AI is taking the labour, not the thinking
The loudest theme in every session: Klaviyo wants AI doing the mechanical work. Drafting variants, building segments, suggesting send times, assembling flows from a prompt. Watching the demos, most of it is genuinely useful rather than gimmick.
The honest takeaway for brands: the busywork advantage is disappearing. When everyone's tooling writes competent subject lines, competent stops being an edge. Strategy, taste and knowing your customer are what's left, which suits us fine because that was always the actual job.
Klaviyo doesn't want to be 'the email platform' anymore
The pitch from the main stage was B2C CRM: one profile per customer, with email, SMS, service, reviews and analytics hanging off it. Less duct tape between five tools that disagree about who your customer is.
For the brands we run, the practical version is simple. The more of your customer data lives in one place, the better every send gets. Unified profiles beat clever copy, every time.
SMS is arriving in the UK properly, and RCS is behind it
The US treats SMS as a first-class revenue channel and the UK is a few years behind, which at this event felt less like a gap and more like a countdown. RCS, the richer successor to text messaging, got plenty of airtime too: branded, interactive messages sitting where texts used to.
The move for UK brands is unglamorous: start collecting SMS consent now, properly, so the audience exists when the channel matures. Consent gathered early is the cheapest it will ever be.
Deliverability is a diet, not a detox
Inbox providers keep tightening the rules, and the days of blasting a full list and hoping are properly over. Everything pointed the same way: engagement-based sending, ruthless list hygiene, and reputations built send by send.
This matches what we see in client accounts weekly. The brands that treat the inbox as a privilege keep reaching it. The ones that treat it as a free megaphone end up in spam, then in our audits.
The hallway track was the best session
The most valuable hour was spent comparing notes with other partners and ecommerce operators. The recurring confession: almost everyone's flows are half-built and almost everyone knows it. The UK email bar is still low, which is bleak for the average brand and excellent news for anyone willing to do the work.
If you want the practical version of any of this applied to your own Klaviyo account, that is quite literally the day job. You know where we are.