Mavlers

Norman Nielsen 🚀 has a clear message for Braze teams betting big on AI: it makes weak data even worse. Norman is Growth Evangelist at idealo internet GmbH. Ahead of Braze Forge 2026, we asked him what AI has genuinely changed in CRM and growth work. And what's still theater. He started with one-to-one marketing. It's been the headline at every conference for the last 10 to 15 years. A study he read says 93% of marketers now think AI has made it easy. His take as a customer? One-to-one still isn't fixed. He doesn't get the best recommendation at the right time, across categories. And in Europe, he sees that gap as even bigger. The interesting part wasn't the personalization debate. It was agentic shopping. He asked a room of 200 people at a conference who already shops through AI agents. The hands that went up were just few people. So his advice is refreshingly unglamorous: → Orchestrate all your data → Normalize it → Connect every channel, landing page, and app → Then start acting agentic on top of it Get the basics right. The agents come later. Here's what stood out to us. The teams winning with AI in Braze won't be the ones with the most AI features switched on. They'll be the ones whose data and segmentation were clean before any model touched them. Chintan Doshi and Mary M. from the Mavlers team are bringing this conversation to Forge through their Braindate sessions. One of them, hosted by Chintan, goes straight at it: "AI in CRM: Beyond the Hype!" Bring the AI use cases that worked. And the ones that fell flat. Braindate link in comments. #BrazeForge #CRM #LifecycleMarketing #AgenticAI #MarketingAI

"AI isn't a magic bullet, but marketers who ignore it will get left behind." That's the take from one of our past conversations with David O'Reilly, and it lines up with exactly what we're seeing across CRM and lifecycle programs right now. His point was simple. AI isn't replacing marketers. It's replacing the ones who refuse to learn it. The teams getting real value aren't expecting AI to fix everything, they're using it to clear out the repetitive, low-value work so people can focus on what actually needs judgment. That's the same conversation we're bringing to Braze Forge 2026. Mavlers is attending as a Silver Sponsor, and we'll be talking through exactly this, where AI genuinely moves CRM execution forward, and where it still needs a human calling the shots. Catch us at our photobooth, or grab a seat at our Braindates, hosted by Chintan Doshi and Mary M.. More info on our Braze Forge presence here: https://lnkd.in/e6J2Kw8N #BrazeForge2026 #Braze #AIinCRM #CRM #MarTech #Mavlers

Matt Kelly, Growth Strategy Partner at Mavlers and former Salesforce, breaks down the misconception we run into most when brands talk about deploying AI in their Braze environment. Heading into Forge this year, the question he keeps getting asked is which marketers are going to get replaced. He thinks that's the wrong question entirely, and here's why: → Agentic workflows and AI-driven personalization don't run themselves. They need a marketer telling them what to do and how, then critiquing the output so the system actually gets better next time → The real skill shift isn't fewer marketers, it's marketers moving into training, reinforcement and judgment calls the AI can't make on its own → Accountability doesn't disappear when an agent takes over a task a person used to do. Someone still owns how well it performed → Most teams underestimate this: the process you build around AI matters more than the AI itself We're bringing this exact conversation to Braze Forge 2026 in Las Vegas, September 28 to 30, where Mavlers is a Silver Sponsor this year. Catch Matt Kelly and Nital Shah at our booth, or find Chintan Doshi and Mary M. at their Braindate sessions on AI in CRM and scaling Braze without the complexity. See you in Vegas. #Braze #BrazeForge2026 #CRM #LifecycleMarketing #AIinMarketing

Currents. Catalogs plus Liquid. Two "hidden gems" in Braze that most marketers barely touch. Georgia Price, Lifecycle and Retention Marketing Leader and a familiar voice in the Braze community, recently broke down why these two features deserve more attention. Currents lets you pipe your Braze data straight into Snowflake or BIGQUERY, giving your data team full visibility and letting them put it to work across the business. Catalogs plus Liquid unlocks a level of personalization most brands haven't even scratched yet. These are exactly the kind of topics we'll be talking about at Braze Forge 2026. Mavlers is attending as a Silver Sponsor, and we'll be on the ground in Vegas talking data activation, personalization at scale, and everything in between. If you're building on Braze and want to go deeper on this, let's connect in Vegas. Check out the link in the comments to connect with our team at Forge. #BrazeForge2026 #Braze #CustomerEngagement #LifecycleMarketing #MarketingAutomation #Personalization #Mavlers #CRM #MarTech

David O'Reilly, Braze Community Leader of the Year 2024 and someone who's been deep in the Braze ecosystem for years, broke down this story on a podcast we did with him a while back. His team working at Clipchamp app noticed something simple: users waiting on a video export (often 3 to 4 minutes) were leaving the app to fill that dead time elsewhere. No data behind it at first, just a hunch from the team that they'd do the same thing. So they built the "While You Wait" campaign. A tutorial video, embedded right into the export screen, so users stayed in-app while their video processed. The result: → Users stayed longer during the export window instead of dropping off → Many discovered features they didn't know existed → YouTube subscriptions saw a real, measurable bump No new feature. No redesign. Just one dead moment in the user journey turned into something useful. A few things worth pulling from this: → The best campaign ideas often come from watching where users actually drop off, not from a brainstorm → Gut instinct backed by team consensus is still a valid starting point, data can validate it after → Retention isn't always about adding more touchpoints, sometimes it's about using the ones that already exist This is the kind of lifecycle thinking we build around when we work with Braze. Not "what campaign can we run" but "what moment already exists in the product that nobody's using yet." We'll be at Braze Forge 2026, Fontainebleau Las Vegas, Sept 28 to 30, talking through exactly this kind of lifecycle thinking with teams doing the same work. Details on where to catch us: link in comments 👇 #BrazeForge2026 #Braze #LifecycleMarketing #CRMOperations #MarTechOperations

Georgia Price has spent years in the Braze ecosystem, and honestly, what she said recently is what most teams are going through: nobody fixes a broken Braze instance by touching campaigns first. You fix the data. Here's what that looks like: → Audit every custom event and custom attribute in the instance → Block-list anything unused, anything dead weight → Check every high-priority campaign for an assigned custom event, and if it's missing, replicate the campaign and add one → Layer in conversion events everywhere, so every campaign has a measurable baseline Because a campaign built on broken event tracking gives you numbers you can't trust. No custom events, no idea what's working. No baseline, no way to prove anything moved. This is the part of Braze cleanup most teams skip, and it's usually why "optimization" work stalls out six months later. Mavlers is heading to Braze Forge 2026 as a silver sponsor, and we're excited to unpack exactly this with lifecycle and retention leaders in Vegas. Catch our team there...Nital Shah, Chintan Doshi, Mary M., and Matt Kelly. If you'll be there and want to connect with the Mavlers team, let's talk ... link in comments. #Braze #brazeforge2026 #CRM #LifecycleMarketing #MarketingAutomation #DataHygiene #brazebonfire