Key insights from Grow with Braze Dubai 2026

How MENA’s fastest-moving brands are matching the right AI to the right job, designing for the people and the agents now standing between them, and proving that human connection still wins.

Grow with Braze Dubai 2026 brought together around 170 marketing, CRM, product, and growth leaders at the Al Habtoor Grand Resort for the fourth year running. The afternoon opened with a short video and a line that stayed in the room. “You can create almost anything now, but just because you can doesn’t mean you should. If your content is obviously AI, it’s artificial. Not intelligent.” The video closed on the question that shaped the rest of the day. What will you make people feel?

Shahid Nizami, VP of APAC and GCC at Braze, opened the afternoon by setting the frame. Access to AI, he argued, will not be the differentiator, because everyone will have it. The difference will be what marketers choose to build with it, how well they understand their customers, how they experiment, and how confidently they act on ideas. The aim is a brand customers experience as recognition, not marketing.

“You want to be acting as a brand where a customer feels less like marketing and more like recognition.”

Shahid Nizami, Braze

Across the afternoon, MENA brands showed what that looks like in practice. There was a keynote on matching the right AI to the right job, Mumzworld took personalization from 30% to 100% coverage, and an overnight delivery experiment during Ramadan. Snoonu showed how it turned a World Cup into a conversation, and a gifting brand explained why it treats every present as the start of two relationships.

● HUMANIZING CONVERSATIONS, PROVING IMPACT

AI for outcomes, not output: Matching the right AI to the right job

William Palmer, Director of Forward-Deployed Data Science at Braze, took on last year’s feedback that marketers have AI tools coming out of their ears and want clear guidance on which to use when. AI, he said, is “a catch-all word. It’s a junk drawer where we toss a lot of different tools.” His job was to sort the drawer. Two of the five tools in the marketer’s kit are not AI at all: rules, which cannot hallucinate, and A/B tests. The rest are predictive models, generative models, and reinforcement learning, which makes decisions rather than predictions.

He then mapped the tools to five jobs: data, content, experimentation, decisioning, and workflow. Luxury Escapes used an agent to classify user intent from live behavior and route people into different journeys, lifting gross margin and revenue per user by 10% each. Dayuse Hotels had an agent write emails comparing the exact hotels each user had browsed, driving a 23% increase in repeat bookings and double the incremental revenue. Motorway used BrazeAI Content Optimizer™ to test 125 content variants and saw clicks rise 114% and reactivations 37%.

Decisioning brought the most useful distinction of the day. Qualitative decisioning asks an LLM to use its judgment, and suits messy inputs, few options, or no history to learn from. ConsumerAffairs used it to pick product categories per user and saw 3.5X clicks per open and 3X conversions. Statistical decisioning uses reinforcement learning to learn from your own customers, and wins when the answer is a measurable trade-off such as offer size. A leading financial services company used it on an already heavily tested referral campaign and still saw a 92% uplift in conversion rate and roughly $16 million in annualized value. BrazeAI Decisioning Studio™ Go, the self-serve tier, was a week away from general availability at the time and is now generally available. The advice on choosing: “You don’t need Decisioning Studio to personalize the send time of a weekly newsletter.”

The strongest results come from composing tools rather than picking one. Braze’s own lifecycle team paired Decisioning Studio Go, which chose timing and tone per person, with a Canvas Step Agent that wrote the content for each recipient. Across its webinar emails, click rate rose 272%, registrations 235%, and attendance 71%.

“The marketer’s new role is fundamentally changing while staying the same.”

William Palmer, Braze

● ANTICIPATING NEEDS, ORCHESTRATING JOURNEYS

Mumzworld: From milestones to moments

Sefik Bagdadioglu, Chief Growth Officer at Mumzworld began with the competitive reality. The mother-and-baby retailer, founded 15 years ago and headquartered in Dubai, competes with horizontal players that have deeper pockets, more scale, and more data, so its edge is depth. Every child moves through a familiar sequence of milestones, from starting solids to crawling to first steps, and Mumzworld has always known it. What it lacked was a way to act on it. Personalization was stuck at 30% coverage, because targeting was strict and there was no fallback for customers who did not fit.

Four months into using Braze, the team paired Braze’s native AI Item Recommendations with fallback logic that serves high-converting baseline products when purchase history is thin, taking coverage from 30% to 100%. A custom HTML in-app message now shows a six-item product grid with live AED pricing and discount badges, triggered seven days after purchase, when customers are ready to reorder. Repeat purchases are up, richer in-app pop-up design and logic lifted NPS responses from about 50 to about 200 a week, and CRM monthly revenue is up 57%.

His takeaway was about pace, not features, and that the solution is combining a reactive platform that removes friction with responsive partners who treat your question as their own. The next step is moving from AI-selected products to AI-generated copy for each user.

“Personalization has to be a default for us.”

Sefik Bagdiolu, Mumzworld

● ANTICIPATING NEEDS, ORCHESTRATING JOURNEYS

How MENA’s fastest-moving brands stay ahead of the customer

Moderated by Scott Doughty, Senior Director of Partner Sales for MENAT at Braze, the panel opened by asking the audience to picture a scene. It is around 2:00 AM during Ramadan, and a customer scrolling on her phone places an order by 2:47 that is on its way to her door by sunrise. Nobody set out to build a business around 2:00 AM shopping, but one team on stage saw that rhythm in its data and reshaped its operations around it. That team was Ounass. Stanislas Brunais, Executive Board Director for Marketing and Retail Media at Ounass, explained his bar for acting on a pattern like that: repeatable, informed by what customers say, and frequent rather than a one-off spike. The team tested overnight delivery in a small region of Saudi Arabia, measuring customer satisfaction alongside revenue since cost per order roughly doubles at night. The result was a 100% uplift in conversion rate and a 20% gain in satisfaction, and the model now rolls out across the GCC every Ramadan.

The same discipline ran through the other stories. David Moore, Head of CRM at Infinox looks for persistent behavioral change rather than reacting to market volatility. When a client’s trading volume falls, his team introduces copy trading and treats the sign-up as confirmation. He scaled a customer reviews journey only after watching unsubscribe rates by region, which he called earning the right to scale. Haris Khan, Group Vice President of Growth at Rain, a regulated crypto exchange, combines behavioral data with public blockchain data to tell VIP, institutional, and retail customers apart.

Mohammed Alogaily, COO of Anghami and OSN+, described the journey from hundreds of segments to a segment of one, and a single team with no silos running both brands, so a Taylor Swift fan on Anghami hears about the documentary on OSN+. Zeeshan Haider, Head of Marketing & Communications at Al Wathba Insurance reminded the room that insurance is a grudge purchase, and that customers judge it against quick commerce, not other insurers. Asked which signal they most want to unlock next, answers ranged from predictive lifetime value to churn propensity built with agents in Canvas, to intent. Stanislas asked for something softer: a customer’s “leave me alone” moment.

“We generally overestimate things we can measure and underestimate the value of things we are unable to easily measure.”

Mohammed Alogaily, Anghami and OSN+

● HUMANISING CONVERSATIONS, PROVING IMPACT

Snoonu: Measuring the relationship, not the click

Sharif Kotb, AVP of Sales for MENAT at Braze, opened with a question for the room: how do you know when a customer feels known, rather than just reached? That question was the subject of a conversation with Matthew Neff, Chief Product Officer at Snoonu, the Qatari super app that is six years old, spans 15 verticals, serves around half a million active users, and is expanding to Kuwait and Oman. Matthew estimates it is about 20% of the way to its founding vision.

His clearest lesson on emotional resonance came from the World Cup. Two weeks out, the team realized every idea on the table was what every other brand would do. How the game is coming up and to place your order now. So they scrapped the plan and set out to have fun with customers, showing the match schedule in the app, updating scores live, and celebrating when a customer’s country scored. It became the app’s biggest period for sessions and orders. On AI, Snoonu is not yet at true one-to-one marketing, but its audiences keep shrinking, and Matthew sees AI helping to send fewer messages with more context, such as why something is being recommended.

On measurement, Snoonu tracks whether new customers keep arriving and whether existing customers order more often, and has begun asking whether a customer is profitable rather than whether each order is. A 10-riyal lunchtime coffee looks like a loss on a spreadsheet, but the same customer who places a 300-riyal family order and orders 40 times a month is hugely valuable. He closed with a story about a broken birthday gift: A support agent, empowered to use judgment, sent five gifts and a handwritten note from the founder, turning the customer’s worst order into their best.

“You can get the AI and technology right, but a lot of the time, that’s still going to be the thing that informs the human in the loop, and you need to have the culture that empowers that human to do the right thing.”

Matthew Neff, Snoonu

● EARNING TRUST, BUILDING LOYALTY

A conversation with CxOs: Earning trust when messages meet machines first

Shahid came back to the stage to moderate and framed the challenge. Every message a marketer sends is now filtered and ranked before a customer sees it, so brands are speaking to two audiences, the digital gatekeeper and the person behind it. He was joined by Hamza Chaoui, CMO of Property Finder; Viji Kannan, Chief Business Officer at YOUGotaGift; Mitra Daram, CEO of Braze partner at CustomerIK; and Matthew Nicholas, Chief Commercial Officer at The Giving Movement.

On earning consent, each panelist brought a different lens to the same principle, which was to give value back. Hamza noted that a home buyer carries the most emotion and risk yet knows the least, so Property Finder sits on the buyer’s side of the table and returns data such as a decade of Dubai transactions. Viji pointed to choice, relevance, and simplicity, so redeeming a reward never feels like a transaction. Mitra shared an internal explainability test. Before a campaign launches, the team must be able to say what the customer did that justifies the message. “Inference is dangerous.” Someone who searched for a two-bedroom home should see two-bedroom homes, not a presumption that they are ready to buy. Matthew’s approach was transparency about where a purchase goes.

On AI intermediaries, Hamza described agents as simply another persona that shortlists while the decision stays with the human, and said Property Finder optimizes for LLMs much as brands once did for search, with a clear summary at the top of each page. Mitra argued the shift is real but the interface has changed more than the behavior, so brands should build around outcomes rather than clicks. Asked which vanity metric to retire, Viji and Mitra chose registrations and Matthew chose social followers, while Mitra offered one to keep: signal acceptance rate, whether people stay when you message them.

“We are all for AI agents because we think that they are doing one of the least pleasing parts of the journey, which is browsing pages and pages and pages.”

Hamza Chaoui, Property Finder

● ANTICIPATING NEEDS, ORCHESTRATING JOURNEYS

Floward: Blooming customer connections

Hossam Kamel, Senior Director of Marketing at Floward, began with a line that frames the business: “We are selling emotions, not flowers.” Operating across 46 cities in nine countries, Floward knows timing is the experience, and that what works in Riyadh may not work in Cairo. Its CRM idea is that every gift creates two customers. The sender is known, but the recipient was a blind spot, with only a phone number from the delivery. WhatsApp changed that: A reciprocity journey invites recipients to return the joy, and lifted return visits by 24% at zero paid ad cost.

The team then built an identity system that maps who gifts whom and for which occasion. A few days before a loved one’s birthday, a WhatsApp message invites a purchase, followed by up to three pushes if there is no response, delivering a 17.7% purchase lift over a no-send control. For Valentine’s Day, WhatsApp became the closing channel in a multi-channel Canvas, reaching a 55% read rate and 99.1% share of voice and generating positive ROI, despite a tough conversation with finance about cost per message.

Hossam’s lessons were refreshingly candid. The moment matters more than the asset, since a static recap performed as well as a personalized video. Opening the app is not buying. AI-written copy ships only when it beats a human control. Always hold out a control group, around 20%, and keep WhatsApp for communications that earn it. Next, Floward is moving from reminding to anticipating, with predictive reminders about 30 days ahead and a belated rescue for missed occasions.

“We don’t message people. We remember occasions for them.”

Hossam Kamel, Floward

● HUMANISING CONVERSATIONS, PROVING IMPACT

Building trust in the moment: Digital Zone, CoinMENA, Fitness First, and GALE

Moderated by Orlando Beakbane, GM of the Dubai office and Principal Customer Success Manager at Braze, the final panel asked each speaker for a moment this year when their brand got the human touch right. Sercan Alici, Head of Growth & Marketing at Digital Zone, Iraq’s largest voucher marketplace, described how, when Iraq qualified for the World Cup after 40 years, the team hired Baghdad’s biggest stadium to screen the matches for 2,000 fans. Sajini Jacob, Marketing Director at CoinMENA, described the opposite instinct: toning down promotions when the market is euphoric, so the brand is not just stable in appearance but genuinely stable, and sending only notifications that are contextual and genuinely needed.

Lucy Merigold, AVP Marketing at Fitness First Middle East offered the clearest case of data and humanity working together. During a period of regional disruption earlier this year, visits dropped and members asked to freeze or cancel. The technology flagged the change, but human insight explained why. The team added afternoon kids’ classes, opened clubs to non-members, and launched two-week and one-month memberships. Now app signals flow to club teams, who can offer a free PT session or guest pass, and success is measured by renewals, visit frequency, and PT sign-ups rather than opens and clicks.

Murtaza Mirza, VP Strategy & Head of EMEA at GALE offered a rule of thumb for personalization: Would the customer be surprised to learn you know this? A vegetarian offer on a Thursday works, but inferring a diet does not. He added that 56% of respondents in GALE’s Preference Economy survey would be comfortable with AI filtering all brand communications, so brands must structure for the algorithm and still design for the human. Sercan closed with a practical trust test: correlate feature adoption with trust, then run an experiment to confirm causation.

“Business metrics or KPIs shouldn’t overtake customers’ feelings.”

Sajini Jacob, CoinMENA

Grow with Braze Honours: Property Finder, Snoonu, and Floward recognised

The programme closed with the Grow with Braze Dubai Honours. Twelve nominations across three categories were scored by a panel of four judges on strategy and challenge, measurable impact, and experimentation and data. Fittingly, each winner had already shared the stage during the day.

Property Finder took the AI-Powered Personalisation Honour. Its Search Re-Engagement journey, its biggest CRM channel, had been sending templated messages that reflected where a user searched but not why. The team connected its own LLM directly into Braze’s Canvas Step Agent, passing in live search behavior and enriched property data so that, as each push fires, the model writes a bespoke title and body in the right tone, language, and price format, with no manual content creation. The payoff was a step change in click engagement and lead conversion, delivered in real time at scale, with the prompt later optimized to run leaner.

Snoonu won the Connected Journey Mastery Honour, the most competitive category of the night. The challenge was sustaining daily engagement across a hyper-diverse, multinational user base through a month-long live sporting event, where relevance was measured in seconds rather than days. The answer was a living journey built entirely in Braze across WhatsApp, Push, and custom In-App games, adapting to the match schedule, the score, and each user, with messages in each customer’s own language. The proof set it apart: For the first time in Snoonu’s CRM history, control groups showed the revenue was truly incremental rather than assumed, and the games alone drove meaningful attributed revenue.

Floward received the Customer Impact and Growth Honour. Its biggest funnel drop-off sat between registration and first order, so it built a flywheel activation layer in Braze Canvas, tested as a multi-arm experiment, alongside Reciprocity and Retention Canvases. The outcomes spanned activation, retention, and brand sentiment, including a Valentine’s Day campaign that lifted positive reviews and share of voice. Just as important, every result was measured against a true held-out control, not a before-and-after comparison.

Five takeaways for MENA marketers

• Match the AI to the job, then compose. Rules, A/B tests, predictive models, LLMs, and reinforcement learning each have a place. The biggest gains came from combining them, as in Braze’s own webinar program.
• Earn the right to scale. Ounass tested in one region before a GCC rollout, Infinox watched unsubscribe rates before widening a journey, and Floward holds out a control. Small, measured bets are how the region’s fastest movers de-risk speed.
• Build for people and their AI intermediaries. Structure content so agents can parse it, but design every message for the human who makes the final decision, and be able to explain why each message was sent.
• Let human judgment lead where data cannot. Fitness First needed insight to understand why behavior changed, and Snoonu’s empowered agent turned a broken gift into a loyal customer. AI informs the human in the loop.
• Measure relationships, not clicks. Registrations, followers, and opens are diagnostics. Retention, order frequency, customer profitability, and signal acceptance are what show whether engagement is changing behavior.

Made for this moment

As the event gave way to networking, the conversations carried on. What lingered was not any single result but the pattern beneath them. Mumzworld is closing the gap between knowing its customers and acting on it. Ounass and Snoonu are earning trust by testing small and listening closely. Floward is remembering occasions on its customers’ behalf. And across every session, the human decisions, from a stadium in Baghdad to a handwritten birthday note, were what customers remembered.

AI is the catalyst. The relationship is the strategy. And as the film at the start of the day asked, the question for every marketer in the region is the same: What will you make people feel?