Key insights from Grow with Braze Jakarta 2026

Our Grow with Braze Jakarta event brought together over 350 marketers across CRM, marketing, data, and digital functions at The Westin Jakarta. The central question was: with AI now embedded in nearly every touchpoint, how do Indonesian brands turn that capability into outcomes customers actually feel?

From telco and digital banking to food & beverage, healthcare, and sportswear, the day brought together practitioners working on the same problem from very different angles and produced a consistent answer. Technology is no longer the constraint—ambition, architecture, and judgment are.

From output to outcomes: Bill Magnuson on the wind tunnel effect

Bill Magnuson, Cofounder and CEO of Braze, opened with a story centered around football boots. During the World Cup, teams from Australia, Japan, and the US walked onto the pitch in bright pink boots. Different teams, different sponsors, but the same idea, designed years in advance by Nike, Adidas, and Puma. They were reading the same signals, following the same trends, and likely consulting the same AI assistants. But it all averaged out to the same answer.

That's the wind tunnel effect. Wind tunnels remove drag and make machines perform better, but when every company optimizes for the same objective using the same inputs, the differences disappear. The exceptions prove the point, cars like The Suzuki Jimny made a completely different bet that were impractical by conventional standards, but instantly recognizable as a result.

AI, Bill argued, is now becoming a wind tunnel for ideas. Marketers need to master it, but mastery is only the starting line. In engineering, friction is the enemy; in marketing, friction is sometimes the whole point. More output does not automatically mean better outcomes. Outcomes start instead with context, the first-party data that too often sits dormant. In 2025, over 25 trillion data points were processed through Braze SDKs and APIs, with nearly 9 trillion profile updates through Cloud Data Ingestion. That context is what makes agents useful. Bill shared the following Braze customers case studies to drive his points: Cleo shipped a stalled onboarding journey using BrazeAI™ Operator (+178% in-app engagement, +284% app opens); Luxury Escapes used BrazeAI Agent Console™ to read sparse early-journey signals into existing intent tiers (+10% revenue per user, +10% gross margin); Dayuse personalized email against booking history (+23% repeat bookings). For teams unsure where to start, begin at the bottom of your funnel and work backwards—where context and intent are strongest.

Bill's most important distinction was that language intelligence is not constrained to optimization. LLMs carry biases and can't handle tension. He likened it to a night market, where the best negotiators know when to hold the line and novices chase you through the stalls dropping their price. The answer isn't LLMs or decisioning: decisioning picks channel, tone, and offer, and the LLM writes the message.

That reshapes the job from designing segments to curating the data feeding the agent, from A/B testing for one winner to supervising agents that personalize per person. Same job, far more leverage. His closing line came from Michelangelo: "The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it." AI can remove constraints, but it cannot choose our ambition.

A call from Indonesia's creative economy leadership

Muhammad Neil El Himam, Deputy for Digital and Technology Creativity, followed with a reminder that reframed the morning's technology focus: the future of marketing is not only about smart technology, but about stronger human connection.

He urged attendees to use the day to exchange ideas, build partnerships, and find new ways to help Indonesian creative businesses grow beyond the country's borders. His challenge to the room was pointed: let the next globally admired creative brand not simply come to Indonesia, but come from Indonesia. Indonesia has never lacked creativity, but what its marketers need is the right technology, the right partnerships, and the right opportunities to bring their work to the world. With innovation, collaboration, and partners willing to move at that pace, that vision is achievable.

Connecting millions: Telkomsel's journey to smarter customer engagement

Shahid Nizami, VP APAC & GCC at Braze, sat down with Dedi Suherman, VP Digital Experience at Telkomsel, opening with the question that framed everything: when you serve over 100 million customers, how do you make the digital experience feel uniquely built for one person?

Telkomsel is Indonesia's largest telecom operator, serving a population of 270 million across more than 17,000 islands. That scale is exactly what makes personalization difficult, and exactly why it matters.

Dedi walked through how the MyTelkomsel experience has evolved and how journeys are orchestrated today. BrazeAI Agent Console™ for content filtering acts as an automated approval layer on outgoing messaging rather than manually reviewing every campaign, the AI evaluates content against Telkomsel's brand guidelines and filters off-brand content before it reaches a customer. Multivariate testing lets the team test copy, imagery, timing, and channel simultaneously, taking the guesswork out of finding the winning formula for millions of users at once.

The through-line is that scale and intimacy aren't opposites, but bridging them takes architecture and discipline about where AI helps versus where it oversteps.

Fueling the momentum with BrazeAI™

Henry Roberto, Solutions Consultant at Braze, offered a definition worth borrowing: momentum is what happens when every interaction makes the next one more likely. Which is just another way of saying retention.

He made it concrete with a customer named Marcus and his morning coffee run. Instead of sending the same 8:00 AM message to millions, Braze learns when Marcus personally opens the app and shows him what he actually orders. He taps buy and starts driving. When his phone comes within 500 metres of the store, Braze tells the kitchen to start making his order so it's fresh when he arrives. He walks in, the app already showing his loyalty barcode, and scans at the counter. From the moment it registers the sale, his receipt lands on WhatsApp with a one-tap way to rate the visit. Braze isn't just sending messages here it's connecting where the customer physically is to what the store actually does.

Henry described agentic AI as software that doesn't just make things for you, but plans, decides, and acts on its own to hit a goal you've set. Operator is the assistant inside Braze that helps you build campaigns; Agent Console puts agents inside your customer journeys, sorting people into the right path and writing content as it sends; and Decisioning Studio helps brands work out the most relevant journey for each person.

His sharpest point was about the limits of traditional segments. Benjamin and Michael land in the same group for different reasons—Benjamin bought the wrong toys for his grandchildren, while Michael is a graduate buying daycare supplies who found somewhere cheaper. Benjamin needs a phone call and an apology; Michael needs a coupon. Segments tell you what, who, when, and how, but never why.

He closed with an example of a bank using Decisioning Studio to drive credit card referrals, weighing 113 things it knew about each customer.

Trust first, loyalty always with BCA Digital, BODYPACK and Telcowin

Franz Sihaloho, Country Director Indonesia at Braze, opened the loyalty panel with a line that captured the shift: loyalty used to mean points, now it means being the brand customers actually trust. He was joined by Duardi Prihandiko, SVP Head of Brand & Communication at BCA Digital, Cassandra Maharani Putri of BODYPACK, and Iman Muhammad, Managing Director at Telcowin.

The first territory was adapting loyalty in real time, how behavioural signals and product events adjust tiers, offers, and rewards dynamically inside a Canvas, and what gives a team confidence to act on a signal in the moment. Franz pushed the panel on the harder half of that equation, that personalising on customer data only works if people trust how it's handled, so how do you decide what data to use and keep the experience feeling helpful rather than invasive?

The second was the path from occasional customer to advocate, how consent-respecting journeys compound over time, and how teams connect engagement to retention in ways that show up in measurable outcomes rather than vanity metrics. Each panellist closed with the advice they'd given their past self, sharing advice and tying back to Franz's premise that where switching is frictionless, trust is the currency loyalty is built on.

Composing the customer journey with Jiwa Group, BCA Syariah and Pertamina Bina Medika IHC

Sam Meyer, Area Vice President Asia at Braze opened with a scenario everyone recognized. A customer sees an ad on Instagram, taps through to your app, browses, drops something in the cart, hits a snag, and opens a chat with support. Does your stack know it's the same person on the same journey and did it do anything with that, or did the customer start over three times?Joined by Coki Wicaksono, VP Marketing & Branding at Pertamina Bina Medika IHC, Grace Surya, Marketing Director at Jiwa Group, and Ruli Himawan, Head of Marketing Communications at BCA Syariah to share their experience and expertise.

Ruli's framing of the online-offline problem was the standout. More than a third of BCA Syariah's new customers now join through the app. That creates an obligation: when those customers walk into a branch, staff should already know them.

BCA Syariah is now closing the loop, so a customer who starts looking at a product in the app but doesn't finish can walk into a branch and be guided to complete it. "We use Braze as the connector in the middle," Ruli said. The underlying shift is that marketers need to stop managing app, branches, and offline activations as separate channels, and start managing them as one continuous relationship.

Grace's furthered share that meaningful means personalized, and that runs on first-party data. Not a single data point, but multiple touchpoints, frequency, and preferences accumulated across the journey. Jiwa builds Canvases with granular segmentation following each segment's behaviour, and uses Operator to analyse, recommend, and create new segments. As an F&B business that started offline with a digital-first roadmap, Jiwa's bridge is deliberately practical: collect a phone number, offer the app download, then connect online behaviours with offline preferences.

The results came fast. Jiwa kicked off with Braze in April and began experimenting in May. By June, a breakfast campaign experiment delivered a 90% uplift in campaign revenue and reactivated 20% of churned Jiwa+ users using BrazeAI-recommended campaigns. Grace credited speed, plus a culture built on adaptability, continuous learning, and AI projects written into OKRs.

Their closing advice complemented each other, understanding the role of automation, using AI for context and heavy lifting, but leaving the room for real human connection is where it matters most.

Three takeaways for Indonesian marketers:

1. Mastering the tools is the starting line, not the finish. When every brand optimizes with the same tools toward the same answer, output converges and everyone becomes forgettable together. The brands that stand out will use the technology well, then bring judgment, creativity, and a willingness to take risks on top of it.

2. Use the right AI for the right job. LLMs interpret signals, structure messy inputs, and generate content brilliantly. Decisioning agents optimize under constraints without the human biases toward over-generosity and conflict avoidance. The strongest performance combines them and the most common mistake is asking one to do the other's job.

3. Channels are not the unit of the relationship. Whether it was Telkomsel bridging 100 million subscribers to individual experiences, BCA Syariah connecting app behaviour to branch conversations, or Jiwa linking offline preferences to online behaviour, the customer experiences one continuous relationship, and the stack has to be built to match.

Grow with Braze Jakarta 2026 made clear that Indonesian marketers are past the question of whether AI belongs in the engagement stack. The live question now is how to use it without letting it flatten what makes a brand worth choosing.