What's the future of AI and RCS in mobile messaging?

Speaker A: Are we reaching a breaking point with digital noise? Between AI driven inboxes and stricter filters for bulk senders, it's never been harder for brands to actually reach their customers. M Today we're talking to Eric Meow, chief Strategy Officer at Attentive, about the future of conversational commerce. From the RCS rollout to to agentic shopping. Conversations with Martech is coming up next. This episode of Conversations with Martech is brought to you by Semrush. Meet your unfair advantage. A new Semrush uniting search and AI discovery into one powerful marketing growth engine. Delivering richer data, more keywords, deeper AI insights and prioritized next steps. With Semrush you can turn total brand visibility into coordinated action. Get a 14 day free trial on a discount code. Visit martech.org SEMrushrushcoupon or scan the QR code.

Speaker B: Hi, my name is Eric Mail. I'm the Chief Strategy officer at Attentive. Uh, Attentive is a AI and mobile M marketing company. So we help some of the largest brands in the world manage uh, their communications with their customers across sms, rcs, push, uh, and email. And we've been around for about 10 years now.

Speaker A: All right, let's talk about messaging and communications in general. There's a lot of it, right? Um, we've seen the largest email providers make attempts to crack down on bulk senders. We've seen AI come to the inbox. We've seen moves to make managing otherwise known as canceling subscriptions easier. Are consumers at a breaking point with email and text messages?

Speaker B: Yeah, it's interesting because on the one hand there's definitely never been more communication. So I think from what we track there's like five or six times as many brands because of D2C. Um, brands are sending more actual total messages. And you see on the brand side stuff like repeat purchase rate actually starting to fall a little bit as consumers filter out a lot of what brands have been sending. And so like on the one hand, yes, there's, there's a lot of communication. What we're finding that's interesting is uh, people actually want badly better messages. So when you as the brand actually go and you take the time and energy and you put the work in to actually send like a one to one actually good message and you start talking about what people want. Your open rates skyrocket, your click through rates skyrocket, your revenue skyrockets. Like consumers are clearly saying, not like we don't want anything, they are saying we don't want the bad stuff anymore. Like please stop spamming us. However, if you actually send us good stuff, we literally are not actually loyal at the brand level anymore. Like in theory we are loyal to brands that treat us uh, uniquely. And so I do think actually on the brand side, stuff like RCS that is clearly more branded, uh, and something that the consumer can trust and is more engaging clearly seems to be working. Uh, and then same with just like basic SMS and email. If you are doing some of this more kind of, uh, you know, AI driven personalization, consumers are responding really well to that. What they are not responding well to is three emails a day about, you know, random stuff.

Speaker A: Right. It's, it's like any other type of content. There's a quality versus quantity, uh, that people need to figure out.

Speaker B: Uh, yeah, and we passed the tipping point. So I think for a long time more is more was like a completely reasonable marketing strategy and that, that seems to not be as true anymore.

Speaker A: Yeah, send more emails. Send more emails. What is the current state of rcs? Since you brought it up, uh, people thought, you know, Apple's involvement was going to accelerate adoption. I think it certainly helped. Um, but I know, you know, people I've talked to have said, you know, maybe not being adopted as quickly as they expected it would be. What do you guys see?

Speaker B: Yeah, so the hard work was done on the Apple and Google side. So basically, you know, Google, it owns rcs, right? So it's worked on Google devices, you know, forever. Android, uh, forever for Apple it is now rolled out so the carriers all support it in the us I think the US is now actually the biggest market for rcs. Um, but a lot of it's peer to peer and so there's this slower process, uh, where brands have to move over basically. So if you're a brand and you had a short code that was sending text messages, you now need to procure an agent, uh, which is what it's called for rcs. And getting that I'd say was dated, uh, really only the largest brands got access to that last year I want to say that something like 70% of all of the RCS agents in America were given to attentive customers. And so just from our perspective we definitely saw that the larger brands were getting prioritized. I think that it's starting to speed up, um, uh, this year and so they kind of worked out a lot of the, you know, the difficulties with that new process. The biggest thing that we're still working through and I think where there's a lot of testing and learning is that RCS isn't magically better, uh, immediately in the sense that you just start sending it and it's amazing. It has way better features, it has suggested replies, it has video, it has a lot of interesting dynamic, uh, carousels that you can send through and you can have all kinds of interesting stuff. But Apple and Google render that stuff a little bit differently. Unlike SMS and mms, which was pretty much the same on all of the devices, RCS actually is not. It's actually implemented differently for iOS and for Android. And so brands, I think need to be a little bit careful, uh, in terms of what their testing plan looks like. I think what we're also finding is, uh, there was a change that Apple made, uh, for iOS 26, where they introduced something that consumers talking about getting too many messages consumers love, which is called known senders and unknown senders. So if you have been getting text messages from whatever local politician, you don't like that, scammers, whatever, that all is gone now. So that just goes into what's called unknown senders. You don't have to look at it. Unfortunately for marketers, a lot of marketing communication also went to unknown senders. So if you as a consumer signed up for a brand, but rather than texting the brand first, the brand texted you first. So you like typed your phone number in to something and then you replied, why? And you got the messages, those all go to unknown senders moving forward. So what attentive found is we actually patented some things called two tap that allows you to message the brand first that goes to known senders. I bring it up because RCS currently goes to unknown senders. And so in a lot of different circumstances, brands need to also kind of pick and choose who do they want to send the RCS to. If you can send an RCS to someone and you know for sure it's not going to go to unknown senders. They're on Android, they signed up in a certain way. You definitely should do it. If you today get your texts going to known senders, you probably don't want to start sending RCS to unknown senders. And so there's a little bit of, I'd say, uh, a tightrope right now that has to get walked as some of this stuff again gets sorted out between Apple and Google, which, you know, we kind of live and breathe this. And so we, we have the details covered. But for a lot of brands, they're just learning this stuff kind of as you know, we were all just excited to do RCS I think that that initial excitement is turning into just cautious optimism that yes, when we do it the right way, it works better, but doing it the right way takes some effort.

Speaker A: That's uh, you know, the known centers, unknown centers. Um, so there's like an opt in there, which, you know, we've seen that in other medias, mediums. Um, but it also I think speaks to, you know, the, the providers, um, basically like they want to default to, you don't want it. Which I think speaks to the volume that we talked about at the beginning.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's interesting because from like a consumer standpoint it's I'd say 90 plus percent love for unknown senders. Again, I like not getting messages from, you know, all of the things that previously were clearly spam. But you know, flight notifications also can go to unknown senders. Like a lot of stuff actually inadvertently. Like if you meet a person in real life and you text them, you say, oh, what's your phone number? And you text them, that text will go to unknown senders. And so there's a, there's like a lot of stuff that I think Apple and Google are still working out, which you know, is a kind of a bigger thing. But RCS falls into some of how that's getting worked out.

Speaker A: What do you think is the ultimate experience for messaging for consumers? And is it something that brands are even capable of delivering?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, so my background, like even kind of before the advertising and marketing world, when I was in college, I worked retail, right? So I worked in like the women's shoe department, uh, in the SoHo Bloomingdale's, you know, selling stuff in real life to real people. And that's still how most people shop, like 80%, whatever the number is, uh, of all kind of, you know, purchasing still happens in real life in stores. When you go to a store, something like 80 or 90% of people seek out a store associate, like they want to talk to one of the people who's working in the store. And so that clearly is a nice dynamic. People like to see a lot of stuff. They like to see a lot of range and when they have questions, they like to talk to an expert. That's clearly what people like. That's why they keep doing it. Uh, translating that to digital and largely to mobile is difficult. Right? Because if I go to a, you know, a store on my phone, I can see very few total things. Like the merchandising is just more difficult on mobile, which is, you know, a lot of the suspected reason that stuff like, purchase rates are low is because it's just hard to find what you want. And so a lot of the suspicion is that at the brand level, I need to somehow figure out your mic. This is the stuff that you like. This is kind of why you like that stuff, and this is how I'm going to try and sell it to you. I'm going to figure out, like, the psychographics of, like, why does this person shop this way? And I have to communicate all of that. I think what we're finding is that is actually possible now. So the big improvement that I think we thought would happen two or three years ago was, uh, when we saw LLMs actually start to be good, our suspicion was that that was going to unblock something that we had been waiting on probably for, like, 10 years, which is we can make a prediction about what you want to buy, but when we're stuck in the world of everything is a template. So, like, every text message has to say, like, hey, first name, you left product name M in your cart. And that's the best message that you can send. It doesn't really matter what I can predict about you. I'm limited at the content level of, like, okay, the template's bad, so the message is going to be bad. In getting rid of the templates that I think has enabled brands to actually now say unique stuff to people one message at a time. And so what we have found is that if you have a really good data foundation, if, like, all of the data about a person who's on your list actually is available to you, so that when you see the person on your site, you can say, okay, I know that's Mike. I know all the stuff Mike's M ever done on my site before, because I can trace him over time. I know all the messages that he's gotten in the past. I know what they were about, because I can now use an LLM to say, you know, what's the content actually like? And then I can see what he clicked on. Then I can have a good guess, because you're telling me what you want, right? You're on the website, you're literally looking at sweaters or whatever. Like, I know what you're shopping for. It's just before I couldn't actually put together, what kind of person are you? What do you buy? Why do you buy it? So now, if you have all that data, you can actually use that to send an amazing message. So we have a product that does this. That product is driving a 2 or 3x improvement for brands. So they are doubling or uh, tripling the amount of revenue that they're getting. But it is, you know, not every brand has that data foundation yet and it's going to take time. So I think what you're finding is a lot of brands uh, trying to put this together are realizing that the cool AI stuff that they want to do, the cool personalization stuff that they want to do, they actually first need to get their data house in order and that takes a little bit more time. And I think that's also why a lot of the kind of like, you know, sass apocalypse stuff is a little bit ridiculous because you're going to need someone to help you do that. Most brands are not going to like vibe code, a massive database to link an identity system to link all that stuff together. But if you've done that, you totally can actually give the consumer the real one to one experience now that they've wanted for the last 10, 15 years.

Speaker A: All right, what are you expecting in the year ahead in messaging? What would we be talking about if we had this conversation say a year from now?

Speaker B: I mean I really hope RCS gets smoothed out because it's clearly better, right? Like it's a branded thing that looks good, that has better features, that you know, is verified.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Like it should just be better. The thing that we are personally very excited about is you know, actually being able to transact in messaging. Uh, we, we at attentive have been working on this for four or five years now. What is exciting to us is a lot of other people uh, are building the rails for it. So when you start to see stuff like you know, agentic shopping, I don't know if agentic shopping is a real thing, I really don't. What I do know is that Shopify and others, you know, Google building this stripe is building this, are allowing simpler paths for checkout where whoever, whether it's you know, attentive an agent, it doesn't matter, can fully go all the way through. When you combine what RCS can do in that it has access natively to you know, Google Wallet and Apple Wallet. So on the device you have stored credit card information and then on the site you have a simple pathway to do a checkout. We really hope that's the right set of ingredients of like a trusted messaging system. A better set of features to go back and forth about what you want. The payment information already being on the phone, the site being able to support commerce without any kind of gateways because they've set up kind of trusted pathways, like that shopping experience of I just want something, I'm going to text whoever and get it like that. Seems like the building blocks are coming together in ways that we are really excited about. Um, whether it happens in 12 months, I don't know. But that's clearly the set of technologies that you would need to do that. And it's all clearly coming together. Together.

Speaker A: All right, Eric Meow from Attentive. Thanks for joining us on conversations with Martech.

Speaker B: Thanks very much.