Klaviyo built AI features to help its 200,000 users overcome two problems: not knowing what marketing moves to make, and lacking time or skill to execute them. The system suggests actions and automates the work, from writing copy to clicking buttons, developed through rapid prototyping where engineers at all levels ship code in days.
We realized with AI there was a big problem our customers had that we could now address. And that for us was this. We have 200,000 customers, but I have so many of them. Every conversation I have basically boils down to one of two things. Either one, tell me what to do, right? Which is what this question is. What I have these products, I don't know how to market them. Um, a lot of people get a little anxious, a little nervous about marketing. A lot of you have experimented, but maybe they don't have the confidence to know what's right. I don't have the time to do the analysis to prove it. I wanna grow and I wanna just deliver an awesome experience. So customers ask us, hey, how do I use your software? I think one of the cool parts about AI is I think we built up all this software, this infrastructure. There's a big gap between the best users actually using it versus what the software can do. And AI allows us to close that. And the other part was, it's like, okay, well now you've told me what to do. Can you just help me get the darn thing done? So a lot of folks say, hey, I don't know if I'm creative enough, or I don't know how to do that analysis, or I just literally run outta time in the day. Can you point and click and mash the buttons for me? So that's what we set out to solve. We started on this probably about a year ago. We've gone through dozens of iterations. But one of the things that we have is at Klaviyo is everybody, you know, we have a lot of engineers, but everybody codes. From myself all the way down to some of our like co-ops and interns. For the summers. So when we started out is, this is the prompts, or probably part of the prompts, that in January when the models got really good, one of the things that we have as a pattern is like, hey, well, often we meet every Friday to review progress and usually over the weekend or early next week, we'll say, if we've got some ideas, we're not gonna say, hey, let's wait till the next sprint or next month or whatever to prototype 'em.
