Reflections from Braze Forge 2025

✨ First Impressions

Braze Forge 2025 was my first time attending, and it exceeded every expectation!

Hosted at Virgin Hotels Las Vegas, the event brought together marketers, technologists, and innovators to explore what’s next in customer engagement, experimentation, and AI-driven personalization.

A huge thank you to the Braze team (Madison DeJesus, Emily Calderon, Ethan Abrams, Sean Grove, Mitch Schneider, Christina Dely, Diana Kim, Victor Kostyuk, Zachary Sverdrup, Meredith Mitchell, Sadaf Qayumi, David Bielik, Matt Kreisher, Laina Davidson, Todd Grennan, Andrew Quicho, and many more!) for the invitation and hospitality, and for giving me the opportunity to speak on two incredible panels:

From Iteration to Acceleration: Building an Experimentation Culture with Victor Kostyuk (Braze), Kym van der Weyde (DoorDash), and Melissa Neikirk (Remitly)
The Dollars and Cents of Deliverability with Zachary Sverdrup (Braze), Courtney Tierney (Papa Johns), and Chlöe O’Malley (Rightmove)

🎥 You can now watch my Braze Forge session on-demand: ▶️ From Iteration to Acceleration: Building an AI-Forward Experimentation Culture

Or explore the full library of sessions here:
🎬 Braze Forge 2025 On-Demand Videos

🧪 From Iteration to Acceleration

Our experimentation panel focused on the mindset before the tools.

The best experimentation cultures aren’t built on dashboards — they’re built on psychological safety, shared learning, and rhythm.
We discussed frameworks like weekly testing meetings, an experiment repository, and defining success in terms of learning velocity, not just win rate.

My biggest takeaway?

Learn fast, but with guardrails.

AI is now playing a growing role in that acceleration: from automating creative ideation and audience segmentation to cleaning data, flagging anomalies, and summarizing results faster than ever before.

The result isn’t just more tests - it’s more meaningful learning.

💰 The Dollars and Cents of Deliverability

In the deliverability session, we took a hard look at the economics of inbox performance.
Good deliverability isn’t just a hygiene metric, it’s a growth multiplier.

We covered the four pillars:

ISP & Domain Strategy: Right pacing, authentication, and reputation management
Postmaster Monitoring: Using data science to detect shifts before they hurt revenue
List Hygiene & Source Audits: Ongoing suppression and validation to protect your sender reputation
Governance & ROI: Operational rhythms and DMARC/BIMI compliance to maintain brand trust

Deliverability is where engagement, data quality, and revenue truly meet, and increasingly, where AI-prioritized inboxes decide who gets seen.

🤖 BrazeAI and the Future of Decisioning

The product announcements this year were just as exciting.
BrazeAI Decisioning Studio™, Agent Console, and the upcoming Operator mark a major step toward agentic marketing, where reinforcement learning continuously optimizes channel, message, and timing.

As marketers, our role shifts from campaign executor to strategic conductor, designing systems that learn autonomously and drive personalized engagement at scale.

🪄 Key Takeaways

Culture before tools: Technology amplifies habits; it doesn’t replace them.
Deliverability equals revenue: Treat it as a growth lever, not an afterthought.
AI accelerates learning: Reinforcement learning and decisioning agents will redefine experimentation.
Community matters: The people behind the sessions made this event unforgettable.

🔍 What’s Next

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing deeper dives into:

The frameworks and experiments we discussed in both of my Braze Forge panels
Highlights from key sessions that I attended from AI skill-building to composable data stacks
And my perspective on how I plan to incorporate Braze’s newest AI features (Decisioning Studio, Agent Console, and Operator) into my CRM experimentation and deliverability strategies

If you’re interested in where marketing experimentation and AI orchestration are headed next, stay tuned. I’ll be unpacking it all here and in my upcoming Substack series.

🙏 Gratitude

To everyone at Braze, thank you for the warm welcome, inspiring content, and flawless execution.
To my fellow panelists and attendees, your insights made the conversations very rich and rewarding.

Until next year, here’s to building faster feedback loops, cleaner data, and smarter campaigns, one experiment at a time.

Andrew

Explore BrazeAI Feature Announcements →
Watch Braze Forge 2025 Sessions On-Demand →