What we're talking about this month — everything you need to know from Braze Forge 2025, our upcoming webinar with Taco Bell about improving campaign processes with AI, our new Innovation Lookbook, and more!   Welcome to the October edition of Cutting Edge: the monthly newsletter for marketers who use Braze! We're still unpacking from Braze Forge 2025. While we brought home a few branded water bottles, what we really brought back was way better: breakthrough ideas, bold product releases, and can't-miss takeaways shaping what's next in customer engagement. So, instead of postcards, we're bringing you back something more useful: insights, updates, and practical tips that matter right now — straight from the Vegas Strip to your daily marketing strategy. What we're talking about this month: 💡 What composable intelligence means for marketing 📌 Braze tips & tricks 🛠️ Our take on Braze’s biggest Forge releases 🪡 Resources you can use to hone your craft: including our upcoming AI campaign process webinar & 2025 Innovation Lookbook! STITCH IN TIME Marketing, meet composable intelligence. 🧠 Back from Forge, and it’s clear: we’re not just seeing new tools. We’re watching a new marketing infrastructure take shape. The story isn’t AI features. It’s composable intelligence — real-time data, autonomous decisioning, and modular systems working together to replace rigid campaigns with adaptive experiences. Think of it like cooking. Traditional marketing is following a recipe card step by step. Composable intelligence is a smart kitchen: it knows what’s in the fridge, who’s coming to dinner, and adapts the meal on the fly. Pasta tonight, tacos tomorrow. No new recipe required. We’ve already seen it in action. Decisioning Studio (formerly OfferFit) helped Yum! Brands deliver 2.6x stronger engagement across hundreds of millions of interactions. That’s not a pilot. That’s production scale. For marketers, this means a role shift. Less time as campaign operators, more time as system architects (setting the rules, the brand voice, the strategy) while intelligent agents optimize timing, channel, creative, and frequency in real time. How you can set the foundation for composable intelligence: Audit your data flow: Map how customer data moves today. Identify gaps where batch processing slows you down and prioritize investments in real-time streaming. Redefine campaign briefs: Stop writing step-by-step instructions (“send email A, then push notification B”). Start writing outcome-based briefs (“increase repeat purchase by 15%”). Build pilot use cases: Pick one or two high-value journeys (e.g., cart abandonment, onboarding) and test autonomous decisioning there first. Prove value before scaling. This isn’t incremental. It’s a rewiring of how marketing works. The future is already here: real-time, autonomous, composable. - Michael Burton CEO & Former radio announcer at IU-Bloomington (WIUS) PIN IT Braze tips & tricks 📌 Custom head content is here for drag-and-drop emails! Braze’s new custom head tag feature is a subtle upgrade with a big impact for drag-and-drop emails. What it does: It allows you to add CSS and metadata directly in your email head without having to switch to a complex HTML build. It also supports Liquid, so all your custom code can live neatly in one content block. Why it's a must-use: Braze has a limitation where mobile-only styles in drag-and-drop content blocks don’t apply when those blocks are inserted via Liquid tags. With custom head tags, you can now wrap these content snippets in a class and target them precisely using CSS. Previously, CSS in HTML blocks outside the head tag wouldn’t render properly in mobile Gmail inboxes. This feature solves that limitation. It’s a relatively small change, but it unlocks big flexibility. - Megan Hampton Technical Producer & Home DIY Expert PATCHWORK Decoding Braze product updates 🛠️ Braze released a lot at Forge. BrazeAI™ took center stage — here’s what you need to know. BrazeAI Agent Console™ In our opinion, this is the real announcement. Agent Console lets marketers insert AI agents directly into Braze workflows. The first two places you’ll see them are in Canvas flows (e.g., an agent can decide in real time whether to send an SMS, email, or push based on live customer signals) and Catalog data syncs (e.g., enriching a product or offer row with AI-generated content like copy, tags, or descriptions, as new data flows in). Over time, this will become Braze’s “AI integration layer” — the foundation for plugging in AI across the platform. Why it matters: Automates the manual, repetitive decision-making inside campaigns. Lets you bring your own AI models (OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropic, etc.) if your company already has AI investments. Comes with pre-built agents for optimization and brand voice, but the real value is custom agents built around your business. BrazeAI Operator™ This is like ChatGPT for Braze, but it isn’t available yet — a limited beta started this month, and it won’t be in full beta until January 2026. Imagine a chatbot in the UI where you can type: “Build me a re-engagement email for lapsed customers,” or “Show me campaign performance for push in NAM last month.” Why it matters: Speeds up campaign creation and analysis (no hunting through menus). Lowers the barrier for junior team members—less training required. Works even better when paired with Agent Console (Operator asks, Agents do). BrazeAI Decisioning Studio™ This is essentially OfferFit under a new name. It uses reinforcement learning to continuously personalize campaigns—deciding the best channel, timing, message, and offer for each customer instead of finding one “winner” for all. Why it matters: Delivers ongoing, adaptive personalization at the individual level. Moves beyond A/B testing or predictive rules—it learns and improves automatically. What does this mean for you as a marketer? AI prompting is going to become an essential marketing skill. Here are 3 tips to help you become a better prompter: Give the AI some context. Don’t just say “write an email.” Tell it who you’re talking to, what channel you’re using, and what you want your audience to do as a result. The clearer you are, the better the output. Treat it like a conversation. The first draft won’t be perfect, and that’s fine (and expected). Ask the AI to tweak it: “make it shorter,” “add a playful tone,” “try three variations.” Store the good stuff. When you find a prompt that really works, save it. Share it with your team so you can all reuse the winners instead of reinventing the wheel. P.S. Braze released way more than just AI updates. They dropped new platform-wide features, like channel innovations for WhatsApp and RCS, enhancements to their email & form capabilities, and key updates that will improve workflows (zero-copy Canvas triggers, eCommerce attributes, and more). See all the Forge product announcements here. - Stephen Rosenfeld CTO & Amateur Deck Carpenter HONE YOUR CRAFT Our top resources this month 🪡 What happened in Vegas isn’t staying in Vegas. Our session at Braze Forge 2025 was overflowing (literally) with interest — and we're inviting those who couldn't make it into the session to join us for our virtual encore on Tuesday, October 28th. Learn how we're helping brands like Taco Bell and Whataburger transform their campaign processes with AI and automation. Register here > Keep the inspiration coming. Our 2nd annual Braze Innovation Lookbook is here! This year, we're bringing you 10 real use cases — all showing how marketers are working smarter, driving engagement, and building brand love with Braze. Get the Lookbook > 📚 What we're reading/watching Forge 2025 On Demand - Do you have post-Forge FOMO? Catch handpicked sessions featuring brands like e.l.f. Beauty, Yum! Brands, Canva, Venmo, Peloton, and many more on Braze’s website. The Real Implication of Braze's AI Strategy: Infrastructure Wins - Michael Burton Using AI to improve customer experience and customer journey orchestration - Chris Wood, Martech.org   LOOSE ENDS This month's VIP (very important pet) 🐾 Stitch, 830 Massachusetts Ave Floor 3, Suite 9, Indianapolis, IN 46204, USA Unsubscribe Manage preferences