Customer engagement technology is getting more ambitious.
The latest news and announcements are not limited to finding an audience, drafting a campaign, or recommending a product. Instead, AI is being used to activate the campaign, manage the handoff, continue the client conversation, and finish the booking.
That makes the technology more useful. It also raises the stakes when customer context is wrong, permissions are unclear, or a brand mistakes relevance for entitlement.
In a recent discussion with CX Today, Jessica Keehn, Chief Marketing Officer at SAP, said:
“The lesson for CX leaders ultimately is to start with the customer outcome, not the technology.”
It is a helpful test for every announcement below. Customers will not care how sophisticated the orchestration is if it fails to save time, solve a problem, or give them confidence in the next step.
Editor’s Pick: SAP Wants AI to Fix the Handoffs Customers Feel
SAP used its Connect event to unveil Autonomous CX, a suite of Joule-based AI assistants designed to coordinate workflows across marketing, commerce, sales, service, and operations.
The company is targeting the moments where a journey breaks because the business behind it is disconnected.
For example, a campaign that promotes something unavailable, a quote that takes too long, or a service request that is separated from the planning, inventory, or logistics information needed to resolve it.
SAP’s assistants cover campaign activation, content creation, shopping, quoting, and service planning.
Keehn told CX Today:
“Autonomous CX means AI coordinates across those boundaries, so marketing, commerce, sales, and service can act across the entire customer experience.”
That gets at a weakness in many AI launches. A chatbot can generate a polished response while lacking the information needed to make a promise the business can keep. SAP is trying to ground AI action in ERP, customer, product, and operational data before the journey reaches the customer.
Its 2026 Customer Loyalty Index found that 35% of consumers prefer AI recommendations to advice from friends and family. Yet 30% said they had left a brand because of its use of AI.
These findings suggest that customers do not necessarily reject AI; they reject friction dressed up as AI.
Braze Takes Agentic Marketing into the QA Process
Braze’s Forge announcements took aim at the operational side of AI-led marketing.
The vendor introduced BrazeAI Decisioning Studio Go, Agentic Standards, Operator Connect, and Conversational Agents.
Together, they are intended to help marketers optimize campaign timing, frequency, content, and variants while checking activity against quality and compliance requirements.
Decisioning Studio Go promises continuous one-to-one optimization across customer journeys. Agentic Standards reviews campaign setup, links, personalization logic, and requirements such as unsubscribe links before activity goes live.
In discussing the news, Bill Magnuson, Co-Founder and CEO of Braze, said:
“With today’s launches, BrazeAI handles the experimentation, verification, and execution, so the world’s most sophisticated marketers can focus on creativity, ambition, and judgment.”
That is attractive for teams managing high campaign volumes. But agentic marketing can also create customer fatigue, conflict with another active journey, or fail a rule that a human marketer would have spotted.
