#687: Customer Experience Design using Generative AI, with Tara DeZao, Pega

Summary

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Podcast Summary: The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®

Episode #687: Customer Experience Design using Generative AI, with Tara DeZao, Pega
Release Date: June 9, 2025
Host: Greg Kihlström
Guest: Tara DeZao, Senior Product Marketing Director at Pega

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Greg Kihlström is joined by Tara DeZao, Senior Product Marketing Director at Pega, live from Pegaworld 2025 in Las Vegas. The focus is on how generative AI—particularly through Pega’s Customer Engagement Blueprint tool—is revolutionizing customer experience (CX) design. The discussion highlights how AI-powered prototyping not only accelerates and enriches CX design but also fosters cross-team alignment, de-risks innovation, and supports hyper-personalization at scale.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introduction to Customer Engagement Blueprint

[02:10–04:08]

• Greg introduces the concept: testing and visualizing entire customer experiences before writing any code.
• Tara explains Customer Engagement Blueprint as a tool to visualize and prototype AI-powered, next best action customer journeys, distinguishing it from traditional, static CX mapping tools:
  • “It's really about visualizing what a customer journey should be. Instead of a rules-based, static, traditional customer journey, it's helping you envision what next best action could look like to your customers in the channels that they're in.” —Tara DeZao [04:58]

2. The Broader GenAI Blueprint Family at Pega

[05:20–06:48]

• PegaGen AI Blueprint—the broader solution—enables building applications rapidly, sometimes in less than 40 hours.

• Both blueprints allow marketers and developers to upload data assets and brand guidelines, driving faster time-to-market while maintaining quality.

  • "Now we’re seeing sub 40 hours. That's an amazing jump in efficiency." —Tara DeZao [05:59]

3. Role of Generative AI in CX Prototyping

[06:48–08:17]

• GenAI makes prototyping aspirational and architectural, allowing companies to simulate and refine entire journeys (acquisition, cross-sell, retention), complete with real creative assets and modifiable brand tones.

• Rapid iteration allows teams to see outputs across channels (mobile, desktop, email) in minutes.

  • "You can actually turn those into real pieces of creative and then you can change it up. If you put in an authoritative tone and don’t like it, you can go back and change the tone and see what generates after that." —Tara DeZao [07:25]

4. Cross-Functional Collaboration & Breaking Down Silos

[08:28–12:59]

• Marketers can easily export blueprints to educate and align other departments or agency partners, moving away from slow, expensive storyboarding.

• Helps teams avoid costly misunderstandings and iterations, promoting organizational alignment and efficiency.

• Enables data-driven prioritization and resolution of cross-departmental conflicts.

  • "This takes the place of that [traditional storyboard]. I can show you exactly what it could look like. You can even export it and give it to your agency and say, I want you to do just about this." —Tara DeZao [09:35]
  • “It reduces risk. It reduces the amount of iterations... there's something about the power of the visual...” —Tara DeZao [10:12]

5. Operational Impact: Streamlining Process & Pre-Testing

[12:59–14:36]

• Rapid prototyping reduces operational overhead, allowing organizations to understand what messaging or journey elements work before investing in full development.

• Pre-testing through blueprints minimizes wasted time and resources, simplifying complex processes.

  • “Normally we have to test that in market... we don’t get to pre-test those things or we haven't been able to pre-test those things. So from an operations perspective, being able to test and not... take down a bunch of time and resources, you can really just kind of make it work, make it seamless, and take steps out of process.” —Tara DeZao [13:31]

6. Bridging Blueprint with Customer Decision Hub (CDH)

[14:36–16:50]

• Tara describes CDH as an AI-powered decisioning and personalization engine—the “nerve center” where strategies are built and action libraries created.

• Blueprint output is imported into CDH’s “one-to-one Operations Manager,” helping clients scale dynamic, robust action libraries for true hyper-personalization.

• Real-world example: Wells Fargo’s comprehensive use of action libraries for meaningful, diverse, and customer-centric experiences.

  • “Your action library should be as robust as possible... Blueprint can populate your action library... helping clients scale... so that it’s truly dynamic one-to-one personalization.” —Tara DeZao [15:02]

7. Importance of Rich, Diverse Action Libraries

[16:50–17:27]

• For effective one-to-one personalization, organizations must maintain a varied action library, not just focused on sales but also on service, nurture, and loyalty.

  • “You should have actions across acquisition, cross-sell, retention, service, nurture... It’s really important to your customer lifetime value and loyalty to not just sell to your customers every minute.” —Tara DeZao [16:59]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On GenAI in CX:
  “GenAI makes it actually more aspirational. It's really about being able to understand your goals and objectives for your marketing messages and then see what comes out...” — Tara DeZao [07:25]

• On Operational Savings:
  “Normally we have to test that in market... but being able to test and not... take down a bunch of time and resources, you can really just kind of make it work...” — Tara DeZao [13:31]

• On Staying Agile:
  “What I do to stay agile in my role is surround myself with really smart team members that I can trust... and making connections with my peers... If I might not know something, I can call up Greg Kihlström and say, Greg, have you seen this?” — Tara DeZao [18:15]

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Highlighted Timestamps for Key Segments

• [02:10–04:08] — Introduction to Pega’s Customer Engagement Blueprint
• [05:20–06:48] — Rapid application building with GenAI Blueprint
• [06:48–08:17] — GenAI’s capabilities in rapid prototyping and ideation
• [08:28–10:12] — Visualization, stakeholder alignment, and replacing storyboards
• [12:59–14:36] — Operational efficiencies, reducing process complexity
• [14:36–16:50] — Blueprint into CDH; building robust action libraries
• [16:50–17:27] — The necessity of action variety for customer centricity
• [17:41–18:07] — Pegaworld highlights (Rob Walker's keynote and Don Sherman’s session)
• [18:15–18:49] — Personal strategies for maintaining agility

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Conclusion & Takeaways

This episode showcases how generative AI is fundamentally changing customer experience design by allowing marketers and organizations to rapidly prototype, iterate, and socialize journeys and interactions across teams. The power to visualize, export, and scale actionable strategies not only speeds up innovation but also aligns diverse organizational silos and ensures true one-to-one personalization for customers.

For more on Pega’s Customer Engagement Blueprint or to connect with the guest, see the episode show notes.

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Transcript

[Strayer University Announcer]

At Strayer University, we help students like you. Go from Will I To why not? For over 130 years, we've been innovating higher education to make it more affordable, accessible and attainable so you can reach your goals. Go from thinking, Can I? To Yes, I Can. And keep striving. Visit strayer.edu to learn more. Strayer University is certified to operate in Virginia by CHEV and its many campuses, including at 2121 15th Street north in Arlington, Virginia.

[Carvana User]

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[Tara Dezeo]

So good you'll want to leave a voicemail about it.

[Strayer University Announcer]

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[Carvana User]

Foreign.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Welcome to Season seven of the Agile Brand, where we discuss the trends and topics marketing leaders need to know. Stay curious, stay agile and join the top enterprise brands and Martech platforms as we explore marketing technology, AI, e commerce, and whatever's next for the Omnichannel customer experience. Together, we'll discover what it takes to create an agile brand built for today and tomorrow and built for customers, employees and continued business growth. I'm your host Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on martech, AI and marketing operations. The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by Tech Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services, and real world application. For more information, go to teksystems.com to make sure you always get the latest episodes, please hit subscribe on the app you listen to podcasts on and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. And now onto the show.

What if you could test drive your entire customer experience before even writing a line of code? Agility isn't just about reacting fast. It's about thinking ahead, designing deliberately, and testing before committing. In an age where customer expectations shift by the minute, businesses can't afford to just build and hope. Today we're here at Pegaworld 2025 at the MGM grand in Las Vegas, and we're exploring how generative AI powered prototyping can help organizations visualize and refine the full customer journey before it's built, and why tools like Pega's Customer Engagement Blueprint are Changing how brands think about strategy, customer centricity and innovation. To walk us through this, I'd like to welcome back to the show today Tara Dazeo, senior Product Marketing Director at Pega. Tara, welcome to the show.

[Tara Dezeo]

Thanks for having me, Greg. Always great to be here.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Yeah, yeah, I should say welcome back actually. So, yeah, love it, love it. I think like three times now. So it's like returning champion here. So, so, yeah. For those that didn't catch you when you were back, when you were on the show last, why don't you share a little bit about your background and your role at pega?

[Tara Dezeo]

Yeah, absolutely. So my background is in ad tech and Martech. I'm a subject matter expert in both of those areas and joined Pega to help with that. Over time I became more embedded with customer engagement as a whole and I work on the Customer Decision Hub product and with Customer Decision Hub we help our clients create better customer experiences.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Great, great. So, yeah, got the right person to talk about this today. So let's talk about something that I'm excited to. I played around a little bit with it today. Going to do a little more tomorrow. The innovation lab here at pegaworld Customer Engagement Blueprint. And why don't we start by just what is it for those not familiar and what makes it different from traditional CX planning or mapping tools?

[Tara Dezeo]

Yeah, absolutely. So it's a tool where you can visualize creating AI powered next best action, Customer journeys. And what's great about it is that one of the differentiators for Customer Decision Hub is the ability to redecision in the moment, what marketing message you're going to give to a customer. And Customer Engagement Blueprint helps you visualize that so you can actually see what happens inside of the software without being there.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Yeah. And it's, I mean from what I've seen, and we'll talk a little bit more about the prototyping aspect. But I mean it's not just like a map. Like there's journey mapping software that you can kind of like say there's a box here that implies something is going to happen. Right. It's well beyond that.

[Tara Dezeo]

Yes, it is completely dynamic and it's really about visualizing what a customer journey should be. Instead of a rules based, static traditional customer journey, it's helping you envision what next best action could look like to your customers in the channels that they're in.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Yeah. And so this is also part of a broader Genai blueprint family at Pega. Can you talk a little bit about so you Know, we just briefly talked about customer engagement Blueprint. There's also Pegagen AI Blueprint. You know, what's, what do each do basically?

[Tara Dezeo]

Yeah. So Pegagen AI blueprint, the original platform blueprint, helps create applications and understand what you need to do before you code and then you can, you know, we learned today we had one of our customers make an app in less than 40 hours.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Yeah.

[Tara Dezeo]

So it reduces the amount of time it takes you to build an app. So I mean, if you think about, you know, app building, it might have taken you a couple months, couple weeks. Now we're seeing sub 40 hours. That's an amazing jump in efficiency.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Yeah. And this isn't just like a basic widget or something.

[Tara Dezeo]

Right.

[Greg Kilstrom]

I mean this is complex internal operations and everything like that.

[Tara Dezeo]

Absolutely. And you can up in both blueprints, you can upload things like your data assets. With Customer engagement Blueprint, you can upload your brand component and guidelines. So it's really dynamic across both blueprints to be able to help marketers and developers do things more quickly without sacrificing quality.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Yeah, yeah. So let's talk a little bit about the rapid prototyping aspect. I mean, you know, this, this is able to envision the, the entire journey and things, but from the prototyping aspect. So, you know, the idea of prototyping an experience before it's built sounds almost architectural. You know, what role does generative AI play in this process and how does it help companies kind of see, see around corner, you know, see the things that they. A lot of times I've been part of these projects, you know, you make assumptions or you just, you're human, you forget things.

Right.

So how does gen play a role in this process?

[Tara Dezeo]

Yeah, So I would say that gen AI makes it actually more aspirational. Right. So it is architectural in some respects, but it's really about being able to understand what your goals and objectives are for your marketing messages and then see what comes out of Gen AI when you put in things like, here's the customer that I want to reach, here's what I'm trying to do from like acquisition, cross sell, retention. What does it look like within a mobile app? What does it look like within an email? And you can actually turn those into real pieces of creative and then you can change it up. Right. So if you put in that you want to work with an authoritative tone and then you don't like what comes out, you can go back and change the tone and then see what generates after that.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Yeah, I Mean being able to see like the mobile interface and like switching to desktop or whatever, you know, it's pretty powerful to be able to do that in a matter of what, minutes?

[Tara Dezeo]

Yeah. And one of the things that is great about it is that for the first time, marketers can share their vision and how things work for them with other parts of the organization. Because you can either export or share your blueprint. And it's about a lot of the time educating the organization on why Customer Decision Hub is the right fit for your marketing team. And it's something that education has to continue over and over again. So this just makes that education process much more simple.

[Greg Kilstrom]

I mean, it also seems like, you know, again, having been in these big enterprise transformation and app building exercises, everybody kind of comes to it with their own perspective. Right. And to your point about, you know, marketing being able to show their vision without writing code, without spending hours and hours on wireframing and all those kinds of things. What kinds of things does this help avoid down the process?

[Tara Dezeo]

Yeah. If you think about, let's say you're trying to sell creative to your CMO or your CEO. Right. In the past, you'd have to go to your either in house or external creative agency and say, hey, build me a storyboard. And that takes time, it takes money. This takes the place of that. Right. I don't need to create a storyboard. I can show you exactly what it could look like. You can even then export it and give it to your agency and say, I want you to do just about this.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Yeah, it reduces risk and just misunderstanding, right?

[Tara Dezeo]

Yes, it reduces risk. It reduces the amount of iterations that you have to do. And really there's something about the power of the visual. I know, I'm a visual learner. And being able to show someone your idea as you talk them through it is so much more powerful than just telling.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it also, I think again, as creative or visionary as we all like to fancy ourselves, sometimes our idea has some improvements to be made about it. Right. So I'm speaking, you know, softly about this, but we don't always get it right the first time. So the cost of getting it wrong the first, second, maybe third time is it's a lot if you have to go through all those processes that you just described, getting agencies, even internal teams. So just the idea that, I mean, just like, you know, the equivalent of like, write me a blog post in ChatGPT or something, it's like now we're designing like omnichannel apps and Customer experiences and stuff, right?

[Tara Dezeo]

Yeah, for sure.

[Greg Kilstrom]

You can tell I'm kind of excited about this myself.

[Tara Dezeo]

But it is exciting.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Yeah, it's, it's, it's. I think it's a really. Yeah, just a fascinating thing to be able to do and do so quickly. So talking about maybe going to the next step of scalability and adoption, you know, customer experience, it touches marketing, but it also touches sales, service, product and much, much more. How have you seen organizations use a blueprint like this to kind of, to use the cliche, break down silos or build alignment across those teams?

[Tara Dezeo]

Yeah, you know, I think it's interesting because you can upload your data assets and artifacts into this and so I think you can really understand more about between using blueprint and using features of cdh, you can understand how to better prioritize certain things. Right. We have large marketing organizations where there's never enough resource and maybe you have different product lines or competing priorities. And we always tell folks, be data driven about this. Understand what, what drives the most value for your customer, what part of the experience is going to drive the most value to your customer. So I think again, it's about being able to kind of test and learn and walk through those things before doing them. And that, you know, can help solve some of these competing priority conflicts that you might experience or that many of us do experience.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Yeah, I mean, I think also, you know, as someone that's often focused on the operational part of marketing, to me, being able to prototype more rapidly, to be able to share that with other teams, how does that kind of help people think through? You know, it's great to see the nice interface and the, you know, the, the messaging and all that, but then you actually have to do the work to get it done or to support it or whatever. How does something like this help from an operational standpoint of just like thinking through the details?

[Tara Dezeo]

Yeah, absolutely. So I think that we're at a point too where we're about to be able to just import a lot more of the output into cdh. And even at that point it's still strategy building moment. You can still iterate on whatever offers and strategies that you create. I think it really just allows you to understand what is going to work and what isn't. And normally we have to test that in market. We don't get to pre test those things or we haven't been able to pre test those things. So I think from an operations perspective, being able to test and not like you said, take down a bunch of time and Resources and doing that, you can really just kind of make it work, make it seamless and, and take steps out of process. Operations is synonymous a lot with process or complex process. And this minimizes that.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Yeah, yeah. So I know in previous episodes we talked a little bit about Customer Decision Hub and stuff like that. But you know, let's maybe for those that are less familiar with that product itself, can you talk a little bit about, you know, how does, what does it look like to take something out of this blueprint tool and implement it into CDH and talk a little bit about what CDH is?

[Tara Dezeo]

Yeah, absolutely. So Customer Decision Hub is an AI powered decisioning engine and I try to translate that to marketers as a personalization engine. Right. It's a way to hyper personalize in milliseconds the creative that you're serving to your customer along their journey. And I think that it's a little complex to understand that step unless you have CDH of importing it. But essentially there's a nerve center within Customer Decision Hub called one to one Operations Manager. And that's where your strategies sit and that's where you build out your action library. And your action library should be as robust as possible. So if I think of a customer that has like a very robust action library, it's Wells Fargo and they have talked about this openly in the marketplace. So you can seek out that information for those who are interested. And so blueprint, you can populate your action library through one to one Operations Manager. That's the linkage to blueprint and it just again takes out that extra step. It scales can help you scale the action library. You can see what actions might look like. We have a lot of clients that have trouble coming up with a lot of actions because you want them to be meaningful and make an impact. You want them to be personalized and customer centric, but you also want them to drive business value. And so this is going to be probably the most revolutionary part, is helping clients scale their action libraries so that it's truly dynamic one to one personalization when you're using Customer Decision Hub.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Yeah, yeah. Because you need more potential actions. If we're talking one to one, we want more potential actions so we can actually get more granular. Right?

[Tara Dezeo]

Absolutely. And like you should have actions across acquisition, cross sell, retention, service, nurture. You should not have all acquisition, all sales.

[Carvana User]

Right.

[Tara Dezeo]

So it's really important to your customer lifetime value and your customer loyalty to not just sell to your customers every minute. And so having a robust action library with a lot of types of actions is the way to get there.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Great. Well, couple last things here as we wrap up. So we're about to head into second day of or you know, last day of Pega World here. What's either a highlight so far or something you're looking forward to?

[Tara Dezeo]

Yeah, so I'm looking forward to Rob Walker's keynote tomorrow. It's about agentic AI and I got a tiny sneak peek and it's just really interesting and cool and he's a great speaker. So looking forward to that. Don's going to be on stage tomorrow, Don Sherman, and he is very, very good speaker and really engaging and always fun. So those two keynotes probably are what I'm looking forward to the most.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Love it. Love it. So last question for you. Like to ask this to everybody. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?

[Tara Dezeo]

Yeah, what I do to stay agile in my role is surround myself with really smart team members that I can trust to do things in collaboration with me. I also rely a lot on looking at trends and making connections with my peers and I think that keeps me really on top of things because if I might not know something, I can call up Greg Kilstrom and say, Greg, can you have you seen this? Do you know what's happening?

[Greg Kilstrom]

So anytime.

[Tara Dezeo]

Yeah, good old fashioned networking is always great to stay agile I think too.

[Greg Kilstrom]

Love it, love it. Well again I'd like to thank Tara Dezeo, Senior Product Marketing Director at Pega for joining the show. You can learn more about Terra and pega's Customer Engagement Blueprint by following the links in the show notes.

Thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand brought to you by Tech Systems. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show as well. You can access more episodes of the show@theagile brand.com that's theagile brand.com and contact me if you're interested in consulting or advisory services or are looking for a speaker for your next event, go to www.gregkilstrom.com that's G R E G K I H L S t r o m.com the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile.

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[Strayer University Announcer]

At Strayer University, we help students like you. Go from Will I? To why not? For over 130 years, we've been innovating higher education to make it more affordable, accessible and attainable so you can reach your goals. Go from thinking, can I? To Yes, I Can. And keep striving. Visit strayer.edu to learn more. Strayer University is certified to operate in Virginia by Chev and its many campuses, including at 2121 15th Street north in Arlington, Virginia.