Kevin Shectman, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Braze shares more on how marketers can drive more value with their customer engagement strategies in this MarTech interview by MarTechSeries:
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Hi Kevin, tell us about your role at Braze and your experience in martech?
Over the past 10 years, I’ve built a career at the intersection of technology and customer behavior. I’ve focused on helping companies—from iconic brands to scrappy startups—use technology to build stronger customer relationships.
My journey began at JPMorgan Chase, where I launched new applications to hundreds of thousands of end users globally, followed by advising technology and marketing leaders at Deloitte Consulting. For the last six years, I’ve been scaling product marketing at Braze. Here, I lead the go-to-market strategies and team that fuel Braze’s continued growth and innovation in the customer engagement space.
It’s an incredibly exciting time to work in customer engagement. As a marketer who markets marketing technology to marketers (meta), I’ve seen firsthand how AI is upleveling our craft. A lot of my current work centers on helping marketers unpack the latest trends, create winning strategies, and deliver more relevant customer experiences.
How are Braze’s latest AI powered enhancements driving output for end users?
Consumers and marketers are constantly faced with decisions. Say you’re shopping for a new pair of shoes. There’s a sea of different brands, products, and offers all vying to capture your attention and share of wallet. If you’re marketing to those consumers, you have to think through what to send, when to send, who to send to, what channel to send on, and more. How do you make the best possible decisions for each individual?
This problem isn’t new. The north star of many marketing teams has long been to deliver 1:1 personalization at scale. And yet, it’s always been slightly out of reach. In our 2025 Braze Customer Engagement Review, 85% of marketing leaders said they’re worried their messages aren’t resonating. The reality is that traditional tools and tactics weren’t designed to handle this kind of complexity.
AI is fundamentally changing this dynamic. At Braze, we recently launched two new solutions that make the promise of 1:1 personalization at scale possible. For example, the BrazeAI Decisioning Studio™ empowers marketers to tailor every aspect of customer communication. AI agents autonomously determine the best channel, timing, copy, creative, products, offers, and more for each person (not segment). The agents are empowered with business and customer context. They experiment, learn, and adapt in real time. They are designed to make optimal 1:1 decisions at a speed and scale no human team can match.
Beyond decisioning, AI agents stand to impact all facets of engagement. With the BrazeAI Agent Console™, marketers can create, manage, and deploy custom agents across the customer lifecycle and marketing workflow. This opens the door to all kinds of personalized marketing and product experiences. For example, marketers can spin up an agent to rapidly generate and optimize content, keep a steady pulse on user sentiment, send timely follow-ups in the moments that matter, and more. By removing technical blockers and human limitations, AI is freeing marketers to focus on what matters most: creativity, strategy, and connection.
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What are some of the common bottlenecks between customer insights and how the insights are used to power campaign plans and performance?
While AI is exciting and transformative, the fundamentals of great marketing aren’t changing. To make and keep a customer, you’ve got to build a relationship with them. That relationship is built on first-party data.
When it comes to data, the challenge isn’t about volume. Most brands honestly have more than they know what to do with. The real challenge lies in picking up and applying the right context. What data matters most? Where does it live? How can the underlying insights be surfaced, combined, and put to good use quickly, completely, and with minimal overhead?
Too often, customer and brand insights are sitting on the sidelines. They’re idle in a 3rd party system, dashboard, or data warehouse. Access and activation remain out of reach for the average marketer or require them to navigate a web of requests for technical support. It’s time-consuming, costly, and cumbersome. Not to mention, when the insights do arrive, they’re likely outdated. They’re likely disjointed from the rest of the tech stack. And they’re likely painting an incomplete picture of the customer journey and campaign performance.
This is why the concept of composability is so important. When rich context flows freely across a brand’s technology ecosystem, it fuels greater intelligence across models, agents, and operators. It also drives higher-quality interactions across channels.
What would you say are some of the biggest pain points holding back modern marketers?
Marketers are no stranger to challenges. We operate in a world defined by rapidly shifting trends, technologies, channels, competitors, and expectations. We share pain points around data sprawl, technology overload, siloed channels, resource constraints, and internal misalignment. Navigating this environment is both the challenge and the opportunity ahead. The good news? AI can help. The bad news? It’s not a catch-all.
Succeeding in an AI-native world requires masterful orchestration across data, technology, processes, and people. Marketers are well-positioned to not only survive, but thrive in this environment and elevate themselves to an even more strategic role. Doing that effectively means staying curious, harnessing powerful new technologies, expanding core responsibilities, aligning to key business objectives, and continuing to build relationships at scale.
What thoughts would you like to share around the future of AI, customer engagement and martech?
AI is the next major platform change of our generation. The rapid adoption of this technology is as significant as the rise of the Internet or cloud computing that came before. It’s not only helping us move faster, it’s unlocking entirely new ways of working and delivering new and enhanced experiences that simply weren’t possible before.
There’s still a lot of uncertainty around what exactly an AI-native future will look like. What’s clear is that AI is redefining the way consumers and brands engage with one another.
For consumers, the idea of a perfectly tailored experience at every touchpoint is now possible. For marketers, AI is elevating us from the drudgery of day-to-day campaign tactics. The rise of genAI and reinforcement learning in particular is empowering us to focus more on our customers, business strategy, and creativity. It’s not replacing us as marketers. It’s amplifying our impact and empowering us to chart the next frontier of engagement.
Some pointers you’d share with fellow marketers?
The key is to focus on building lasting, valuable customer relationships. It can be so tempting to focus on shiny objects or short-term tactics. These might move the needle temporarily, but long-term growth is built on trust. And trust is earned over a series of meaningful interactions.
Brands should lean on AI not only for efficiency gains, but to deepen customer understanding through real-time data, make more intelligent decisions, and deliver relevant cross-channel interactions. When marketers combine their human creativity with AI-driven insights and execution, they create deeper connections that stand the test of time.
Five martech best practices you’d leave us with before we wrap up?
Center your strategy on the customer: Take care of your customers and they’ll take care of your business. Focus on adding value, reinforcing relevance, and taking a long-term approach to the customer relationship.
Do more with your data: AI is only as good as the underlying data that fuels it. Let first-party data insights flow freely across systems, AI applications, and customer interactions.
Embrace composable intelligence: Empower models, agents, and operators with the rich context about your brand and customers. Combine, recombine, and call on them to come together in diverse ways across the customer journey.
Start small and scale with AI: Focus on one initial use case that will benefit your customers and your marketing team. Identify the core stakeholders, move quickly, and spread the learnings across the organization to generate momentum.
Stay curious: In marketing, the only constant is change. Embrace a beginner’s mindset that allows you to generate empathy, challenge the status quo, adopt and master new technologies, and fuel smarter insights and decision-making.
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