Key insights from Grow with Braze Dubai 2025
2026-03-07 22:10 Diff
https://www.braze.com/resources/articles/key-insights-from-grow-with-braze-dubai-2025

Our Grow with Braze Dubai event brought together over 130 regional marketing, digital, and growth leaders at the One&Only Royal Mirage, Dubai Marina. It was an evening focused on mastering always-on customer engagement in one of the world’s most competitive digital markets, where attendees discovered how Braze and customer engagement has transformed together with the ever-changing landscape of consumer behavior.

From engaging the consumer with AI-decisioning and AI-powered excellence to building trust and loyalty, Grow with Braze Dubai spotlighted what it takes to connect with today’s ever changing consumer behavior, where every interaction is real-time, personal, and governed by trust.

A region defined by ambition and innovation

In his opening remarks, Sharif Kotb, AVP of Sales GCC at Braze highlighted three emerging customer engagement trends in the GCC:

  • Breaking down organizational silos
  • Moving from fragmentation to flow
  • Navigating the new loyalty landscape

Recognizing the growing maturity of GCC brands across sectors, he reminded the crowd that what makes events like this special is hearing firsthand how brands are using Braze and AI agents to build meaningful connections with their customers. After all, the breadth and scale of the Braze platform is vast, supporting over 7.4B monthly active users and 2,000+ customers, with 300+ of them sending over 1 billion messages per year.

From hype to impact: Delivering AI-powered customer excellence

Jon Hyman, Cofounder and Chief Technology Officer of Braze, reinforced our commitment to building AI agents and tools that meaningfully enhance modern customer engagement. He introduced BrazeAI Decisioning Studio™, a new capability that helps brands move beyond static, rules-based segmentation toward dynamic, reinforcement-learning-driven experiences. By continuously analyzing behavioral and contextual signals, the platform identifies the next best action for every individual, empowering brands to personalize each interaction at scale.

Jon emphasized that,“like every new tool, its real value depends on how we use it,” while AI unlocks new levels of automation and intelligence, he noted that exceptional customer engagement still requires human judgment, creativity, and strategic thinking. AI, he clarified, does not replace those qualities and, rather, it amplifies them, reinforcing the importance of a thoughtful human touch in order to use AI effectively.

Key highlights:

  • BrazeAI Decisioning Studio™ enables dynamic, reinforcement-learning-based decisioning
  • Behavioral and contextual signals inform personalized next-best actions
  • AI augments, not replaces

Reflecting on Dubai’s rapid pace of innovation, Jon highlighted how each major technology shift has been marked by greater connectivity, bringing brands and customers closer together. Today, the rise of AI is accelerating this transition, shaping consumer behavior and redefining customer engagement through richer, more immediate interactions.

How Anghami creates seamless cross-channel experiences to win and retain customers

Elie Habib, Co-Founder and CTO of Anghami took this opportunity to share how the platform has grown to over 100M registered users worldwide, with 18M loyal active users in MENA, by prioritizing personalization, automation, and retention over pure acquisition.

Elie emphasized that sustainable growth comes from iterating before perfection, investing in multi-touch journey orchestration, and leveraging AI to scale personalization across user segments with the help of Braze. Anghami’s GenAI-assisted campaigns such as contextual episodic notifications, have delivered significant performance lifts, improving engagement by up to 48% versus generic reminders.

The team’s focus on early churn detection, automation, and continuous testing reinforces a core belief that if a customer engagement strategy does not deliver its intention to customers, it is just content and not CRM. These principles demonstrate how disciplined experimentation and customer-first design can drive long-term loyalty in a saturated streaming market.

Future-ready engagement: How leading brands scale AI

The first panel focused on how AI-driven content creation, journey orchestration, and unified data are transforming customer engagement. Brand leaders from Majid Al Futtaim, Botim / Astra Tech, Contentsquare and Optimizely discussed the adoption of AI in advanced marketing strategies, highlighting its role in achieving operational scale, enhancing cross-channel orchestration, and fostering innovative creative approaches.

Speakers:

  • Diaa El Din Nasr, Senior Director MENAT, Contentsquare
  • Frenando Ansari, Lead Product Manager, Botim / Astra Tech
  • Majd Arzouni, Marketing Technology & Engagement Senior Manager, Majid Al Futtaim
  • Praveen Prabhakaran, General Manager, MEA, Optimizely

Across the discussion, panelists agreed that three pillars are required to scale AI: a creative engine flexible enough to produce high-volume multilingual content, an agent-to-agent framework to orchestrate decisions along the journey, and governance guardrails to ensure trust, compliance, and controlled autonomy.

Key highlights:

  • Majid Al Futtaim: Scaled lifecycle engagement by increasing automated campaigns from 40+ to over 110, executing 1,000 tactical communications in eight months, and reaching approximately 5.6M recipients monthly.
  • Botim / Astra Tech: AI-powered conversational interfaces (bilingual chatbot, on-chat payments) drove nearly 300% monthly transaction gains, totaling AED 1.3B in four months.
  • Contentsquare's Sense: AI-enabled "perception layer" interprets friction signals (e.g., rage clicks) to inform real-time Braze journeys, enabling corrective or empathetic experiences.
  • Optimizely: Highlighted AI tools for automated content production and streamlined experiment creation, leading to faster cycles and adaptive personalization.

From data chaos to impact: How real-time sync transformed media engagement

Mitra Daram, Co-Founder and Shekhar S, Head of Growth & Strategy, CustomerIK showcased how an American nonprofit successfully migrated over 2.5M active contacts to Braze and reached 124M households with messaging in just 35 days demonstrating the value of real-time syncing and clean profile management.

The project showcased how CustomerIK’s bi-directional integration with Braze unified data activation, minimizes duplication and accelerates high impact campaign execution. Through its spanning data, insights, lifecycle strategy, campaign execution, and analytics, the team illustrated how infrastructure and strategy can move in-parallel to accelerate time-to-value.

The takeaway: With the right technology fabric, clean data, and thoughtful orchestration, brands can transition from fragmented systems to scalable, real-time customer engagement faster than ever.

From data to devotion: Styli’s GCC loyalty playbook

Styli’s Chief Growth Officer, Abhinav Nair, discussed how the brand blends first-party data and localized channel orchestration with the help of Braze to reshape loyalty among GCC shoppers.

As a customer, Styli uses Braze to leverage on first party data and consumer signals such as purchase recency, category affinity, language, and channel preference serve as the foundation for thoughtful personalization that respects cultural and frequency guardrails. A mobile-first mindset is essential, especially across apps and WhatsApp platforms. The two channels consistently demonstrate their ability to convert and drive repeat revenue for young, digitally native shoppers. Abhinav described how insights from localized behavior influence tone, timing, and channel selection in markets like KSA and UAE, where customer expectations and delivery norms vary.

The conversation unpacked key lifecycle moments that shape customer loyalty: Returns, seasonal drops, birthdays, and wallet top-ups. Abhinav noted that designing these moments into a flywheel, supported by clear measurement frameworks, helps Styli deepen relationships and increase lifetime value.

Always on, always engaged: Personalization & retention from finance to food delivery with amana and Snoonu

This session brought together CMOs from amana and Snoonu for a conversation on how always-on brands nurture emotional resonance and loyalty.

Speakers:

  • Rahma Abid, Acting Chief Marketing Officer, Snoonu
  • Joy Dabeet, Chief Marketing Officer, amana

The panel opened by sharing how daily, mobile-first customer relationships require brands to balance hyper-personalization with respectful message density. The intensity of mobile usage across both industries where frequency, immediacy, and trust, profoundly shape engagement strategies.

In a high-stakes ecosystem like trading, thoughtful and responsible pacing, tone, and compliance-aligned content proved critical to increasing user comfort and repeat activity. As a result, amana intentionally builds journeys that help customers feel secure rather than one that pushes them into reactive decisions.

Meanwhile, Snoonu shared how reliability and lifestyle value strengthens loyalty. By designing real-time journeys powered by AI that respond to intent signals such as time-of-day, recency, cuisine affinity, and location, Snoonu aims to behave less like a promotion engine and more like a concierge, thereby improving efficiency and relevance.

There’s never been a better time to be a better marketer™

In a powerful closing keynote, Astha Malik, Chief Business Officer at Braze celebrated the region’s creative momentum by sharing inspiring stories of brands transforming WhatsApp into a dynamic hub for discovery, service, and loyalty. She emphasized how brands are redefining omnichannel strategies by seamlessly blending digital and in-person experiences, turning real-time updates into opportunities to strengthen emotional connections and build lasting loyalty.

As technology advances, each new tool acts as a portal, merging timelines and looping brands into new narratives. Through every twist and turn, marketers continue to adapt and thrive.

“We have always found a way to evolve.” Astha remarked, highlighting how rediscovering creativity and amplifying it with AI tools, is how we will keep moving forward. She showcased examples of how the fusion of AI and creativity enables new forms of immersion, personalization, real-time relevance, and risk-taking.

“Journeys bend and shift. But the constant, the force that makes all of it work, is you.”

Final takeaways for Dubai marketers

  1. AI amplifies and augments, not replaces: While AI unlocks powerful automation and real-time decisioning, its impact depends on judgment, imagination, and creativity. The craft of engagement still requires people.
  2. First-party data and cultural nuance drive modern loyalty: Brands that thoughtfully activate signals and first party data with transparency to build deeper trust and relevance across markets.
  3. Real-time, multi-channel orchestration is the new baseline: Customers expect fluid experiences across channels, journeys must adapt dynamically to retain customer relevance and loyalty.

As the day concluded with networking drinks and building new connections one message resonated: the future of customer engagement is one that forges meaningful connections with trust and transparency and AI-powered excellence.

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