Braze City x City 2025 - Our Takeaways

We headed to Braze City x City London this week to explore what’s new (and what’s next) in personalised customer engagement. From AI content generation to next-level journey decisioning, one message came through loud and clear:

What’s best for one person isn’t best for everyone.

This shift in mindset is driving some big changes in how brands think about customer experience. And Braze is right at the forefront.

Reinforcement learning: smarter decisions at scale

One of the standout discussions was around OfferFit – a decisioning platform built on reinforcement learning, and recently announced to be joining the Braze family. While the acquisition isn’t final just yet, it signals where things are heading.

OfferFit’s approach goes a step beyond traditional predictive models. Instead of relying on static scores (like propensity to churn), reinforcement learning tests and learns in real time. It figures out which action, message, or experience will actually move the needle – for each individual, not just each segment.

OfferFit’s agents also help optimise offers, work within promotional budgets, and nudge customers toward key goals. The result is true one-to-one personalisation at scale, powered by decision-making models that continuously improve through learning. Importantly, the more trust the AI agents earn, the more autonomy they can take on.

It also sets the stage for a bigger shift: autonomous journey creation. With OfferFit’s tech, Braze is heading toward a future where journeys are designed dynamically by AI, not just manually by marketers.

For our clients using Braze, that could mean fewer assumptions, faster optimisation, and better outcomes with less manual effort.
It’ll be exciting to see how Braze and OfferFit bring these ideas to life together.

Catalyst: AI content that stays on-brand

Another standout was Catalyst, Braze’s new generative AI tool that sits inside their Canvas journey builder.

Catalyst can create message variants based on your tone of voice and brand guidelines, then test and optimise them automatically across channels. It’s designed to save teams time while still delivering relevant, high-quality content – no copy-pasting required.

While Catalyst is already supporting smarter content testing, we also heard about Project Catalyst: an evolution of the tool designed to act as a native AI decision agent. This feature will go beyond copy creation, building relevant journeys based on marketer-defined goals and seed content.

This opens up real opportunities for marketers:

• Faster testing without the overhead
• Smarter targeting based on real-time results
• More personalised experiences, without having to write every variant by hand

In short: less grind, more impact.

Data that moves at the speed of your customers

There was also a lot of buzz around Braze’s enhanced zero-copy integration with Snowflake. While the core integration has been around for a while, what’s new is the ability to trigger journeys directly from that external data without needing to move it into Braze first.

This kind of composable architecture – where your CDP capabilities are built directly on cloud data warehouses – allows brands to activate at both the profile and campaign level, making real-time personalisation more precise and less resource-intensive.

It might sound technical, but the benefit is simple:

• Faster access to external data
• More responsive journeys
• Less duplication and delay

It’s a win for any brand looking to move quickly, stay precise, and reduce data wrangling along the way.

RCS: A richer alternative to SMS

Braze shone a spotlight on RCS (Rich Communication Services) – pitched as the next evolution of SMS. With interactive buttons, branded sender IDs, and richer media support, RCS delivers a far more engaging experience than traditional text. It’s already seeing 250% more conversions than SMS, according to Google, and now boasts 100% carrier support in the UK.

Add in enhanced security, better analytics, and no app download required, and it’s easy to see why marketers are paying attention.

For brands, it’s a chance to bring mobile messaging in line with the kinds of experiences customers already expect from other channels, and to do it with more confidence and control.

From “next best action” to “next best everything”

One of the most thought-provoking ideas came from the OfferFit team: a shift from “next best action” to what they call “next best everything.”

Forget the old idea of making decisions based on a single metric. Their approach is all about full context: with AI agents understanding goals, learning from customer interactions, evaluating insights, weighing up the options and then informing the ‘next best’ path for each person.

While this is currently part of OfferFit’s technology, the Braze acquisition suggests we’ll see these advanced decisioning models become part of the Braze platform in future.

Why this matters for Tap CXM clients

Everything we saw at Braze City x City aligns with our mission to enable valuable, human-centred customer experiences. With these new tools and capabilities, we can help our clients:

• Personalise at scale without overloading their teams
• Test and learn faster, with smarter AI at the core
• Deliver journeys that feel truly relevant, not just reactive

And as the tech gets smarter, so do the possibilities.