How data impacts AI decisioning

Data is the fuel that powers AI decisioning. The right data helps AI decisioning models make the right recommendations, while data inconsistencies and gaps in data sources can reduce decisioning systems’ overall performance.

The more data related to your marketing use case that your brand is able to share with decisioning solutions like the BrazeAI Decisioning Studio™, the better you'll be able to personalize your marketing campaigns and optimize them for your desired metrics. That’s because you’ll be providing a more accurate view of the customer to the AI decisioning agent, as it relates to the specific behavior you’re trying to drive.

Investing in data is what Cameron Davies, Chief Data Officer at Yum! Brands, says has helped his company (which includes the iconic QSR brands Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC, and Habit Burger & Grill), achieve success with AI decisioning. In 2025, Yum! Brands used our BrazeAI Decisioning Studio™ platform to power 200 million interactions across eight different marketing use cases, delivering up to a 2.6X uplift in incremental impact on transactions per customer.

Here’s what you need to know about how AI decisioning systems like the BrazeAI Decisioning Studio™ and data work together.

AI decisioning systems don’t need every piece of data, only essential data

There’s a common misconception that companies need to share all of their data to get started with AI decisioning, but that’s not the case. For instance, the BrazeAI Decisioning Studio™ only needs access to data that’s related to your AI decisioning use case, including relevant:

• Profile data
• Customer profile data (e.g., a user’s location, acquisition channel, survey scores, customer lifetime value)
• Event data (e.g., started session, opened page X, ended session)
• Aggregate event data (e.g., average session length today)

Irrelevant data won’t help the model. In fact, it even could slow down the process of getting set up with AI decisioning. Why? Because our dedicated forward-deployed data science team that helps companies get set up with BrazeAI Decisioning Studio™ analyzes all of the data we receive to see if it will enable our AI model to make better decisions. If that data set is overloaded with information that’s not relevant to the use case at hand, it will complicate efforts to complete that important audit and get the use case up and running

Your event data doesn’t have to be 100% perfect, but at a minimum you’ll need conversion and activation event data

If there’s some type of event data that isn’t synced to your data warehouse or to your customer data platform (CDP)], that’s not a dealbreaker with BrazeAI Decisioning Studio™.

The bare minimum data Decision Studio needs are conversion events and activation events . Conversions, or a value associated with each conversion like revenue net of promotion costs, are what Decisioning Studio is typically set to maximize.

We also need to know when your conversions are taking place, so we need access to your conversion events. That way our model can recommend the best time to send a campaign.

If you’re already a Braze customer, all of your Braze data is integrated into the BrazeAI Decisioning Studio™

If you’re already using our customer engagement platform, we’re able to access customer profiles and event data that’s available in Braze directly. If there are events that aren’t in Braze, such as data stored in your company’s customer data warehouse or CDP, that can be pushed to the Braze customer engagement platform or sent to BrazeAI Decisioning Studio™ directly.

Identity resolution needs to happen before the data gets passed along to our AI decisioning system

If any customer data needs to be unified, make sure every event or aggregated metric is joinable to a customer id. Then, BrazeAI Decisioning Studio™ can unify the data for you. So, as you’re building out your plan, make sure you investigate whether data unification is a pressing need for your specific data set and, if so, build in enough time and bandwidth to complete that work before you begin moving on your AI decisioning implementation.

Let us take the guesswork out of getting your data to work with AI decisioning

Unlike most companies that offer AI decisioning capabilities, our system is flexible in terms of the types of data that are supported.

As part of the hands-on, white glove services we offer with our AI decisioning platform, our team of forward-deployed engineers and AI specialists will help you format your data as needed. Whether your data is centralized or not, we’ll be able to work with you to identify the most effective ingestion method. We enable a variety of different methods of data ingestion, via Braze, your CDP, your data warehouse, or a variety of different systems, batched daily, on a streaming basis, or via a cadence that makes the most sense for your business.

If you’re ready to let AI decisioning guide smarter marketing at scale, learn more about BrazeAI Decisioning Studio™ and see how we can help you achieve your most important marketing KPIs.

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 performance of and expected benefits from Braze and its products and features, including without limitation BrazeAI Decisioning Studio™. 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 the Braze Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended October 31, 2025, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on December 10, 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.