, then run” to success with the Operator. Let’s take a look!

1. Crawl — Message proofing

Let’s start small. Typos and human error are a fact of life, but when they slip into your marketing campaigns, they can cause a lot of stress and heartache. Thankfully, the Operator makes it easier to catch these mistakes before they make their way out into the world. Marketers can quickly QA and proof emails, push notifications, and other outreach simply by telling the Operator to review the draft messages they’ve put together and asking to have any grammatical errors or other issues flagged.

2. Walk — Style guide QA

When you communicate with your customers, it’s important that your brand sounds like itself. But with the growing use of AI to draft and generate copy and creative for campaigns, brands are increasingly at risk of putting generic or sound-alike campaigns out into the world.To ensure any messages or campaigns stay authentic to a brand, marketers can upload their brand style guide right into Braze and then use it to review messages to ensure that the voice, tone, and style of every email, in-app message, or push notification aligns with their brand.

3. Run — Campaign creation

Overcome the blank-page problem with a little help from AI. The Operator is built to support content generation (e.g. writing an email for users who visited your website during the last 30 days but left without making a purchase), but its ability to help drive more impactful customer engagement doesn’t stop there.

The Operator can help—just tell it what sort of campaign you’re looking to design, what your goals are, and what channels you have at your disposal, and then sit back as it first designs and then builds out full a full draft campaign that you can use to, say, provide a holistic onboarding experience or smooth the process of encouraging users to join your loyalty program. You can tweak and optimize these flows to your heart’s content, but by leveraging the Operator, you can get moving quickly and spin up compelling journeys faster and more effectively.

Final thoughts

Maybe you need a quick answer to a pressing customer engagement question—or maybe you need help building out a nuanced customer journey. Either way, the Operator is there to help, making it easier for customer engagement teams to move fast, better understand their marketing programs, and support stronger customer relationships.

Interested in learning more about BrazeAI™ and how it can support more impactful customer engagement? Check out the BrazeAI™ product page.