What we're talking about this month — AI without the chaos, the best Braze features from 2025, gamification and accessibility resources, and a few end-of-year treats! ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏    ͏      Welcome to the December edition of Cutting Edge: the monthly newsletter for marketers who use Braze! As we wrap up another big year in marketing (and try not to break anything before going OOO), this month’s newsletter is all about clearing space — in our Canvases, our workflows, and our brains. We’re taking a year-end look at how AI should simplify marketing instead of adding more to manage, highlighting the Braze releases that shaped 2025, and sharing a few ideas to help you head into 2026 ready to build smarter. Consider this our little holiday gift to you. What we're talking about this month: ✅ Your year-end AI checklist 📌 Braze tips & tricks 🛠️ Our Braze release year-in-review 🪡 Resources you can use to hone your craft STITCH IN TIME Making AI List, Checking It Twice 🎄 Most marketing leaders expect AI to enhance team speed and intelligence, and these expectations have only grown over the past year as more AI tools and features have hit the market. In practice, many marketing teams experience the opposite: these new tools often make campaign creation more complex, adding steps and overhead instead of simplifying the work. When marketers spend most of their day chasing approvals, tracking creative versions, maintaining fragile or complex Canvas logic, and/or rebuilding journeys for edge use cases; they lose the time required to analyze performance, identify gaps in communication, and design meaningful tests. Without that space, AI becomes just another thing to manage, rather than a tool marketers leverage to learn faster (a.k.a do more testing) and improve performance. The most effective AI use cases today make marketers more effective by removing or reducing manual work. For example, rather than hardcoding dozens of branches in a Canvas, AI can evaluate historical engagement, purchase behavior, and response patterns to guide decisions dynamically. Fewer rules mean less maintenance, fewer errors, and journeys that scale as data grows. Year-end planning and reporting offer perfect opportunities to take stock and examine your Canvases. Which campaigns required frequent edits, multiple branches, or human intervention over the past year? These Canvases are great candidates to leverage AI to create simpler flows that still deliver highly personalized experiences for users. Need reporting on those different variations built within a single message step? Leverage Message Extras to indicate which recipient got which message into your data warehouse for deeper analysis. As we head into 2026, we should take a step back and look for opportunities to create more breathing room for our marketing teams — giving them time to build impactful campaigns, analyze results, identify cross-channel gaps, and design bigger tests. In the spirit of the holiday season (and to counteract my tendency to be long-winded), here’s my gift to you, a little TL;DR: Marketers need space to do "the marketing things." Don’t be scared of “the AI.” It can set you free. Identify low-hanging fruit to prove that AI can set you free. Measure the time savings AND campaign results with Message Extras. - Cat Mears Business Strategist & HGTV Star PIN IT Braze tips & tricks 📌 As your Braze program matures, decision logic inside Canvases often grows complex and brittle. Static rules for offer eligibility, urgency, or suppression can quickly become hard to maintain. Braze’s newer AI-assisted orchestration capabilities (like BrazeAI Operator™) help teams identify where manual logic can be simplified or optimized. For example, in an abandoned cart Canvas, AI can evaluate historical engagement, purchase behavior, and message response to determine whether to highlight a specific product, suppress an incentive, or escalate urgency. Why this matters: During year-end reviews, look for Canvas steps with heavy branching, frequent edits, or one-off rules. These are prime candidates for AI-informed decisioning or simplification. Reducing custom logic lowers maintenance effort, limits campaign sprawl, and makes personalization easier to scale as your data grows. Treat your year-in-review as a chance to refactor — not just report. - Kevin Dowd Business Strategist & Soon-to-be Girl Dad PATCHWORK Our 2025 Braze Release Wrapped 🛠️ What a year it’s been! It can be hard to keep up with all of Braze’s newest features and releases as the year goes by, so let’s take a look at the biggest game-changers this year, in case you missed them the first time around. January: The year started off strong with Canvas templates for email capture with double opt-in and onboarding with preferences survey–excellent starting points for new user nurturing. Adjustable widths also came to content blocks and the soft bounce filter to segmentation. February: The API usage dashboard became generally available (and immediately loved for its insight into previously hidden API traffic). It summarizes total requests for a given window, success and failure rates, and breakdown by hour (or minutes!) for different endpoints, API keys, and response codes. Pair this visibility with API usage alerts (from the July release) and never be surprised by an oncoming issue again. Price drop and back-in-stock notifications added tools to the commerce marketer’s toolbox to help close the sale, and catalog items could be templated using Liquid. March: This release brought clarity, enhanced documentation, and early access to my favorite release this year (spoiler: it’s Canvas Context, but more on that later). Developer docs got updated and tutorials were released for common Liquid scenarios, Snowflake entity relationships, and item recommendations. April: We got two product releases along with a major UI re-design. I don’t need to emphasize how nice it is to work in a platform that looks modern and is easy to navigate. April also brought the ability to import users with email addresses and phone numbers, simplifying data imports for accounts with elusive external_ids. Canvases got some love with in-app message trigger options and customizable entrance volume. The second April release continued making marketer’s lives easier with scheduled user merging for those pesky duplicate user scenarios, and the copy preview link for quick external proofing. May: Braze answered all of our dev-to-prod prayers with the copying Canvases across workspaces/ Banners and RCS channels unlocked more messaging real estate. June: BrazeAI Decisioning Studio™ (formerly OfferFit by Braze) revolutionized personalization at scale. Traditional A/B testing gets replaced with configurable agents and a specific goal. July: CSV imports for user attributes and custom events made data management a lot easier. We also got API usage alerts and bot filtering for email. August: Self-service custom domains for SMS, RCS, and Whatsapp enabled easier access to branded links, which garner more engagement. August also brought segment funnel statistics to each filter in a segment. September: Braze unveiled more docs related to the Braze Data Platform, clarifying its use and purpose, and Braze Pilot simplified app testing with a mobile app that’s publicly available and easy to connect. October: Suppression Lists were unleashed in streamlining exclusion criteria, and email Deal Cards made it easy to put the TL;DR right where the customer will see it. November: RFM (recency, frequency, monetary) criteria was baked into segment extensions creating shortcuts for more sophisticated segmentation. The “Values” tab was also added to custom attributes usage reports showcasing most or all possible values for that attribute. No more questioning the engineering team or pulling a query in hopes of gathering every possible value! Simply open up the custom attribute in question and click to the “Values” tab to see the number of distinct values found on a sampling of 250,000 users. A slew of Braze technology partners were added or optimized this year as well. The list includes: Justuno, Odicci, Optimizely, Constructor, Trustpilot, Email Love, VWO, Movable Ink Da Vinci, Shopify, Just Words, Tapcart, Eagle Eye, Eppo, Mention Me, Stripe, Okendo, Lemnisk, Blings, Jasper, Swym, StackAdapt, Cloudinary, and Kameleoon. Early access or betas were also released for the following: Canvas Context, Braze Agents, ChatGPT models with BrazeAI™ Operator, zero-copy personalization and eCommerce recommended events. My favorite 2025 release is Canvas Context. Since gaining access to Context steps, I use it in 90% of my builds to define variables, personalize delays, and simplify dynamic builds. Think of it as a way to define that final data point in a Canvas when it doesn’t already exist as a user attribute or event, with all the flexibility of Liquid. It’s your new secret ingredient. Here’s to another year of exciting product releases with the best customer engagement platform there is! - Rachel Moning Senior Solution Architect & the Public Library's Biggest Fan HONE YOUR CRAFT Our top resources this month 🪡 🦌 Reindeer games, but with better ROI (and less bullying). Our recent gamification webinar is now available on-demand! In this session, our team covered everything you need to know about building games in Braze — from strategy and creative concept development to execution and measuring success. Get it on demand >   📝 Make sure your emails are on the nice list. In this new blog, Sarah Gallardo, our resident accessibility expert, shares her top tips on how to create a more accessible email with the Braze drag-and-drop editor. These low-lift accessibility wins in your email builds make a big difference for every subscriber — and your engagement metrics, too. Read the article >   🔁 Let’s circle back in January. Our Braze Innovation Series resumes on January 20th, 2026. This will be the third installment in a series of webinars where we're cutting through the noise to bring you real-life use cases for how real brands are actually using Braze — today. No hypotheticals, no "ideas" that haven't been put into action, no fluffy concepts. Each webinar will walk through challenges, goals, and in-depth solution dives for cool sh*t that we've helped marketers build in Braze that has moved the needle in changing the way marketing gets done. Stay tuned for our first 2026 topic! Register here > 📚 What we're reading/watching After the all-out sprint that is the holiday season, the last thing a marketer wants to see under their tree is thought leadership. (Don’t worry, our educational content will resume in the new year.) Kick back, relax, and watch some of our team’s favorite holiday movies: Elf The Santa Clause Die Hard The Grinch - There was hot debate on which version is the best, the original animation (1966), the live action (2000), or the newer animation (2018). Watch all three and let us know. National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation Christmas with the Kranks Home Alone (1 & 2) The Muppet Christmas Carol   LOOSE ENDS This month's VIP (very important pet) 🐾 Stitch, 830 Massachusetts Ave Floor 3, Suite 9, Indianapolis, IN 46204, USA Unsubscribe Manage preferences