The Future of CRM: Five Insights from Braze Forge 2025

At Razorfish, we believe CRM is the connective tissue that powers relationships, fuels growth, and defines the future of experience. This year, at Braze Forge 2025, one message was unmistakable: The future belongs to brands that put the customer at the center, not the channel.

The trends emerging from this year's summit reinforce what we've long advocated—that CRM must evolve from fragmented systems into connected ecosystems capable of meeting customers in the moment with intelligence, empathy, and precision.

Here are the five themes that stood out, and what they mean for how brands should think about CRM in 2025 and beyond.

1. Composable Intelligence: From Automation to Orchestration

The most significant announcement at Braze Forge was the launch of AI Decisioning Studio, introducing what Braze calls "composable intelligence"—multiple AI agents working together like a high-performing team to design and optimize campaigns based on marketer-defined outcomes.

Why it matters: We're witnessing a fundamental shift from rigid, rules-based automation to adaptive, agentic orchestration. Instead of building static workflows, marketers now define desired outcomes, and AI agents collaborate to deliver them—continuously learning and adjusting based on real-time consumer behavior.

The Razorfish POV: As we help clients build composable architectures that integrate data, decisioning, and design, the role of technology shifts from execution engine to intelligent partner. Success will depend on how well brands can orchestrate their existing investments—across Google, Snowflake, Salesforce, Adobe, and now Braze—into unified ecosystems that deliver personalized experiences at scale.

Interoperability matters deeply. It's not about replacing systems; it's about connecting them so intelligence flows freely across the entire customer experience infrastructure.

2. Marketers as Conductors: The Evolution from Operators to Orchestrators

A recurring theme throughout the summit was the transformation of the marketer's role from operator to conductor.

Why it matters: Success now depends less on manually executing campaigns and more on integrating, orchestrating, and connecting the systems, data, and AI agents that power them. Marketers set strategic direction, define desired outcomes, and guide tone and intent—while intelligent systems handle execution.

The Razorfish POV: This shift requires a new skill set, one that mirrors systems integration and connection design more than traditional campaign management. At Razorfish, we're already building for this future through our Connected CRM discipline—unifying customer data, decisioning, and design to create adaptive experiences.

Brands need partners who understand how to harmonize technology, data, and creativity into one cohesive ecosystem. This means investing in the right talent, as well as creating standardized processes, and repeatable playbooks that elevate CRM from a support function to a strategic growth engine. The most effective teams will be those focused on creativity, experimentation, and deep customer insight—not manual campaign execution.

3. Loyalty as a Business Imperative: Connection Over Transactions

Loyalty took center stage, not as a program, but as a principle. The conversation has evolved beyond points and perks to something more fundamental: building emotional, data-driven connections across every touchpoint.

Why it matters: Retention begins at the first interaction. The most successful brands use zero-, first-, and third-party data to understand customers, celebrate milestones, recognize preferences, and show genuine appreciation. They weave loyalty-driven messaging across their entire PESO (paid, earned, shared, and owned) ecosystem, making it the underlying theme guiding every channel and campaign.

The Razorfish POV: CRM must extend beyond owned channels. While rooted in email, SMS, mobile, and direct mail, Connected CRM also fuels paid, earned, and shared experiences—activating intelligence and creativity at scale.

Shared connection is the new currency. Transactional rewards attract customers, but shared experiences—built on transparency, storytelling, and community—turn them into passionate advocates. With Publicis Groupe solutions like CoreID and second- and third-party data enrichment, we help brands create these connected experiences that build belonging, not just transactions.

4. Engagement in a Messy World: From Proactive to Predictive

People's lives are unpredictable and non-linear. Their needs and priorities shift constantly. As one CRM leader noted, our strategies must keep up, and the underlying technology and data must enable them to do so.

What this means: Advances in predictive, generative, and synthetic AI are moving brands from proactive engagement to truly predictive engagement. Brands can now flag when customers are at risk of churn, produce dynamic content variations in real time, simulate audience cohorts before launch, and enrich first-party data with external signals that make personalization genuinely relevant.

The Razorfish POV: We've long maintained that CRM must be a dynamic ecosystem combining data, automation, content, and AI to orchestrate customer journeys in real time. The tools showcased at Braze Forge—AI Decisioning Studio, AI Agent Console, and AI Operator—represent the maturation of capabilities that finally allow us to activate this vision at scale.

First-party data is essential, but its power multiplies when enriched with behavioral signals and contextual intelligence. A customer who bought high heels last month might now be training for a marathon—and adaptive partnerships help brands pivot accordingly, recommending running shoes instead. That’s how we move from static, pre-curated audiences to intelligent personalization.

5. Beyond the Funnel: Meeting Customers in the Moment

Perhaps the most resonant insight came from Seth Matlins, managing director of the Forbes CMO Network: "Customers don't live in the funnel, they live in the moment."

Why it matters: Many marketers still think in campaigns and channels: email blasts, social pushes, paid media flights. But customers don't live like that. They make decisions moment to moment, guided by relevance and context. To connect meaningfully, brands must move from pushing messages on their schedule to designing adaptive experiences that respond to customer behavior as it happens.

The Razorfish POV: This is the essence of Connected CRM—a discipline and ecosystem that unifies customer data, decisioning, and design to deliver personalized, trusted, and adaptive experiences across every channel, journey, and moment.

The future of CRM will not be measured by how many campaigns you launch but by how effectively you identify and activate pivotal moments—those brief windows when personalized action creates disproportionate impact in the customer relationship.

CRM acts as the connective tissue across touchpoints—linking marketing channels with e-commerce, in-store, loyalty, media, and service centers—so brands can create relationships that grow in relevance and value over time. The new features announced at Forge, from zero-copy Canvas triggers to message prioritization to WhatsApp Flows, all point toward this moment-based future.

What This Means for Your Brand

The insights from Braze Forge 2025 make one thing clear: CRM has expanded in scope, and with that expansion comes complexity. What began as a system of record has evolved into a dynamic ecosystem of automation, AI-driven agents, real-time data, and proliferating touchpoints. The opportunity is massive, but the risk of fragmentation is just as real.

At Razorfish, we help brands navigate this complexity by:

• Shifting from campaigns to moments: Focusing on the pivotal moments when personalized action creates disproportionate impact
• Moving from fragmented to connected: Transforming CRM from isolated campaigns into connective tissue that links people, platforms, and experiences across every touchpoint
• Building technology ecosystems, not just platforms: Integrating data, automation, content, and AI to orchestrate customer journeys in real time through composable architectures
• CRM at Razorfish is a growth engine, not a support function. As the industry moves toward composable intelligence, agentic orchestration, and moment-based engagement, our Connected CRM discipline is built to help brands thrive in this new era.

The future belongs to brands that can meet customers where they are, in the moment, with ecosystems designed to deliver personalized, trusted, and adaptive experiences at scale.