K:LDN 2026: The Architecture of Meaningful Connection

Speaker A: For 30 years, brands ran on a funnel. We put awareness at the top and purchases came out the bottom. But I think that's starting to change from what I've heard this week here at K London, here at the tobacco docs, there are new technologies and new techniques that are changing the way that merchants and operators are thinking about how they interact with their customers. I'm Philip Jackson and this is Future Commerce. We're coming to you live from London at, uh, K London 2026. And I'm sitting brand operators and people from Klaviyo who are delivering new types of engagement and service with their customers. Today we're kicking off our conversations with Roger Beheri Lal from IDC and Jamie Dominici, the chief marketer here at Klaviyo. And we're going to ask the question, are we in the age of autonomy? Are businesses automating more than ever? And how does that work when the consumer is in the age of sovereignty, when they are trying to automate and autopilot their lives away from the institutions that they used to trust? So come along with us on this journey as we find out how do we compose our businesses more and how do we get more automation out of the tools that we're using? All right, Monday morning, I want you to walk into your all Hands meeting and I want you to ask the question, do we have a 360 unified view of the customer? And when they say, yeah, absolutely, sure we do, I want you to ask, where is it? And can our AI tools make use of it to drive some concrete outcome, something that actually ticks a box on our roadmap for the year? And undoubtedly they're going to point to a spreadsheet. They're going to say, yeah, absolutely, it's right here. It's in a spreadsheet named CustomerFinalFinal all caps real1xlsx. That is how most business is done in 2026. And that's why Klaviyo's latest release feels super relevant to most teams right now, because Composer takes this busy work off your plate and helps you actually focus on the customer relationship, work that requires a human. So Composer can audit your campaigns. It can identify what you have missed already, what you haven't built yet, and then it can build those missing pieces and it hands it back to you ready for your review. Customer Agent can resolve shopper questions across chat, email, SMS and WhatsApp now in more than 100 languages, which gives you time to focus on implementing Klaviyo's social marketing which does Instagram DMs comments and mentions and profile data that triggers your flows that you just got set up with. Composer. And Klaviyo is bringing all of that back into the customer profile, which makes it part of the flow, which is part of what happens next in personalization. So they always feel like they matter to you as part of the brand. And that is where CRM means it's more autonomous, more connected, and a little less dependent on everyone in your team remembering which tab the customer is hiding in. So you can see everything new from Klaviyo at, uh, klaviyo.com new that's K L-A-V-I-Y-O.com new and remember, you heard it on Future Commerce. K L A V-I-Y-O.COM new let's get back to the show. Hello and welcome to Future Commerce, the podcast at the intersection of culture and commerce. I'm Philip and today we're coming to you live from K London 2026 and I'm sitting with with Roger Beheri Lal from IDC and Jamie Dominecci from. Did I get that right? Pretty close, pretty close.

Speaker B: Feels good.

Speaker A: Uh, who is the chief marketer here at Klaviyo. And we are talking about the age of autonomy and how, uh, things like Composer, which congratulations on launching the public beta here, are helping marketers and helping, uh, you know, businesses really meet new objectives by turning what I think was chat based, autonomous, uh, AI agents into actual business objective outcomes. So welcome to the show.

Speaker B: Thanks for having us.

Speaker A: Uh, Jamie K London, it's an international event. Uh, this is a number of years now in the making. Um, it's bringing a European Klaviyo community here together. Uh, and it's a pivotal moment. Uh, what is the single biggest shift in how brands and consumers are relating this week and how is that coming together for you and your mind?

Speaker B: Uh, well, one, I don't think it's a big shift, but I think people still really love coming together. So I think the power of connection is just that, very powerful. So we have over a thousand customers here. Customers, prospects, partners, friends. Um, and I think there's a real community that's been built. Um, and then too, I think, what is the thing? What's the big shift everyone's talking about? Well, let me guess, let you guess. What do you think? Is it, Is it AI? Yeah, I think everybody's trying to figure out what is the new way of working in this new world. And I think there's a Lot of excitement, a lot of uh, trying to figure it out and trying to figure it out together.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I do sense a lot of excitement. I've already talked to a few customers, I've already seen a few case studies and real uh, work that's getting done. Um, and it's not happening in our chat windows anymore. It's actually happening in the tools where people are working and living. Uh, walk us through some of those headline announcements and uh, what are some of the ones that are best signaling that Commerce is heading in a new direction?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean if we go back when we were here a year ago, I think people are just getting comfortable with like AI. What is it? I think it's a big shift this year now people are ready to use it and I think as you mentioned launched some pretty exciting enhancements into this that's going to make it easier for people to do their job. The first being Composer. So that is our new marketing agent which is basically a prompt based um, uh, action that will allow you to create campaigns, flows, everything just how you work with an LLM. Now you work in Klaviyo, um, and what makes it so special is Klaviyo knows a lot about you. So it's not just generic AI, but you can actually uh, Klaviyo knows your customer history, it knows your past campaigns, it has best practices from our 200,000 customers. So when you say make me a campaign or improve my abandoned cart flow, we can pull from all those best practices, make recommendations and also go and build it right for you, right where you work.

Speaker A: Uh Roger, we've spent the year here at Future Commerce talking about autonomy, business autonomy. Businesses are trying to automate more and consumer sovereignty. Consumers are trying to uh, find more ways to uh, take that trust that they used to put in institutions and make themselves more institutional. And I'm just curious from your vantage point at IDC and from the analysis point of view, um, consumers now give LLMs, uh, and using LLMs, uh, to increasingly discover uh, better deals, they're having better relationships with brands, I'm seeing that myself. Um, but brands also now have this ability to utilize these tools for first party data and they're the same tools. Um, what is this relationship with the customer and the brand that the brand has and the first party data behind it is what is the advantage?

Speaker C: I mean it's evolving and it's a fascinating time. To your point, you know, AI, AI, AI. The world is shifting and you know I get to look at a sort of 30,000 foot view of things. And we're seeing this tension, this evolution between LLMs, search, traditional search engines, the brand site itself, merchant sites, where does one go to to buy, to discover, to engage. And that's, that's shifting. And these LLMs have come onto the scene over the last year and they're very popular but we don't know where they're going to land. We don't know the degree to which, you know, will they just be discovery tools? Will they be full commerce transaction tools? Uh, we'll still, you know, a lot of that is still to be determined. What we do know is that customers are using them and when we survey end consumers, about two thirds say that they find advertising an acceptable trade off for those free tools. So we know that it's going to move from just a discovery to advertising and we predict that it'll eventually move to commerce which shifts some of that power balance and shifts where the data lies.

Speaker A: And the power balance I think is very, very real. I, I've seen a number of studies now of the way that consumers do use the tools in and how CX operators and marketers, um, are reeling from, you know, they're having better relationships with customers, customers are reaching out more frequently. Uh, but also some of those same customers are, uh, because of the frequency of the touchpoints now, uh, it is also heightening the level of expectation in the relationship with the brand.

Speaker C: We find a lot of customers, end user customers that are saying that yes, they're getting maybe fewer leads direct to them because they're going through an LLM, um, intermediary but when they come to the site they're ready to buy, they're fully engaged, they're well educated on whatever that product might be. So it's a different playbook and we're starting to see that the customer journey is really sort of evolving. And what used to be a very controlled step by step process is now, you know, all over the place when you think about what that flow looks like.

Speaker A: Yeah, our data says um, from our study, ah, that we performed over the holidays that 77% of consumers would prefer to click through from the recommendations in their agentic searches, um, rather than have the agent do a purchase for them. They want control. Right. So they still want to go to the website and I think that's good news for all of us. Right.

Speaker C: And let's be clear today the notion of agentic commerce is still evolving. A lot of those LLMs, you know, they can discover, they can push, but they don't have the integrated functionality that you would see. And like a Klaviyo Shopify type partnership where it's a tightly knit process that sort of takes you from end to end. The LLMs are still kind of piecemealing it together, so we'll see where that lands.

Speaker A: And Composer brings a lot of this functionality now, outside of just the website experience into all of the marketing channels. Right. Um, there was announcements earlier this year in the spring about, uh, social being part of the marketing stack. There's WhatsApp, there's RCS, there's all of these ways that a marketer can integrate, um, these touch points with the consumer. Um, how does Composer bring it all home into one touch point?

Speaker B: And I would even go beyond just Composer. I think philosophically what you just said is so real, the world is changing every day. Six months ago you couldn't buy in an LLM. Now you can actually have more visibility into what your customers are doing in an LLM, how they're interacting. Um, we can bring data in, bring data out. So I think the world is changing and what we tell our customers is prepare for anything. So the most important thing you can do is make sure that you're capturing and integrating across every single touchpoint. So whether that's an LLM or you're in store, you're in email, you're in WhatsApp, uh, you're on your own website, which I agree is completely changing the way that your website looks and how customers interact with it. So while we can't foresee all of the changes in the future, what we can do is help future proof you. And by doing that is building the integrations, the partnerships, the tracking, um, and actually bringing that data together in one place in our world. It's kdp, our Klaviyo data platform. And allowing you to take action on it. How Composer comes in is actually takes the action. So not only is it building on your behalf, your campaigns and flows, things that used to spend hours, you don't have to anymore, but we're also analyzing that and making recommendations of. You should do this, you should look at this. This isn't working. This is working. And that's some of the insight that people have been really looking for, um, from a partner is like me, help me do better, help me make more money, tell me the insights. And now you don't have to go to a human to do that. We can do that all with composer

Speaker A: spent 10, uh, years brand side, 15 years agency side. Um, once upon a time we were Klaviyo partners. When I was in the agency world. And a lot of the friction on the brand side and in the agency space is there's a lot of things on our list to do, but not a lot of budget to do it. And I think this is one of the unlocks here is also the human knowledge and institutional knowledge needed to institute and to implement all of this desired functionality requires a whole apparatus and a whole team of people to understand hundreds of flows, hundreds of touch points, um, to prevent things like collisions. And I think this is, we're now at the point where um, a brand of any size really can operate at that scale. I just don't think it was possible before.

Speaker B: No, no. And I think we pretended like it was.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: This idea of the. Right. Even when you said we used to have controlled like flows, I'm like, were they ever controlled? Or did we think we were building these nurture tracks or journeys or campaigns

Speaker C: or you would build one flow, you wouldn't build 10, you wouldn't build a hundred.

Speaker B: So this whole promise of personalization I actually think is uh, is real and I think AI is removing those boundaries. Everything from optimized send time, but also even to imagery. Now you can change out a background with a click of a button and personalize it down to likes and preference. Somebody likes a red dress, you can make it red for you, pink for you, and you can do that all out of the box. So I think that we're finally delivering on what good marketing truly is. And AI is a huge benefactor. Um, but I also think you have to work with people who are unlocking it for you because you can start to build on your own and can be really complex. And then now you're managing a whole bunch of systems and you're kind of back to where you started, just in a different way.

Speaker A: There's a, ah, wealth of experience. You have 25 years of experience yourself, Roger. It's been a while not to out here, um, but specifically as an evangelist in the SMB space, um, from a global lens, because this is a global event here. Uh, in looking at your Martech experience, what do you think is the key lens that we should be looking at with this sort of technology now from a global data privacy perspective. And what are the solutions that we need to execute with right now in order to make that real for the people that are watching?

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean it's a fascinating landscape. And I look at mid market marketing solutions. I've got colleagues that look at enterprise solutions. Uh, IDC covers the full gamut. So I get to see what's going on out there. And I'll say a few things. Enterprises are challenged because they're risk averse, as they should be. They have lots of data but they've also got lots of issues. And so they're a little bit hesitant sometimes to jump on the AI ah, bandwagon. Whereas I'm seeing the mid market being much more aggressive. You've got these smaller companies that are leveling up. They're playing a game that they just to your point, they couldn't have played a year ago, two years ago, five years ago. And let's be clear, some of these small companies are not small, they're billion dollar, you know, uh, product brands, they're household names, but they're not on the F500. Right. So it's a different landscape. So I see them all starting to take advantage slowly of the AI functionality. The vendor community is leading the way. The users are maybe about six months behind. They're still playing around. But we've moved from a year ago when the question was what do I do? I've got a deer in the headlight moment. What is this AI? What's the use case? Now they're starting to deploy bit by bit by bit. So they're doing early testing, early experimentation. Pilots are becoming production. We're starting to see some low hanging fruit use cases. So things like analytics is a very popular one because it's low risk. I can start to play with the system, I can start to get insights from the tool, um, optimizations, uh, tweaking my flow, changing a graphic here and there. So all these little experiments, performance ladder up. The big unlock that's coming hopefully in the next year is going to be the development of that new playbook. And the new playbook involves not only your sort of tooling but also the way in which you go to market and the way you structure your teams. So a lot of the gap right now is around training and team structure and who does what in an AI centric world. So that all needs to rebalance. That will take time, that will take change management to kick in. But we're starting to see it happen. And again the vendors are leading the way and the users are catching up quickly.

Speaker A: Um, and vendors leading the way. I think also there's something to be uh, thought about, about vendors being selected around trying to meet uh, the regulations that are required in territories like here. Um, we're in London, but the greater needs of what uh, broader Europe is starting to request around data privacy regulation and then we're also thinking about how our brands and brand loyalty and our choice of vendor comes into play. I think all of these things are part of how we make decisions. Um, and I don't want to discount the fact that there is also an ecosystem of people who are very talented in using specific platforms. And that is a key part of this too, because we tend to put those things to the side. We look at future functionality. But the ecosystem plays a major role in all of this.

Speaker C: Absolutely. I mean, when we look at the European market, when we do our surveys, uh, of IT buyers, technology buyers, the sort of percentages shift. Right. People over here think about compliance, they think about regulatory policy, they think about those kinds of things in a different way than they do in North America. It's not that that's absent, but it's 10, 15% higher on any given survey. Uh, so there is a greater demand and that's why people turn to vendors that have thought this stuff through. So I think this whole trend of I'm going to vibe code my way or I'm going to cloud code my way, you can do that to a certain extent, but you're going to run up against a barrier when you start to scale and you start to produce enterprise grade, um, sort of requirements.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: That need to adhere to those regulatory standards that the vendor community has already addressed.

Speaker A: Yeah. Uh, we are going to hear from you on stage. I know you're going to give us a little bit of a preview maybe, um, tell us what you think a brand winning on Klaviyo looks like in the next few, few years. Jamie?

Speaker B: Well, I think that, uh, exactly what you just said, vendors, in our case Klaviyo, should be helping lead the way for you. So I would say a brand that's winning is adopting and leveraging and taking advantage of the tooling that we're building out for you with Composer, that's, you know, creating content for you, um, and that's building, uh, in optimizations, as you said. And I think the future, um, the people who lean into that and embrace it, I think are going to have a competitive, uh, advantage that we never had in the past. And it's going to unlock a lot of things, not only productivity, but also revenue, um, and opportunities for brands to excel. And I think the reason you're going to excel too is you're going to have more of that time back to focus on the things that matter.

Speaker A: That's right.

Speaker B: How you're going to stand out, how you're going to differentiate, because those are things that AI will not replace.

Speaker A: And all of those things compound. Right. Can't wait to see where we are this time next year.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's exciting.

Speaker A: Jamie Rush, thanks so much.

Speaker C: Until kay London in 2027. It.