For marketing teams, AI is acceleration. For many customers, it’s a ride to someone else’s destination.
Braze’s “Global Customer Engagement Review 2026” paints a picture that should make marketing leaders pause. On the one hand, adoption within marketing teams is nearly universal. On the other hand, consumers remain skeptical about how — and why — brands are using AI in their interactions.
That gap is not theoretical. It is already shaping customer experience.
Source: Braze’s “Global Customer Engagement Review 2026”
Nearly all marketers say they are using AI, and the vast majority believe it helps them better understand customer wants and needs. AI is surfacing insights, predicting trends and powering personalization at scale. From the inside, it looks like progress.
While 93% of marketers say AI helps them better understand customers, only 53% of consumers believe brands are accurately predicting their wants and needs. That perception gap cannot be solved with better dashboards.
It signals something deeper: brands believe they are delivering relevance, but customers are not consistently feeling it. And that matters, because perception drives trust.
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Agents are emerging as the middle layer
Another shift is quietly underway. Consumers are beginning to use AI as an intermediary between themselves and brands.
Right now, that number is relatively small — just 19% of consumers say they are using AI intermediaries to interact with brands. But it is expected to grow quickly, rising 1.4 times this year and potentially reaching 46%. That should reframe how marketers think about engagement.
If AI agents become the primary conduit between customers and brands, then visibility, value and clarity will matter more than ever. You are no longer just optimizing for search results or email inbox placement. You are optimizing for how an AI assistant interprets, recommends and prioritizes your brand.
Source: Braze’s “Global Customer Engagement Review 2026”
This is where trust becomes strategic infrastructure.
Marketers are betting big on AI to drive growth and ROI. At the same time, consumers are sending mixed signals about how comfortable they are with AI-led engagement.
More than half of consumers expect brands to use AI in self-interested ways rather than to improve the customer experience. That belief alone can blunt the effectiveness of even the most advanced personalization engine.
In other words, AI-led engagement won’t work without a human touch and clear proof of value. That may be the defining tension of the next five years of marketing. AI capability is accelerating. Consumer confidence is not guaranteed to keep pace.
Four possible futures for AI and engagement
The Braze report outlines four possible outcomes:
- AI agents serve as a central layer between consumers and brands, helping create highly personalized experiences tailored to individual needs. That scenario requires trust, transparency and consistent value delivery.
- AI keeps improving technically, but fails to win public trust. Adoption slows, impact is muted and growth underperforms expectations.
- An AI innovation plateau while consumer sentiment remains steady. Brands leverage existing tools, but human strategy and creativity drive differentiation.
- And in the most pessimistic scenario, customers reject AI-led engagement altogether and marketers quietly scale back expectations.
Right now, we are in a high-capability, low-trust moment. Without deliberate action, the future is likely to look similar — powerful tools constrained by hesitant users.
Source: Braze’s “Global Customer Engagement Review 2026”
Bridging the gap between performance and perception
The brands that succeed will explain AI and show how it improves customer outcomes, not just internal efficiency.
That means demonstrating tangible consumer benefits, like faster service resolution, more relevant recommendations, cleaner experiences across channels and fewer irrelevant messages.
It also means respecting boundaries with clear consent, transparent data use and strong governance.
Many marketers are already seeing meaningful gains from AI-powered engagement. Productivity is up. Insight is deeper. Orchestration is smarter. But the growth curve will flatten unless customers feel that same lift.
The full report can be found here. (Registration required)