Forge 2024—Braze, the leading customer engagement platform that empowers brands to Be Absolutely Engaging™, unveiled new product innovations designed to help marketers craft and optimize one-to-one personalized experiences at its annual customer conference, Forge 2024.
With 10+ years of continued innovation in AI, Braze offers a range of BrazeAI™ features to help marketers experiment and create customer experiences more quickly and effectively. The company’s newest innovation, codenamed Project Catalyst (Beta planned for H1FY26), is an agent that brings together investments across the BrazeAI™ spectrum to help marketers craft and uncover the best experience for each individual consumer.
How Project Catalyst works: marketers provide high-level guidelines for journeys, content, items and incentives, and specify a target audience and goal. The agent then generates hundreds of variants for each component of that experience—the subject line, the tone of the message, the various offers available, the channel mix, the best timing, and more. It combines the best of each component to create an individual, unique experience for each and every consumer.
Marketers using Project Catalyst benefit from Braze’s tightly integrated tech stack, combining its rich data integrations, real-time stream processor, and cross-channel architecture to create relevant experiences across a range of digital touchpoints. In addition, marketers can combine capabilities across Project Catalyst and Braze Canvas, a no-code journey orchestration solution, to bring together handcrafted experiences with machine-crafted scale.
“Consumers have more brand choices than ever before. They demand highly memorable and relevant experiences that are personalized to them, and the brands that meet that challenge by being absolutely engaging will win consumer attention, advocacy, and dollars,” said Jon Hyman, Cofounder and CTO of Braze. “Our latest innovations further improve marketers’ abilities to use first-party data and an ever-evolving set of channels to create more valuable customer experiences. As a result of building up years of maturity in our data science and AI models, Braze powers experimentation at a true one-to-one scale, which drives measurable value for both the consumer and the brand.”
Additional innovations in orchestration and BrazeAI™ offer inspiration, ease of use, and tools to deliver sophisticated use cases efficiently
Braze also announced two new assistant features, BrazeAI™ Liquid Assistant (generally available) and Message Template Assistant (early access planned for Q3FY25), extending the power of generative AI beyond copy and image creation. These features help marketers create advanced logic for personalization as well as sophisticated message templates, all with a simple plain text prompt.
In addition, marketers can now more easily explore new ways to test and implement solutions in Braze Canvas, its no-code journey orchestration solution. Canvas Templates (generally available) provide customers with a new library of pre-built use cases—like onboarding, abandoned cart or intent, feature adoption, lapsing users, and more—that help customers get inspired and quickly get started.
“Braze Canvas Templates have truly transformed the way we work at Overstock,” said Nicole Ruffner, Campaign Automation Manager at Beyond, Inc. “Their straightforward setup and editing capabilities have simplified and significantly streamlined our processes. By eliminating the need to start each email from scratch, our team can now dedicate more time to other projects. These templates have been a game-changer, boosting our team’s efficiency and accuracy.”
Great experiences start with deep understanding: Enhancements to the Braze Data Platform further make it easier to unify and activate customer data
The Braze Data Platform provides brands with the tools they need to unify, activate, and distribute their data, so marketers can deliver meaningful customer engagement without relying heavily on technical teams. Braze announced new Cloud Data Ingestion (CDI) integrations, which unify various data sources within Braze, for AWS S3 (generally available) and Microsoft Azure (early access planned for Q4FY25). Additionally, with CDI Segments, available now for all Braze Alloys data warehouse partners, marketers can build audiences with zero-copy data by creating new segments with their warehouse data. Finally, new automated Identity Resolution capabilities (early access planned for Q4FY25) help marketers maintain accurate customer profiles as consumers engage brands across a variety of digital touchpoints to deliver relevant experiences to each customer.
Braze also announced innovations to help marketers easily access insights that inform customer engagement strategies, both natively in Braze reporting and analytics’ dashboards as well as in third-party business intelligence tools. Available in early access later this year, Braze will have new custom dashboard and reporting options that make insights flexible, easier, and more actionable for customer engagement strategies, including both new out-of-the-box and customizable dashboards, and real-time insights.
New global channels, including LINE and RCS Business, and expanded features in WhatsApp help brands connect at relevant touchpoints
As the surface area of customer engagement expands, Braze remains at the forefront of cross-channel innovation, expanding to new global offerings, and a richer feature set to key messaging experiences.
Braze announced a variety of channel updates, including support for new digital touchpoints such as LINE (planned to be generally available Q3FY25), the most popular messaging app in Japan that’s also widely used in Thailand, Taiwan, and Indonesia. Braze also previewed enhancements to WhatsApp, including dynamic images, click tracking, and commerce support (scheduled to roll out later this year and into FY26). Mobile messaging with support for RCS Business Messaging (Beta planned for later this year) will help brands stay at the forefront of mobile innovation, with additional content types scheduled in FY26.
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