Craig Dennis
February 9, 2025
14 minutes
It feels like just about every day, a new AI feature is launched, or a new AI company emerges. Every marketer knows they should use AI, but blocking out the noise from the signal is nearly impossible.
One thing is for sure, though: Every company wants to move faster, experiment faster, and ultimately learn faster. As part of this demand, a recent wave of AI tools has formed a category known as AI Decisioning, and marketers in every industry are turning to these solutions to automate tedious tasks and drive outcomes that move the needle.
In this blog post, you’ll learn:
AI Decisioning tools leverage machine learning, AI agents, and reinforcement learning to make customer-focused decisions at a scale beyond human capabilities. These tools drive customers toward desired business outcomes, like increasing customer lifetime value and automating time-consuming manual tasks.
AI Decisioning platforms analyze your customer data to determine each individual's optimal content, channel, and timing. These tools track decisions, such as whether a customer opened an email or made a purchase, even if they didn’t lead to the desired outcome. Each recorded interaction helps refine future decisions, continuously optimizing for the best customer experience.
Using an AI Decisioning tool helps optimize the outcomes you’re striving for through a data-driven approach. It eliminates the need for manual tasks, such as orchestrating A/B tests, while enhancing the customer experience through personalized interactions.
As a result, you gain more time to focus on high-value tasks like developing new strategies and achieving better outcomes, such as increased customer lifetime value. This is because AI Decisioning continuously optimizes toward your goals, fostering greater customer loyalty through a more tailored experience.
As a marketer, there’s always more to do than hours in the day. Whether it’s launching experimental campaigns to boost revenue, testing subject lines to improve email open rates, or analyzing data to uncover new audience segments. Hundreds of decisions need to be made, and time and resources are always in short supply.
The constant pressure often leads to a mindset of “let’s just get it done” to avoid bottlenecks. But let’s be honest—making high-stakes decisions that could impact millions of customers isn’t something you can do in seconds. It requires careful analysis to determine the best possible outcome.
This pressure often leads to marketing that feels “average.” You segment users by persona, preferences, and behavior, then send generalized messages accordingly. But what appeals to everyone rarely resonates with anyone. For instance, is it better to send a mass email to customers who purchased 30 days ago about new book releases or to personalize emails based on each customer’s last purchase and preferred genres? The former results in generic strategies—and, unsurprisingly, generic results.
The future of marketing lies in moving beyond blanket strategies toward personalized, one-to-one customer journeys across every channel. Achieving this requires an AI-driven system that learns from your data and orchestrates campaigns—deciding what to send, who to send it to, and when. It continuously experiments and adapts, learning what resonates with each customer to inform future decisions.
Consider a retailer aiming to boost in-store purchases by leveraging data on when customers typically repurchase perishable items—key drivers of customer lifetime value (LTV). Rather than sending a generic monthly email offering 10% off to all customers, they can use existing data to personalize outreach and focus on this specific goal. By analyzing purchase frequency patterns, the retailer can send timely reminders when a customer is likely due for replenishment, paired with tailored incentives to encourage an in-store visit. For example, a small discount on the perishable item can draw customers in, with the expectation that they’ll also purchase higher-margin products during their trip. By automating this level of personalization at scale, AI decisioning ensures each customer receives the right message at the right time—ultimately driving more in-store purchases and increasing overall LTV.
As companies increasingly seek to implement highly personalized customer experiences, AI decisioning platforms have become a key focus. If you’re considering an AI decisioning tool for your business, we’ve compiled a list of the top platforms available on the market today.
Hightouch is an AI Decisioning platform that helps customers like Whoop and PetSmart
by continuously learning and optimizing marketing decisions to deliver 1:1 customer experiences at scale, helping teams achieve their business goals while maintaining full control of their campaigns. The platform powers a wide range of data activation use cases, offering solutions such as identity resolution, event collection, audience segmentation, and AI decisioning.
Hightouch was founded by Tejas Manohar, a former Segment engineer, and Kashish Gupta and Josh Curl. Drawing from their experience as former engineers at Segment, the co-founders brought deep expertise in the CDP space. They recognized that delivering rich customer experiences was only possible through the data warehouse, as it serves as the central repository for all company data and offers the most complete view of the customer. This realization became the driving force behind the founding of Hightouch. They were the first to pioneer the composable CDP approach and AI decisioning.
Hightouch offers an AI decisioning platform that integrates with all your marketing channels to deliver one-to-one personalized experiences for your customers. The platform automates manual A/B testing by running experiments across your entire customer base, optimizing for the best experience for each individual and driving desired outcomes. Hightouch AI decisioning is one of the few platforms that offer a self-service option rather than a managed service.
Beyond AI Decisioning, Hightouch offers a comprehensive suite of tools that can either replace your existing Customer Data Platform (CDP) or seamlessly integrate with it to enhance your marketing efforts.
Key Customers: Whoop, PetSmart
OfferFit is a decision layer between your data systems and marketing automation platforms that uses reinforcement learning to automate A/B testing and multivariate experimentation. The platform works by leveraging its in-house machine learning experts who build a managed service tailored to your business.
The downside is that Offerfit requires interaction from its customer service team for each new use case you want to execute, and it requires daily data transfer via SFTP.
Founded in 2020 by Victor Kostyuk and George Khachatryan, both Cornell University mathematics graduates, OfferFit leverages AI to revolutionize personalized communications. Victor, a former lead data scientist at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) with expertise in self-learning AI, and George, an ex-McKinsey & Company associate partner who led transformations at global corporations, recognized the inefficiencies of traditional approaches and envisioned a more effective solution.
OfferFit is suitable for lifecycle marketers to replace manual testing with a self-learning AI that identifies optimal campaigns per customer.
Key Customers: Latam Airlines, Kayo Sports
Moveable Ink is an AI-driven email and mobile personalization platform that delivers tailored content to each customer and dynamically updates it even after the email has been sent. The platform also leverages generative AI to help craft subject lines that enhance open rates. Moveable Ink enables you to optimize message timing, select content that resonates most with customers, and analyze which assets drive the greatest impact
Similar to OfferFit, Movable Ink requires you to work with their customer service team to launch new campaigns which can slow down learning and time to value.
Founded in 2010 by Vivek Sharma, a software engineering veteran with experience at Cisco and British Telecom, and Michael Nutt, a seasoned engineer, Moveable Ink leverages its co-founders' deep technical expertise. Michael's engineering background uniquely positions him to drive product strategy, development, and implementation.
They started Moveable Ink to revolutionize email marketing through a content-driven approach—when Email Service Providers (ESPs) were primarily focused on infrastructure. Their innovative idea was to personalize emails when they are opened, using factors such as location, weather, time, and device to dynamically tailor content.
Since then, Moveable Ink has expanded beyond email to include web and display ads, continuously enhancing customer experiences through advanced personalization.
Key Customers: Delta, Yard House
Aampe provides an agentic infrastructure that enables continuous personalized experiences by tagging messages and delivering content across multiple channels, including email, mobile push, and SMS. Each customer is assigned an AI agent that monitors their engagement and adapts to their evolving preferences.
One thing to consider, is that Aampe requires you share your customer data with them, outside of your existing platforms, creating potential security risks and extra implementation work.
Founded in 2020 by Paul Meinshausen, a Harvard graduate with extensive experience in data science and AI honed through his work on complex data for the U.S. military in Afghanistan, Schaun Wheeler, a data scientist with expertise in analyzing massive unstructured data for U.S. Army Intelligence, and Sami Abboud, an experienced data scientist with a background in data mining, Aampe aims to revolutionize app personalization. Traditionally limited to rigid, rule-based approaches, app personalization is transformed by Aampe's AI-powered platform, eliminating manual effort and unlocking unprecedented personalization capabilities.
Key Customers: Kashkick, Kuri
As AI Decisioning emerges as a new category, selecting the right tool for your business and specific use cases can be challenging. To simplify your decision-making process, consider the following key factors.
If you want to gain an edge over your competitors, you need to be the company that moves and learns the fastest. The faster you can learn and implement, the better the customer experience will be, which will lead to more customer taking the actions that you want them to. And this is why so many companies are looking to an AI Decisioning platform to help them achieve what’s impossible with the use of AI.
If you're looking for an AI Decisioning tool that integrates seamlessly with your data warehouse without storing data outside your infrastructure, Hightouch is the ideal choice. With an intuitive, easy-to-use interface and complete transparency in decision-making, Hightouch empowers you to take control of your customer data.
Book a demo with a solution engineer today to understand more about AI Decisioning and how it can help you.