by Matthew Caldwell • Director of Marketing, Denada
Everyone Is Talking About Agents
There was one topic at Braze Forge this year: agentic. Every session, every booth and every hallway conversation came back to it.
Braze’s own agents looked promising. They’re also very new. We didn’t see them proven or in use yet. Time will tell how they roll out.
Most People Are Still Learning
A lot of attendees are in learning mode. They’re trying to work out what agents can actually do today and where they fit on their team.
Where the Agents Are Today
Most of the agentic flows we heard about cover three things:
- Campaign setup
- Audience targeting and selection
- Lifecycle setup
We did hear about agents that make creative and handle production. We didn’t see any of them in action.
Creative and Production Is Still the Gap
This is the work Denada does. Denada is an agent that handles creative, copy, coding, content, approvals, versions and translations.
We have yet to see another agent that can do all of this consistently and reliably.
Drag-and-Drop Tools Are Struggling to Make the Shift
We heard from several people that traditional drag-and-drop email tools are having a hard time moving to agent and prompt-based flows.
We even heard a whopper of a tale: a very large pharmaceutical company is completely stalled because the agentic flows it expected aren’t delivering.
One Agent for Everything, or One Agent per Workflow?
The next two to five years will unleash a massive amount of automation. There’s no doubt agents will handle the tedious work.
But, like always with software, we heard a general wariness about having too many tools. Marketers want one central place they can prompt to do it all. We can see where that’s going: to the big agents themselves, like ChatGPT and Claude.
Tools built for a specific workflow, like email creative, are niche for a reason. They’re purpose-built to handle the specific challenges of creative and production.
That’s where the balance is. One agentic tool that does everything but isn’t focused on anything, or a few tools that each do one workflow very well.
Agent Fatigue Is Real
Overall, we saw a lot of exhaustion on the topic. People looked like they needed a walk in the forest. Hearing “agents” over and over seems to be wearing people down.
We hosted an agentic dinner. At the end of the day, people wanted to talk about anything but agents. They were tired.
Our Take
Those are our honest observations from Braze Forge. Agents are coming. Time will tell which ones actually deliver.
