Adapt or Die Laughing: The Marketoonists
Survival Guide on Customer Engagement

Session Summary

This talk set out to address both the excitement and the reality around AI adoption in customer engagement. Ravi Dodda, CEO & Co-founder, MoEngage began by confronting the “elephant in the room”: that 95% of AI pilots fail to deliver results despite the hype

From there, the vision for AI at MoEngage was outlined: embedding AI agents directly into marketers’ workflows, reducing manual effort in segmentation, campaign design, and decision-making, and improving over time through feedback loops

The talk showcased practical AI applications, including Segment Assist (natural language–driven audience creation), In-App Template Builder (using generative AI for campaign assets), and Campaign Decisioning Agents (reinforcement learning to optimize channel, timing, and frequency of customer interactions)

The message was clear: AI must be purpose-built for marketers, embedded in their day-to-day, and focused on measurable ROI.

Thought-Provoking Quotes 

• “95% of AI pilots are failing to deliver results. Only 5% achieve what they set out to do.”
• “The real challenge isn’t building AI—it’s embedding AI into marketers’ workflows so it drives real outcomes.”
• “Decisioning is about matching the right customer with the right offer, channel, and timing—and letting reinforcement learning improve that loop every day.”
• “AI ROI isn’t about new vanity metrics—it’s about outperforming the benchmarks your leadership already tracks.”

Top Takeaways

1. Why AI pilots fail: Lack of high-quality data, absence of brand context, and failure to integrate into marketer workflows.
2. MoEngage’s solution: Merlin AI embeds AI directly into marketing workflows to help lean teams scale impact.
3. AI agents in action: Segment Assist, Copywriter with Brand LLM Kit, Jinja Assist, and In-App Template Builder all solve real marketer pain points.
4. Deterministic & explainable AI: Decisioning must be reliable, avoid hallucinations, and provide transparency on “why” an action was taken.
5. Vision for the future: Democratize advanced decisioning (like Amazon-style personalization) so all brands can deliver next-best actions and offers across channels.