More than a year after the rise of modern generative AI, two things are clear if you assess today’s marketing landscape: First, brands can get more value out of artificial intelligence if they understand what it’s truly capable of, and second, the time for discussing hypotheticals around AI and marketing is long past—it’s time to put this essential technology into action.

Last year, we launched Sage AI by Braze™ to empower brands to embrace the craft of customer engagement, allowing them to move beyond just sending messages and into informing and scaling personalized, sophisticated and lasting experiences that their customers love. Now we’re adding new functionality that makes it even easier and faster for marketers to tailor recommendations to each unique customer, unlock sophisticated personalization and prediction at scale, inspire creativity, and drive high-value actions from each customer while also driving stronger business results. These updates include:

• An expanded AI Item Recommendations engine that uses AI to recommend items personalized to the customers who are most likely to convert.

• Personalized Paths, a feature that scales personalization by matching each customer with the message, copy, creative, channel and offer they are most likely to engage with, at any step in a journey.

• Tone Control generative functionality that empowers marketers to dictate and control the tone of AI-generated copy, directly in Braze.

These features leverage comprehensive, first-party data inputs in real time, speeding up smarter decision making and powering better business outcomes. At the same time, each feature is easily accessible and located intuitively across the marketers' workflow to support more creative testing, optimization, and personalization at every step of the customer journey.

Recommend the right items for every customer.

Brands are competing for their customers’ loyalty—and one of the fastest ways to lose trust is by recommending irrelevant products or services. Relevant, personalized recommendations are essential, but it's often time-consuming and complicated to stand them up and challenging to execute them at scale. To help out, Braze is expanding the AI Item Recommendations feature that leverages out-of-the box AI models to generate personalized item recommendations from Braze Catalogs that can be used in any channel or as part of sophisticated, cross-channel journeys. Marketers will also be able to execute other common recommendations use cases, like most popular and recently engaged items. With AI Item Recommendations, marketers can:

• Personalize the products or services recommended to each individual customer, supporting increased relevance and value.

• Swiftly stand up recommendation programs with out-of-the-box models built into workflows, avoiding expensive integrations or complex workarounds.

• Fuel better results by recommending items with the highest odds of driving conversions.

• Showcase highly relevant items in key moments to power product releases, cross-sells, and upsells, reducing churn and boosting new sales.

Personalize every step of every journey.

For brand experiences to resonate, customers need to feel that they're truly tailored to their wants and needs. But basic personalization based on name or location isn't enough anymore to stand out from the competition. Braze Personalized Paths makes it easy to test any part of a journey, and leverage each user's behaviors to tailor the message variant to the individual across copy, image, channel, offer, or journey, supporting truly comprehensive personalization without complex tech dependencies. With Personalized Paths, marketers can:

• Create more deeply customized experiences, tailoring every interaction to match each customer.

• Save time and minimize complexity with personalization that is easily accessible to any marketer—all with a simple toggle.

• Reduce risk and scale their personalization efforts by using AI to achieve sophisticated, 1:1 experiences regardless of available resources or how many customers they have.

Work smarter and spark your creativity.

The 2024 Global Customer Engagement Review found that 42% of surveyed marketers spend too much time on business-as-usual execution and tasks, with 41% stating they lack the technology to execute on their creative ideas. Overall, 98% identified barriers keeping them from taking more strategic creative approaches to customer engagement. AI can help to solve these issues by driving rapid efficiencies, enhancing productivity and scalability, and fueling creativity. But you need the right tools and the right mindset to make that happen.

That’s why Braze prioritized the launch of our AI Copywriting Assistant, AI Content QA, and AI Image Generator over the last two years, helping marketers swiftly generate and validate creative assets to support more effective campaign creation and testing. Now we’re adding Tone Control, a new feature that allows brands to customize the tone of message outputs from the AI Copywriting Assistant. With this new functionality, Braze users can:

• Save time on routine copywriting by creating focused messages entirely within Braze.

• Use AI to craft authentic experiences and engage real customers while freeing up more time for creative brainstorming and strategy development.

• Rapidly generate variants to test different message tones against each other, supporting more creative testing and experimentation.

• Cut down on mistakes and faux pas with AI-powered tools built to ensure messages are customer-ready.

Sage AI by Braze™: Your Partner for Amazing Customer Engagement

AI is poised to transform the customer engagement space—but only if you have the right tools to make it happen. With Sage AI by Braze™, marketers can focus on the craft of customer engagement with features that make it easy to deliver 1:1 personalization, achieve more creative content generation, and tailor recommendations for each and every customer. By doing so, brands can deliver memorable cross-channel customer experiences that drive the best outcomes from their brand.

Want to learn more about how AI can help enhance your customer engagement program? Check out Sage AI by Braze™ today.