Instead, they immediately encounter friction. They鈥檙e asked to repeat information they鈥檝e already shared across multiple channels and departments. Then they see an offer for the item they just purchased, rather than something similar or new. And when they encounter an issue down the line, customer support doesn鈥檛 recognize their history.

Micro moments like these do not feel minor to customers anymore. They feel inexcusable. Customer expectations have changed faster than most brands can keep up. Customers now assume brands know who they are, what they need, and what鈥檚 happening right now. And they expect brands to act on that knowledge instantly.

At the same time, businesses are embracing a new era of AI. Dubbed “agentic AI,” it represents a paradigm shift where AI doesn鈥檛 just analyze or recommend products, but increasingly plans, decides, and acts through a network of agents. This creates a massive opportunity for customer experience (CX) leaders today, in particular marketers, who, according to McKinsey, are leading in AI adoption amongst business functions. But it also raises the stakes.

Because when AI moves faster than your data, systems, and processes, it exposes everything that鈥檚 broken. That tension鈥攂etween rising expectations and disconnected reality鈥攊s exactly what 麻豆原创 and Google Cloud are addressing together.

Click the button below to load the content from YouTube.

Always allow YouTube

The marketer鈥檚 reality: ambition outpacing execution

According to recent , more than half of marketers say fragmented or outdated data prevents them from acting in the moment. Insights arrive too late. Activation requires manual stitching across tools. And even the best strategies stall before they ever reach customers.

It is clear that most organizations genuinely want to deliver great customer experiences. But fragmentation is what stands in the way of delivering connected, meaningful engagements.

On one side: Customers expect effortless, relevant, and real-time experiences. On the other hand, organizations still operate with fragmented data, siloed teams, and delayed insights.

Our latest reveals that customers are increasingly frustrated: 45% say brands can鈥檛 keep up with changing expectations, and 44% say interactions feel less personal than before.鈥�

AI accelerating the engagement divide 

The disconnect between what customers feel and what businesses believe is the “.” Customer signals live across disconnected systems. Data arrives late or without context. Execution happens separately from insight. And while customers feel this friction immediately, many companies do not realize how disconnected their experiences truly are in their customers’ eyes. Now, AI is accelerating this divide.

Agents can generate content, launch campaigns, and optimize engagement at unprecedented speed. But when those agents act on incomplete, outdated, or fragmented data, they only exacerbate inconsistency and poor customer experiences.

When talking to our customers, it鈥檚 clear that there is no shortage of ambition when it comes to AI. In our research, 78% of brands say AI will be integral to their customer retention efforts this year. But only 46% of brands can connect their data in a way that is accessible to power AI sustainably.

The real challenge for CX leaders today is ensuring that AI has the right foundation: trusted data, unified context, and direct connection to execution.

New model for engagement built on trusted enterprise data

麻豆原创 and Google Cloud are expanding their partnership to enable a fundamentally different approach to marketing execution, one grounded in trusted enterprise data and real-time signals, accelerated with multi-agent coordination, and delivered at scale through 麻豆原创 and Google鈥檚 customer engagement solutions.

麻豆原创 provides both operational truth for elements such as inventory, orders, and fulfillment status, and deep customer knowledge across customer experience interactions. Google Cloud brings additional real-time signals and analytics, along with advanced AI. Combined, they create a shared, real-time understanding of the customer, grounded in business and situational context.

At the heart of this partnership:

• 麻豆原创 Business Data Cloud (麻豆原创 BDC) connects semantically rich data across the enterprise with AI to enable real-time insights and drive personalized interactions grounded in business context. This includes 麻豆原创 Business Data Cloud Connect for Google BigQuery.
• Google BigQuery unlocks real-time signals across the Google ecosystem, such as geolocation, weather, and rich analytics, through bidirectional, zero-copy data access with 麻豆原创 BDC, while ensuring enterprise-grade governance and security.
• 麻豆原创 Customer Experience applications provide the real-time behavioral context 鈥� customer profiles, transactions, orders, service interactions, and consented engagement data.
• 麻豆原创 Engagement Cloud activates enterprise data and AI insights and predictions to securely orchestrate real-time, personalized interactions across the entire customer life cycle.

With these innovations, marketers can finally move from insight to execution automatically.

To realize the full potential of agentic AI, businesses need their systems to speak the same language. By uniting 麻豆原创’s enterprise data and customer engagement platform with Google Cloud’s AI, we鈥檙e enabling marketers to move beyond simple automation to multi-agent orchestration, driving dynamic campaigns that reason and adapt to market shifts in real time.

Kevin Ichhpurani, President, Global Partner Ecosystem at Google Cloud

From prompt to performance: how agents work together for marketing

Another critical element of this new execution model is agent interoperability. Gemini Enterprise acts as a central hub for multi-agent coordination, enabling  customers鈥� agents to securely exchange context and take action across platforms. Meanwhile, Joule acts as the engagement layer within 麻豆原创 applications, executing tasks, orchestrating campaign and content workflows, and optimizing marketing outcomes. Working together, 麻豆原创 and Google are enabling true multi-agent orchestration connected to trusted enterprise data.

Within this broader CX transformation, 麻豆原创 Engagement Cloud is where agentic intelligence becomes operational for marketing teams. It is the environment where enterprise signals, generative media, and AI agents translate into real customer interactions and automated lifecycle journeys.

Advanced generative capabilities powered by Google Gemini models, for example, Nano Banana 2, introduce new agentic skills that help CX teams dynamically generate messaging, imagery, and campaign variations. Through assistants and agents in Joule, these capabilities become embedded directly into marketing workflows, allowing brands to adjust tone, localize content, and respond instantly to changing conditions.

It is not just content generation and personalization that are being rewired. With unified data context and interoperable agents, mobile messaging can turn into immersive conversational experiences with Google Rich Communication Services (RCS) and advertising audiences, and creative, which can continuously evolve based on real-time performance and business signals, transforming campaigns into intelligent, self-optimizing systems.

And through this multi-agent network, marketers will not need to build every step of a campaign manually. Instead, they define the goal, gain more time to focus on strategy and creativity, and let agents handle the rest.

For example, a marketer can prompt:

• 鈥淚ncrease repeat purchases from customers in the last 30 days.鈥�
• 鈥淢aximize customer lifetime value while reducing campaign operational costs.鈥�

And from there:

• Joule Agents coordinate content production, grounded in customer and enterprise data, understand business context, customer history, and constraints
• Google鈥檚 Gemini Models and agents generate creative variations, messaging, and channel-specific content
• Agents collaborate across 麻豆原创 and Google Cloud to personalize, activate, and continuously optimize campaigns in real time across engagement channels and media networks

This is more than a data integration. It鈥檚 a leap forward for AI agents that can collaborate naturally and execute seamlessly. By combining 麻豆原创 Business Data Cloud Connect for Google with interoperable AI agents across 麻豆原创 and Google, we鈥檙e giving organizations a path from AI experimentation to AI-empowered customer experience at scale. Marketers can spend less time on manual tasks and more time shaping the customer journey.

Balaji Balasubramanian, President and Chief Product Officer, 麻豆原创 Customer Experience and Consumer Industries

Clear business outcomes for marketing teams

By enabling a network of interoperable AI agents and grounding them in enterprise data and shared context across 麻豆原创 and Google, organizations can achieve measurable outcomes, including:

• Faster speed-to-market through autonomous campaign and content generation
• Lower operational overhead by eliminating manual execution steps
• Always鈥憃n optimization that continuously improves performance
• Higher ROI through relevant, timely, and consistent engagement at scale

Marketers can spend less time managing workflows and more time shaping strategy, creative direction, and customer value.

Beyond campaigns: continuous engagement at enterprise scale

While marketing is a natural starting point, this is just the beginning. Customer engagement does not live in one system or team. Engagement spans commerce, service, sales, supply chain, and operations. A brand promise made in a message must be fulfilled by inventory. A personalized offer depends on pricing, availability, and delivery. And a single customer service interaction can shape the future of customer loyalty and lifetime value.

This multi-agent model is designed to support high-value use cases across the 麻豆原创 Customer Experience portfolio, laying the foundation for an AI-driven customer experience powered by trusted, unified, real-timedata.

In an AI-driven world, customer experience goes beyond any single interaction鈥攊t’s defined by every touchpoint a customer has with your company.

We believe this recognition reflects the continued momentum of in helping enterprises orchestrate real鈥憈ime, AI鈥憄owered engagement at a global scale, connecting data, channels, and experiences to drive measurable business impact.

Helping brands scale AI-powered engagement across channels

Leading brands鈥攊ncluding , John Frieda, PUMA, and Gibson鈥攗se 麻豆原创 Engagement Cloud to deliver connected, personalized journeys that increase engagement, accelerate growth, and build long-term customer loyalty.

According to the report, 麻豆原创鈥檚 ability to support enterprise鈥慻rade, real鈥憈ime engagement across channels remains a key differentiator. 麻豆原创鈥檚 personalization capabilities are powered by advanced segmentation, embedded AI decisioning, and intelligent triggering to deliver timely, relevant, and consistent experiences.

Organizations using 麻豆原创 continue to see measurable outcomes, including improved customer loyalty, higher conversion rates, and increased average order value.

Driving measurable business impact with event鈥慴ased and behavior鈥憀ed orchestration

We believe this year鈥檚 placement also reflects 麻豆原创鈥檚 strength in orchestrating engagement using real鈥憈ime behavioral, transactional, and operational signals across the business.

With 麻豆原创 Engagement Cloud, brands can activate journeys triggered by events occurring across their business to:

• Boost retention through timely, context鈥慳ware engagement
• Increase conversions with more relevant, personalized interactions
• Strengthen loyalty through connected, lifecycle-driven touchpoints

These results demonstrate 麻豆原创鈥檚 ability to move enterprises beyond channel execution toward true omnichannel orchestration.

Unifying customer experiences with native 麻豆原创 integration

麻豆原创 Engagement Cloud connects marketing, commerce, service, loyalty, sales, and operational data, creating a unified, real-time customer view that powers intelligent engagement across every touchpoint.

This bi鈥慸irectional flow of data gives every customer鈥慺acing team access to the same real鈥憈ime customer view, helping brands drive revenue impact, reduce churn, and improve service outcomes.

Global scale, flexibility, and trust

麻豆原创鈥檚 long鈥憇tanding global footprint and enterprise-ready architecture continue to support its leadership positioning. With a cloud鈥憂ative, composable foundation, embedded privacy and compliance capabilities, and a robust partner ecosystem, 麻豆原创 enables organizations to securely and reliably scale personalized engagement across regions and business models.

Whether operating in five markets or 50, enterprises rely on 麻豆原创 to deliver personalized experiences with confidence.

Customer success reflecting real鈥憌orld impact

Customers on Gartner庐 Peer Insights™ continue to recognize 麻豆原创 for ease of integration, deployment support, and customer partnership. Recent examples include:

• , which uses 麻豆原创 for CRM and marketing automation that supports interaction and communication with customers to increase buyback, retention, and loyalty. This includes CRM ads, push notification apps, personalization campaigns, e-mail and SMS campaign execution, and website and app personalization and recommendations.
• , which increased sales by 30% in three years by using 麻豆原创 solutions, to interact directly with customers within highly personalized omnichannel journeys.
• , which saw a more than 40% increase in CRM revenue and more than 150% in commerce traffic during the holiday season by using 麻豆原创 Customer Experience solutions that empower CHRIST to put customers at the center of everything the company does.

These results highlight the tangible value organizations are achieving with 麻豆原创鈥檚 AI-powered personalization capabilities.

We feel 麻豆原创鈥檚 recognition as a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Personalization Engines underscores the strength of its strategy and continued innovation across 麻豆原创 Engagement Cloud. 麻豆原创 remains committed to helping brands activate data, personalize interactions, connect experiences, and scale engagement with confidence.

Visit 麻豆原创 Engagement Cloud area of sap.com to .

Sara Richter is CMO of 麻豆原创 Emarsys.

Gartner and Magic Quadrant are trademarks of Gartner, Inc., and/or its affiliates.
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Personalization Engines, By , , , , 3 February 2026
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner鈥檚 Research & Advisory organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.