Last week, when Klaviyo unveiled the newest additions to its growing platform of tools for the modern Enterprise marketer, it became clear just how challenging eCommerce has become.

The “death of the funnel” was discussed in hallways and panel sessions, and, alongside the ongoing discourse about what has replaced it, practitioners were discussing both tools and tactics to stay ahead of the evolution of consumers' new modes of buying.

Rather than “the funnel” as we used to know it, inspiration and conversion are split across myriad platforms, with 43% of consumers saying they start researching on one platform and then purchase on another. And increasingly, consumers, especially high-earners (66%), are using AI for product recommendations. Consumers crave immediacy and relevance, and their psychosocial relationships with LLMs are giving them newfound sovereignty over their buying decisions.

Or, as IDC Research Director Roger Beharry Lall explains it: “What used to be a very controlled, step-by-step process is now all over the place.”  

That reality is forcing brands to rethink a framework they once considered tried and true. They are using AI to change not just where they show up, but how they show up in this empowered consumer's life.

Vendors like Klaviyo are providing a new model built on robust data and an expanding toolset that lets brands of any size operate at scale. Composer is at the center of it all, a marketing agent within the Klaviyo platform that serves as the new nucleus for all future brand experiences.

"It's not just generic AI," noted Jamie Domenici, Klaviyo's Chief Marketer, during an exclusive interview with Future Commerce at K:LDN 2026. "Klaviyo knows your customer history. It knows your past campaigns. It has best practices from our 200,000 customers. So when you say, 'make me a campaign' or 'improve my abandoned cart flow,' we can pull from all those best practices, make recommendations, and also go and build it right for you, right where you work."

🎧 Listen to the companion episode of the K:LDN podcast miniseries, featuring Klaviyo’s Jamie Domenici. 

Ethos at Scale

It’s that source of insight and memory that offers the most potential, especially for brands with the heritage and vision required to differentiate themselves in a sea of marketing messages, social media fads, and beige brands over-indexing on performance marketing. Because AI has made it easy for teams to quickly create campaigns and answer customer inquiries, value and meaning are the new competitive lever. 

Value and meaning can show up in many ways. For instance, whether a brand's AI output actually sounds like the brand, is grounded in what's true about the customer, and is trustworthy enough that a customer feels ready and eager to act on it. 

Klaviyo's co-founder and co-CEO, Andrew Bialecki, made those three qualities the spine of his K:LDN keynote, naming commerce's new trifecta for AI-powered customer experiences: taste, context, and trust.

"It's not enough to just define a logo and color palette; there's an ethos to a brand that you can only discover by immersing yourself in it."
— Andrew Bialecki, Co-CEO, Klaviyo

"When it comes to how we represent our brands, ourselves... what makes each of us different is our sense of taste and style, and it's very important that agents understand that," Bialecki said. "What we found as we were building Composer is, if you just ask your general-purpose LLM to design an email, design a campaign, it can do it, and it will be technically correct... but it doesn't know you. It's not enough to just define a logo and color palette; there's an ethos to a brand that you can only discover by immersing yourself in it."

Democratizing access to ethos means marketing teams are no longer separated into the groups of “strategic thinkers” and “doers.” Composer allows all team members to be both, acting as orchestrators that aim to serve their customers first. This is an overwhelming pivot for the many marketers who once spent up to 60% of their time on campaign production. Now, they’re the reviewers and the final decision-makers. “You still have the power to say yes or no,” Domenici noted, “which I think is really important as you continue to train and build AI.  

Private beta customers have already seen the benefits. Spanx unlocked 79% more revenue in two weeks using Composer during beta testing. While using Composer's Flow Audit, AS Beauty surfaced collision issues across an 113-flow library, which helped the brand understand when it was “unintentionally competing for the same customers, creating unnecessary message volume, and potential revenue loss,” according to Katherine Cabe, the brand’s Senior Director of Retention Marketing. “The visibility Composer provided was unbelievable. It didn't just identify issues; it helped us understand the context behind them.” 

Klaviyo's VP of Insights, Jake Cohen, doubled down on context as both a source of knowledge and a source of value in his conversation with The Bottle Club's Tim Martin-Harvey:

"If you can store that context effectively and leverage it effectively, that's the way you can create a moat, because you can serve more people more personally, more memorably."
— Jake Cohen, VP of Insights, Klaviyo

"If you can store [that context] effectively and leverage it effectively, that's the way you can create a moat because you can serve more people more personally, more memorably, which will create deeper relationships and... more durable business over time."

The New Context Layer 

Generic inputs beget generic results. It’s a fact which any AI user can vouch for. Klaviyo takes this idea a step further, arguing that generic AI (meaning generic LLMs) does the same. While you may be able to upload your brand book and additional context to fine-tune your results, they don’t have the full story.

Your voice, your customer history, and the signals that matter in your unique customer experience. Every customer is treated the same, flattening the meaning and emotional connection they have with your brand.

The stakes of that flattening show up in Klaviyo's own research. A survey of 8,000 consumers commissioned by the company found that 60% now use AI at least weekly, while just 13% say they completely trust it.

Adoption, in other words, has raced ahead of belief. Consumers have made AI a habit before brands have made it credible, and that 47-point gap is the territory every K:LDN announcement is trying to claim.

Klaviyo’s shared context layer is adding depth to AI-powered marketing, while also tackling a pain point that has plagued brands for decades: the silos between marketing and customer service. Silos are the reason why basic inquiries, such as WISMO (Where is my order?), remain the hallmark of AI-driven service interactions. It’s why so many consumers escalate to a human without giving service bots a chance. And it’s why none of the insight gathered from service conversations is shared with marketing to improve customer experiences, and vice versa. 

Kelly Thacker, Klaviyo's VP of Product Marketing, calls this failure mode the "dumb bot experience.” It’s the moment "you could be the most loyal VIP customer, and then all of a sudden you ask a question with one of the chatbots, and it is like, 'can you give me your email address?' And you're like, ‘ugh, you should just know me,’” she said in a companion K:LDN podcast conversation. 

Customer Agent, which launched last fall, is now available as a platform accessible via APIs and MCP. As a result, brands can build and extend it across different channels, from web chat to email, SMS and RCS, WhatsApp, and even Instagram. Brands can also set their own escalation rules, deciding upfront how much Customer Agent handles versus when it hands a conversation to a person — and widen that boundary as confidence grows. For many, a poor experience with an AI agent feels worse than a poor experience with a human, which makes that human-in-the-loop critical to building customer trust. 

During the K:LDN keynote, Bialecki shared a hypothetical scenario featuring Alex, a Kiko Milano customer, to illustrate how a service interaction can become a fluid journey across channels and even enrich CRM and social media marketing. 

Alex receives a WhatsApp quiz for product recommendations, and the agent follows up with additional questions to better understand her goals, preferred looks, and personal taste. These prompts further guide Alex through the decision-making journey while adding more context to her profile in the brand’s CRM. After asking a follow-up question about where she can buy the final items in-store, she receives a map pinned with the locations closest to her. When she finally completes her purchase, she shares her new look on Instagram, providing the brand with new context that it can access in Klaviyo Social Marketing.

Bialecki uses this scenario to argue that Customer Agent isn't just resolving tickets; it's creating a pipeline to help brands "learn more about your customers... what their size is, what product affinities they have."

"This is the year that all of our consumers are going to expect an on-brand, tasteful agent delivered by us,” Bialecki said. “You don’t think you should have to hire a whole team of engineers to deliver that. It should be possible with AI that can take your dreams, the experiences you want to deliver, and make those a reality.” 

Thacker framed it more starkly as an urgency, not just an opportunity. “This is the era of the haves and the have-nots," she said. "This is the moment where [brands] will either rise to the occasion, or they'll be forgotten."

The Trifecta, Delivered

Domenici, who has run marketing teams for twenty years, described this new moment in personal terms. "I'm excited, because I know my job is going to be easier... I'm a little scared, because we have to throw out the playbook,” she admitted. “It's going to look different. Nobody's written it. We're actually writing it right now in this moment together."

This glittering opportunity, tinged with a subtle shade of uncertainty, paints a picture of marketing teams around the world. It’s also what’s sitting beneath all the announcements from K:LDN. Composer is Klaviyo's answer for taste, built to produce campaigns that have the undeniable ethos of a specific brand. And its context layer, powered by hundreds of thousands of brand interactions, makes the interplay between marketing, social media, and service more fluid than ever.

K:LDN did more than announce a series of product features and capabilities. It illustrated how retail’s new competitive advantage goes beyond doing AI first or fastest. It’s about how brands are using it to elevate their innate knowledge of their customers and themselves, to add meaning to every moment. 

Composer, Customer Agent, and Klaviyo Social Marketing are built on a single shared profile, so that value compounds rather than being split across three disconnected tools. The brands already fluent in their own customer data — the ones for whom taste, context, and trust are operational habits — are the ones best positioned to benefit while the rest of the industry is still, as Domenici put it, writing the playbook in real time.