Braze announces a new feature, codenamed Project Catalyst, to deliver 1:1 customer experiences by rapidly creating, testing, and optimizing thousands of experience variations

Our goal as marketers is deceptively simple: Create experiences that customers love and build relationships that keep them coming back. But each customer is unique, and their preferences and behaviors change over time. Still, they all have one thing in common—they expect brands to provide experiences that resonate with them, individually.

We’ve also reached a nexus in our ability to create, personalize, and experiment in all the ways and for all the outcomes we’re hungry to achieve. The explosion of data has given us ever-updating insights on consumers, we have more channels and digital touchpoints at our fingertips, and there is no shortage of creative options for us to try out. If we want to take our craft to the next level, marketers need help to reach this next level of experimentation—and we’re excited about a number of investments we’re making to help us get there.

Removing the Limits of Experimentation with BrazeAI™

As marketers, we love experimentation: whether it’s brainstorming and trying out new creative, refining our campaigns and lifecycle programs, or imagining new experiences to bring to life our brand story and promise—it’s the foundation that makes our craft both challenging and incredibly fulfilling. But as humans, we simply cannot build and test hundreds or thousands of variants to create truly 1:1 consumer experiences. We can build 1, 2, 4, 8…but at some point we will be limited by time and efficiency.

We think of it like how AI can benefit chess: For those of you who have played yourself—or maybe just watched The Queen's Gambit—you know there are a seemingly infinite number of moves that a player can make as they progress through a game. With AI, each of those possible moves can be considered, played out, and evaluated at each point in time to recommend the move that will have the best probability for winning. It would be near-impossible for any person (unless, maybe if you’re playing with Beth) to do so in the game’s time constraints.

Like in chess, each moment you engage with your consumer, you learn more, and you could potentially offer a number of likely paths that would align to their journey, preferences, and desired outcomes. But building out all of those potential experiences—and then testing them and refining them for each and every consumer as you continue to engage and learn more—is just not something we can do by ourselves.

That’s why today we’re excited to share Project Catalyst, our codename for a new feature that will unlock a third messaging experience - fueled by BrazeAI™.

Project Catalyst: Experiment and personalize for internet scale

Project Catalyst will sit alongside and integrate with Campaigns and Canvas, and is designed to help you craft and uncover the best experience for each individual consumer. It’s an agent that builds on our nearly 10 years of building products across the AI spectrum, from algorithmic approaches (e.g. Intelligent Timing, Personalized Variant), to traditional AI/ML models (e.g. AI Item Recommendations, Predictive Suite), to Generative AI (e.g. Copywriting Assistant, Tone Control – and even our new Liquid Assistant and Message Template Assistant features).

As we’ve improved our BrazeAI™ capabilities and the data science behind them, we’ve enhanced the foundation to help marketers deliver more value to their customers, and ultimately their brands. Each of our BrazeAI™ features drive benefits to marketers in our current workflows; but when we bring together the foundational high-quality data sets, stream processing capabilities, and mature data science investments, we’re now able to also do a lot more to help marketers create highly personalized experiences and experiment at unprecedented scale.

With Project Catalyst, marketers provide high-level guidelines for journeys, content, items and incentives, and specify a target audience and goal. The agent then generates hundreds of variants for each component of that experience—the subject line, the tone of the message, the various offers available, the channel mix, the best timing, and more. It combines the best of each component to create an individual, unique experience for each and every consumer.

For example, if you set Project Catalyst to focus on reigniting lapsing users for your retail brand:

• Customer one could receive a specific experience after they’ve gone two months without making a purchase. Their content could include a funny tone, a witty subject line and a more direct call to action—while still following brand guidelines. Their journey could start with an email, followed by an SMS, and then ensure that a Content Card is waiting for them when they visit your company’s mobile app. On top of this, that customer could be offered a new sweater in conjunction with a 40% discount.
• Customer two could receive a completely separate experience based on their specific preferences. They could be engaged in ways that are designed to address their monthly decline in purchase volume. Their content could use that same witty title, but leverage more persuasive copy and an informal CTA. Their journey could be a push notification, followed by an in-app message. And at the end, they could be offered a unique vintage jacket with a 20% discount attached.

These experiences, replicated across your entire customer base, offer thousands of potential possibilities for experiences, with each customer receiving the one that’s best suited for them. And with configurable boundaries, content controls, optimization levers, and real-time reporting and analytics, marketers can ensure they are in control of their engagement, make real-time adjustments and improve outcomes over time.

The best part of Project Catalyst, though, is the way it can support your existing Campaigns and Canvases. When we combine capabilities like Project Catalyst and Canvas, we can bring together handcrafted experiences with machine-crafted scale—enabling marketers to create lasting experiences that matter to each of their unique customers.

Forge and beyond: How you can sign up to explore our investments in orchestration and BrazeAI™

Want to explore this new way of building customer experiences with Braze? We're now accepting interest from brands who'd like to get involved. And, in the near term, we’ll be launching one-click content testing for push notifications, a new feature in early access you'll be able to request and use soon that will serve as a sneak peek into the full Project Catalyst experience. One-click content testing will expand to additional channels in the coming months to support faster content creation and more impactful and expansive experimentation.

These advanced capabilities offer powerful new opportunities for marketers to connect with their customers and that, in turn, has the potential to make marketers more valuable than ever before. And as these opportunities mature, we expect to see more exciting and important new questions surface for marketers—for instance, how best to define and maintain brand identity in a fast-moving, AI-informed customer engagement landscape. But hey, that just means you should stay tuned for more…

Note: Planned Beta for Project Catalyst is H1FY26. Want to learn more about how to use AI to achieve your customer engagement goals? Check out BrazeAI™.

Forward-Looking Statements

This blog post contains “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the “safe harbor” provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including but not limited to, statements regarding the performance of and expected benefits from Braze and its products, including the Project Catalyst. These forward-looking statements are based on the current assumptions, expectations and beliefs of Braze, and are subject to substantial risks, uncertainties and changes in circumstances that may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Further information on potential factors that could affect Braze results are included in Braze’s Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended July 31, 2024, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on September 6, 2024, and the other public filings of Braze with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The forward-looking statements included in this blog post represent the views of Braze only as of the date of blog post and Braze assumes no obligation, and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements, except as required by law.