Forge 2025: Advancing customer engagement in an AI-native world
Published on October 06, 2025/Last edited on October 06, 2025/8 min read
Published on October 06, 2025/Last edited on October 06, 2025/8 min read
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.
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.
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:
“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.
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:
To learn more about these and other new Braze features, check out this article.
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.
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:
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.
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