The commercial pressure on brands has sharpened at the same time. Acquisition costs are climbing across the region, marketing budgets are under closer scrutiny, and the return on broad discounting has thinned.
That has pushed personalisation, loyalty, and CRM further up the agenda for retailers and marketers looking for growth that doesn’t depend on margin erosion. The brands that can recognise an individual customer in real time, and respond with something genuinely useful, are pulling ahead.
This was the topic of an executive luncheon recently held in Manila by loyalty and AI platform Eagle Eye, customer engagement platform Braze, and marketing transformation consultancy UpStride.
The session brought together senior retail and marketing leaders to look at what becomes possible when a real-time loyalty engine and a customer engagement platform work together, how AI is shifting from predictive to agentic, and how leading brands are creating experiences that feel personal for millions of customers at once.
In the week of the event, we spoke with speakers from Eagle Eye, UpStride, and Braze about where APAC brands are falling short, what real personalisation requires, and how agentic AI will reshape the customer relationship over the next three years.
Where’s the biggest gap between what APAC consumers expect and what brands are actually delivering in loyalty and personalisation?
Aziz Kastoun, Account Executive, ANZ, Eagle Eye
The biggest gap in APAC right now isn’t a lack of rewardsit’s the friction of redemption. nAPAC consumers expect a seamless experience where value is recognised and applied instantly.
Instead, many brands still deliver manual, clunky processes that require the customer to do the heavy lifting at the counter. The real opportunity here is for the brands that move first. In a market as mobile-savvy as APAC, the businesses that act now to bridge this gap to realtime personalisation at scale will secure a massive first-mover advantage.
By the time others catch up to ‘real-time,’ the early movers will have already captured the lion’s share of customer trust and data.
Shaun Au Yong, Partner, UpStride
APAC consumers are some of the most digitally fluent in the region, they live on Shopee, Lazada, TikTok etc, and they’re used to experiences that feel tailored.
The gap isn’t that brands here lack ambition. It’s that personalisation depends on five interdependent layers: data, technology, people, processes, and AI readiness, and a weakness in any one quietly drags the other four down. That’s why experiences feel ‘random’ even when brands are genuinely trying.
This is why consumers still get recommendations for fried chicken when all they had wanted was some burgers. The intent and ambition are there; the foundations underneath just aren’t.
Sam Meyer, Area Vice President, Asia, Braze
The biggest gap right now is a trust gap, and it’s where revenue is quietly leaking out. Our latest Braze Customer Engagement Report 2026 found that 93% of marketing leaders believe AI is helping them accurately understand customer needs, yet the experience customers are actually having often tells a different story.
Many retailers in this market have leaned on the basics, quick shipping, slick apps, but convenience isn’t a differentiator anymore. What APAC customers want now is personalisation that feels genuinely relevant, and a real reason to walk through a door or open an app.
What does it actually take to make personalisation work at scale, and where do most brands fall short?
Aziz Kastoun, Eagle Eye
While everyone talks about data, the biggest barrier to personalisation at scale isn’t actually a technology decision, it’s internal stakeholder alignment and commitment. Most brands fall short because their data, marketing, and operations teams are moving at different speeds.
To truly succeed, you need a real-time activation layer that ties the entire customer experience together, but that requires an organisational shift. It means moving away from siloed departments and committing to a single, unified goal: recognising and responding to a customer in the milliseconds they are interacting with you.
If you don’t have total internal buy-in to prioritise this real-time infrastructure, you aren’t personalising; you’re just reminiscing.
Shaun Au Yong, UpStride
Most brands fall short because they invest in the most visible layer, usually a newer, shinier platform, while the real bottleneck sits somewhere else entirely.
Sometimes the data model can’t support 1:1 decisioning. Sometimes the team structure still treats CRM, loyalty, and MarTech as separate kingdoms and therefore, separate KPIs/OKRs. Sometimes the process to launch a campaign takes six weeks when the moment for the customer only lasts six minutes.
Personalisation at scale isn’t a tooling problem. It’s an orchestration problem across data, technology, people, processes, and AI readiness. Brands that get it right stop asking ‘what should we buy next?’ and start asking ‘which layer is holding us back?’
Sam Meyer, Braze
Personalisation at scale means breaking away from the old playbook of rigid rules and broad segments, and building something that can actually keep pace with how customers behave in real time.
At its core, it means treating every customer as an individual rather than a segment. The message itself, the channel, the timing, the offer, even the creative all need to flex based on what you actually know about each person from their own first-party data.
Where most brands stumble is that they’re still leaning on rules-based logic, manual segmentation and A/B testing, methods that simply can’t keep pace with how complex customer behaviour has become.
MIT’s GenAI Divide report found that only 5% of AI investments are actually delivering ROI, which tells you most companies have struggled to turn the excitement into real outcomes. And the cost is visible: traditional funnels are breaking, customer acquisition costs are climbing, high-intent moments are slipping by, and retention ends up propped up by discounting that chips away at margin.
AI is moving from predictive to agentic. What changes for brands when that shift hits loyalty and engagement?
Aziz Kastoun, Eagle Eye
We are moving from a world where we ‘target’ customers to a world where we ‘enable’ their agents. Predictive AI told us a customer might want a discount; Agentic AI means the customer’s digital assistant will actively negotiate for the best value.
For brands, this changes everything. Loyalty moves from being an emotional ‘vibe’ to being machine-readable value. If your loyalty rules aren’t simple, digital, and instantly accessible via API, an AI agent will simply bypass your brand for a competitor that is ‘easier’ to transact with. The shift is from persuasion to seamless integration.
Shaun Au Yong, UpStride
Consumer expectations move in lockstep with consumer AI maturity. If a customer is already using AI agents to summarise their inbox, draft their decks, and run their calendar, they will not tolerate a brand experience that still feels like a 2018 email blast. 1:1 personalisation used to be the differentiator. In an agentic world, it’s the bare minimum.
The bigger shift is that customers will increasingly arrive with their own agents transacting on their behalf. Brands need to be ready to be discovered, compared, and chosen by another AI, not just by a human scrolling a feed. 1:1 personalisation is no longer the advantage; it is the bare minimum, brands need to keep up.
Sam Meyer, Braze
This shift fundamentally changes what marketers do, moving from manually setting every rule to designing intelligence that can adapt on its own, in real time.
Agentic AI means agents start acting on their own, continuously experimenting and learning what actually works for each individual customer, instead of just predicting what might.
For loyalty and engagement, this means the conversation moves away from vanity metrics like clicks and open rates, and toward the things that actually matter to the business, customer lifetime value, incremental revenue, retention.
Our 2026 CER found that when brands genuinely understand and meet customer needs, consumers are 30% more likely to stay loyal and 26% more likely to recommend that brand to others.
Looking at the best loyalty programmes globally, what’s the one thing they do that most brands in this region aren’t doing yet?
Aziz Kastoun, Eagle Eye
Looking at the most successful loyalty frameworks globally, the one thing they do differently is move beyond the ‘spend-to-get’ cycle. They focus on lifestyle integration.
The best programs don’t just reward you for the transaction; they reward you for the relationship. They look at the customer’s total journey and find ways to add value outside of a simple discount.
While many brands in this region are still focused on subsidising the purchase, global leaders are focused on driving a change in habit and becoming a staple of the customer’s daily routine.
Shaun Au Yong, UpStride
They go back to basics. The best programs globally are radically simple, a customer understands the value in a single glance. We see the opposite with a lot of clients in the region: tiers stacked on tiers, points that expire on rules no one can explain, partner mechanics bolted-on for one reason or another.
The consumer’s mind space is already overcrowded. The moment a program feels like homework, they switch off, and no amount of clever segmentation wins them back.
The best programs are simple, easy and value is immediately understood by consumers immediately. They are almost embarrassingly simple.
Sam Meyer, Braze
The single biggest differentiator is that the best programmes are genuinely personalising every interaction, not at the segment level, but at the individual level, and they’re doing it consistently enough that customers actually feel it.
Rather than leaning on blanket discounts, which erode margin and water down the brand, they use what they know about each customer to make every message land. That means factoring in hundreds of signals, testing constantly, and adjusting in the moment.
They’re also doing this across every channel, online and offline, which is harder than it sounds: our research found that nearly half of marketers still lack the tools they need to orchestrate experiences consistently across channels.
If a brand gets this right over the next three years, what does their relationship with their customers actually look like?
Aziz Kastoun, Eagle Eye
If a brand gets this right over the next three years, the relationship becomes much more utilitarian and fluid. Instead of a series of one-off marketing campaigns, the brand and the customer are in a continuous dialogue. With agentic AI playing a role, the brand meets the customer exactly where they are.
Whether that’s in a messaging app, a digital wallet, or a physical store. It becomes a relationship based on the brand’s ability to provide a relevant service in real-time. Success means the customer no longer has to ‘work’ for the loyalty program; the brand works for the customer by delivering the right value at the exact moment it’s needed.
Shaun Au Yong, UpStride
It looks like the conversations that you have with your neighbourhood shop keeper/friend that you’ve been going to for years, the shopkeeper who already knows your order, remembers your kid’s name/birthday/graduation, and throws in something extra because they like you.
Just digital, and at scale. Interestingly, back to where it was 30 years ago, before the ecommerce revolution. It’s personal, immediate, conversational. Not ‘Dear [First Name]’ personalisation; actual recognition. That’s the bar.
Sam Meyer, Braze
If a brand gets this right, the relationship is going to look fundamentally different from where most stand today. Every interaction will feel relevant in the moment, and, paradoxically, more human, because the brand has done the work to truly understand each customer.
The brand will no longer just be reaching customers; it will become a part of their most memorable moments. By using context as the ultimate competitive advantage, as PedidosYa did by transforming their app into a real-time flight tracker (source: PedidosYa –
World Cup Delivery case study, brands can bridge the gap between data, creativity and execution, leading to outsized business impact and measurable results in revenue, loyalty, and customer lifetime value.
A clear message from the room
Across all three speakers, a consistent picture emerged. Loyalty programs that fail to deliver genuine personalisation at scale are losing relevance, and the brands willing to invest in real-time infrastructure, organisational alignment, and simpler value propositions are the ones positioned to benefit.
Aaron Crowe, Head of Revenue, APAC at Eagle Eye, summed up the regional view.
“The response from brands across SEA has been clear: loyalty programs that don’t drive genuine personalisation at scale are losing relevance fast,” he said.
Eagle Eye’s platform gives retailers the infrastructure to run real-time, supplier-funded promotions that actually move the needle on customer behaviour, not just points balances.”
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