Insights from the CEO: What’s Next for Intelligent Marketing in 2026

As we close out 2025, I am filled with gratitude for your partnership, your trust, and the ambition that has shaped everything we built this year at CleverTap. This has been a defining year not just for our company, but for the evolution of customer engagement itself. And that transformation has been driven by you: the marketers, leaders, and innovators pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.

Celebrating a Year of Shared Momentum

Across industries, markets, and use cases, our community has expanded and matured. The outcomes we achieved together earned recognition from some of the most respected global platforms, including awards from Stevie®, multiple Leader positions on G2, and our placement in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Personalization Engines.

While these accolades are meaningful, they reflect something deeper: a shared belief that customer engagement can be more intelligent, more contextual, and far more human than it has ever been. They affirm the work you’re doing every day to raise the bar on how brands interact with their customers—and they validate our mission to build technology that keeps pace with that ambition.

CleverAI: A Foundation for the Next Era of Customer Engagement

At the heart of our progress in 2025 was real product innovation. Most notably, we introduced CleverAI, designed to change how marketing teams operate.

CleverAI works alongside your teams to reason about goals, plan strategy, and orchestrate engagement—selecting the right audience, message, offer, channel, and moment, while continuously learning from outcomes to improve performance in real time. It represents a fundamental shift away from manual, fragmented workflows toward intelligent systems designed to act holistically.

CleverAI functions as a growth engine automation layer: a unified intelligence engine that runs execution across campaigns, channels, and journeys so teams can focus on strategy rather than operations. Acting as a digital twin of your workforce, it understands every user, signal, and interaction to enable true hyper-personalization.

By unifying intelligence, execution, and learning within a single system, CleverAI helps marketing teams maximize ROI while reducing operational complexity.

Designed to be more than a tactical helper, CleverAI operates as a true strategic partner, enabling marketers to collaborate with intelligence rather than manage tools. With this foundation, we believe we are entering the era of intelligent marketing, where AI becomes central to how engagement decisions are made and improved over time.

Turning Engagement Into Long-Term Value

Another important milestone this year was our acquisition and integration of Rehook.ai, alongside the launch of Promos, our incentives and loyalty capability.

Promos enables marketers to design and deploy high-impact rewards, offers, and gamified experiences directly within CleverTap. When combined with CleverAI, this creates a unified growth operating system—one that goes beyond engagement to drive sustained retention, deeper loyalty, and long-term customer value.

Together, these capabilities allow teams to move faster, experiment more confidently, and connect engagement directly to business outcomes.

What 2026 Will Mean for Intelligent Marketing Teams

As we look ahead, it’s clear that 2026 will mark a decisive shift—from AI-assisted workflows to AI-directed marketing. Several transformative trends are emerging:

Individualized Engagement Will Become the Standard: Marketing will evolve from broad personalization to true individualization. Every decision—whom to target, which message to send, which channel to use, and the optimal moment to engage—will increasingly be determined in real time and tailored to each customer’s context.

Emotional AI Will Redefine Customer Trust: Understanding why customers behave the way they do will be as important as understanding what they do. Emotional AI will help brands communicate with empathy and relevance, strengthening the relationship between companies and their customers.

AI Fluency Will Become a Core Competency: Just as marketers once mastered creative and analytics tools, they will now guide, audit, and collaborate with intelligent marketing systems. AI fluency will be essential for teams to unlock the full potential of intelligent marketing.

Governance and Safety Will Shape Responsible Innovation: As intelligent systems scale, governance, safety, and compliance will play a central role in ensuring safe and trusted AI adoption. Speed and scale will matter, but so will transparency.

How CleverAI Will Help You Win with Intelligent Marketing in 2026

We are expanding CleverAI’s capabilities with a single goal: helping you move from hypothesis to measurable impact in minutes, not weeks.

The CleverAI Decisioning Engine: A Living, Learning System

CleverAI continuously learns from historical and real-time customer behavior to determine the right audience, channel, timing, offer, and creative for every individual. This is 1:1 personalization reimagined, not as a set of workflows, but as an adaptive, intelligent system.

The Agentic Universe: AI Agents With Specialized Expertise

Our suite of AI Agents, including Analytics, Journey, Segment, Content, and Recommendations, is designed with specialized expertise to support key marketing workflows. These Agents operate autonomously, allowing teams to move faster and make more informed decisions without the manual effort traditionally required. Together, they:

• Build and optimize customer journeys
• Generate on-brand content at scale
• Identify next-best actions and opportunities
• Surface insights directly from your data

CleverAI Agents bring intelligent automation at scale, supported by enterprise-grade governance and security, ensuring safe and compliant AI adoption across your teams.

Shaping the Future of Intelligent Marketing Together: The CleverAI Pioneer’s Program

As we build toward this next era of intelligent marketing, we’re taking a collaborative approach to shaping what AI-first engagement becomes in practice.

The CleverAI™ Pioneer’s Program is an invite-only design partner program created for teams that want to co-create the future of customer engagement alongside us. Participants receive exclusive early access to CleverAI capabilities and work closely with our teams to help define how intelligent marketing systems should operate in real-world environments.

This is not a generic early-access program. As design partners, we customize our models to your business and data, creating continuous feedback loops that help CleverAI learn, adapt, and perform better for your unique context. While most teams receive a standardized product, Pioneer’s Program participants experience a deeply tailored, best-in-class AI implementation shaped directly by their input.

Why Participate

Participants in the CleverAI Pioneer’s Program gain:

• Deeply personalized onboarding and model training
• Direct access to CleverTap’s top talent
• An early advantage competitors won’t be able to buy later

Most importantly, it offers a shared opportunity to influence how intelligent marketing systems evolve together.

The next breakout brands won’t simply use AI features. They’ll run on an AI-powered growth engine. We’re building that engine, and we’d like to build it with you.

The Outcomes You Can Expect in the Coming Year

As CleverAI becomes central to how intelligent marketing teams operate, the outcomes you can expect include:

• Faster creative velocity and time-to-market
• Greater relevance that drives deeper loyalty
• Higher conversions and stronger retention
• Improved average order value and customer lifetime value
• Clear, trusted ROI from campaigns
• Safe, validated, and compliant use of AI

These outcomes reflect what intelligent marketing makes possible when strategy, execution, and learning are unified within a single system.

A Note of Gratitude

To our customers and partners: thank you for your trust, collaboration, and ambition. You continually push us to raise the bar.

As we close out 2025 and look ahead to 2026, I’m excited to continue this journey together. The year ahead is full of possibilities, and I look forward to seeing the impact of intelligent marketing in action.