Forge 2025: Advancing customer engagement in an AI-native world

The customer engagement space is in a moment of flux, one powered by shifting consumer attitudes and the rise of next-generation AI capabilities. Marketers are seeing long-awaited capabilities come to life as generative AI and AI decisioning unlock new possibilities for their customer messaging, but they’re also grappling with a massive amount of change and watching AI-savvy competitors leap ahead.

To help brands respond, Braze brought together more than 100 speakers from a wide range of leading brands—including McDonald’s, Walmart, the Walt Disney Company, Nestlé Purina, Activision Blizzard, Peloton, Canva, and many more—at this year’s Forge 2025 conference, held September 29–October 1 in Las Vegas. Across dozens of sessions, customer engagement experts explored everything from building a modern, AI-enabled marketing tech stack to working collaboratively with Marketing and technical teams to respond to today’s challenging landscape. From the keynotes to in-depth trainings on AI decisioning, the event provided attendees with a comprehensive look at what successful customer engagement looks like and what it takes to achieve it.

With an event this big, there are always too many interesting conversations and striking presentations to cover them all, so let’s take a minute for a quick run-through of some of the conference’s highlights.

All eyes on the consumer

Customer-centricity was a major theme of the event, reflecting a growing sense among marketers that technological advances have made today’s consumers more thoughtful and opinionated about the experiences they receive from the brands they engage with. As Braze Cofounder and CEO Bill Magnuson said in his opening keynote, “If you're going to win precious space in my attention span and be rewarded with a share of my wallet, you have to be paying attention, you have to vibe with my passions, and you have to make me care.”

This shift makes it critical for brands to build rich relationships with their customers—and, as Bill noted, that requires them to “understand the context of those relationships with first-party data” and to “have a sophisticated ability to engage whenever and wherever their attention is available.” Thankfully, innovative new technologies are increasingly making it possible for marketers to move beyond simple, category-based segmentation and provide bespoke, tailored experiences for every individual that feel responsive, relevant, and meaningful.

The secret? The thoughtful, strategic use of AI.

Customer engagement in an AI-native world

AI isn’t a buzzword—it’s the driving force behind so much of today’s shifting marketing landscape. But to use it effectively, brands need to understand what’s possible with this evolving technology and how it can be leveraged to support better experiences and outcomes for marketers and consumers alike.

To help out, Braze Chief Product Officer Kevin Wang and Braze Chief Business & Marketing Officer Astha Malik walked attendees through a range of announcements showcasing a major new suite of AI offerings designed to advance customer engagement outcomes. These powerful features include:

• The BrazeAI Decisioning Studio™ (GA): With this feature, BrazeAI™ decisioning agents can use reinforcement learning to personalize countless aspects of each communication by leveraging available data, including custom and industry-specific datasets, while also identifying patterns most likely to maximize rewards and minimize penalties, and optimizing the KPIs that matter most—like profit and lifetime value—through ongoing, autonomous experimentation.
• The BrazeAI Agent Console™ (Beta): This new feature will allow marketers to create, configure, and deploy agents throughout the Braze platform, turning complex tasks into seamless, automated workflows.
• The BrazeAI Operator™ (Beta Q3): This feature’s intuitive, prompt-based interface will allow marketers to build and QA campaigns with ease, generate immediate data insights, and automate repetitive tasks, helping them get their best work done more efficiently in Braze.

“At Braze, we’ve spent years making it possible to engage your customers in real time, on all of the platforms and channels that are relevant to them,” Kevin told attendees. “AI is fundamentally rewriting the rules of customer engagement. It’s not just helping you move faster, it’s enabling you and your teams to think differently and act in ways that were never possible before.”

To learn more about the Braze platform and its BrazeAI™ capabilities, check out this article on our recent announcements.

Braze in action

While AI was definitely in the air at this year’s Forge, it’s not the whole story when it comes to customer engagement. As Braze Cofounder and CTO Jon Hyman said, “despite these AI-powered enhancements, the fundamental challenges facing marketers and customer engagement professionals remain rooted in the areas of data, orchestration, and cross-channel capabilities.” And during the event, Braze rolled out an array of significant new product advancements across our platform, helping to make it easier for marketers to connect with their customers. Some of those key announcements include:

• Zero-Copy Canvas Triggers (Early Access Q4): This features makes it possible for marketers to seamlessly trigger messaging and other customer experiences within an app, website, or other digital property based on data held in a cloud data warehouse—like Snowflake, BigQuery, or Redshift—and to do it without ongoing technical support; that opens up major new use cases and reduces the need to move data between different systems.
• WhatsApp Flows (Early Access): This feature expands the capabilities of WhatsApp Business Messaging, allowing marketers to facilitate convenient, seamless interactions with their customers using versatile, customizable forms, and allowing them to easily collect sign-ups, conduct surveys, recommend products, help customers book services, capture leads, and more—all directly within a WhatsApp conversation.
• Drag-and-Drop Survey Blocks (GA): This new feature simplifies the process of thoughtfully gathering meaningful zero-party data by allowing teams to more easily gather information on user preferences and satisfaction in minutes by adding modular surveys to their apps or landing pages.

To learn more about these and other new Braze features, check out this article.

Unlock your creativity, make campaign breakthroughs, and achieve bigger marketing outcomes

Throughout the event, attendees heard from a variety of customer engagement experts, thought leaders, and seasoned practitioners, all digging into different aspects of the marketing landscape and sharing exclusive insights, advice, best practices, and exceptional wins. These sessions covered the full spectrum of modern customer engagement and provided an inspiring look at what’s possible today from the brands who are actually doing it.

During a session on creative customer engagement campaigns, Sina Zand, Head of CRM Strategy & Lifecycle Marketing at Blizzard Entertainment wowed the audience with a look at his team’s successful launch of video in-app messages, bringing the high-resolution, immersive world of Blizzard’s games right into the messaging experience. On the data front, Moheth Mohan, Senior Engineering Manager, Marketing Technology at Peloton walked attendees through his company’s use of Braze and in-house tooling to create a personalization engine capable of powering exceptional customer experiences. And Brittni Shull, Director of Digital Communications at Panera Bread, shared her insights into how brands can build an effective customer engagement motion, highlighting the importance of collaboration between Marketing and technical teams—and noting the ways in which tools like Content Cards can strengthen that relationship by reducing the burden on engineers.

Final thoughts

This year’s Forge has come and gone, but it’s not too late to take advantage of the essential thought leadership and key best practices that came with it. To dig deeper into some of the key topics and areas of discussion from this year’s conference, check out:

• The Braze Inspiration Guide
• From efficiency to effectiveness: How AI is transforming customer engagement
• Drive real value: Adding AI decisioning to your customer engagement
• Why customer marketing is the key to retention, loyalty, and revenue growth

Forward-Looking Statements

This blog post contains “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the “safe harbor” provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including but not limited to, statements regarding the expected performance, benefits, development timelines and capabilities of Braze products and features. These forward-looking statements are based on the current assumptions, expectations and beliefs of Braze, and are subject to substantial risks, uncertainties and changes in circumstances that may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Further information on potential factors that could affect Braze results are included in Braze’s Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended July 31, 2025, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on September 5, 2025, and the other public filings of Braze with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The forward-looking statements included in this blog post represent the views of Braze only as of the date of this blog post, and Braze assumes no obligation, and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements, except as required by law.