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

Introduction

In episode #687 of The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®, host Greg Kihlström engages in an insightful conversation with Tara DeZao, Senior Product Marketing Director at Pega. The episode delves into the innovative applications of generative AI in designing customer experiences, emphasizing how Pega's tools are revolutionizing marketing strategies and operational efficiencies for leading brands.

Guest Background and Role at Pega

Tara DeZao brings a wealth of experience in ad tech and martech to her role at Pega. She specializes in customer engagement, focusing on Pega's Customer Decision Hub (CDH) product, which aids clients in crafting superior customer experiences.

"My background is ad tech and Martech. I'm a subject matter expert in both of those areas and I joined Pega to help with that..."
— Tara DeZao [02:57]

Pega's Customer Engagement Blueprint vs. Gen AI Blueprint

Tara introduces Pega's Customer Engagement Blueprint, a dynamic tool that visualizes AI-powered customer journeys. Unlike traditional static mapping tools, this blueprint allows for real-time decision-making and visualization of marketing strategies without the need for coding.

"It's a tool where you can visualize creating AI powered next best action customer journeys..."
— Tara DeZao [03:50]

Expanding on Pega's broader Gen AI Blueprint family, Tara explains the distinctions:

• Customer Engagement Blueprint: Focuses on visualizing and refining customer journeys with AI-driven decisions in real-time.
• Gen AI Blueprint: Facilitates rapid application development, significantly reducing the time required to build apps—from months to under 40 hours.

"Gen AI Blueprint... helps create applications and understand what you need to do before you code..."
— Tara DeZao [05:20]

Rapid Prototyping with Generative AI

A central theme of the discussion is the role of generative AI in prototyping customer experiences. Tara emphasizes that generative AI elevates the prototyping process by allowing marketers to visualize and iterate on customer journeys swiftly, reducing the reliance on lengthy and costly traditional methods like storyboarding.

"Gen AI makes it actually more aspirational... you can actually turn those into real pieces of creative and then you can change it up."
— Tara DeZao [07:07]

The ability to generate and modify customer experience designs in minutes enhances agility, minimizes risk, and fosters better collaboration across teams without the need for extensive coding or design expertise.

"It reduces risk. It reduces the amount of iterations that you have to do. ... being able to show someone your idea as you talk them through it is so much more powerful than just telling."
— Tara DeZao [09:54]

Breaking Down Silos and Building Team Alignment

Tara discusses how the Customer Engagement Blueprint aids in breaking down organizational silos by providing a shared visual framework for different departments. This fosters alignment among marketing, sales, service, and product teams, ensuring that all functions work towards unified customer-centric goals.

"It's about being able to test and learn and walk through those things before doing them. And that... can help solve some of these competing priority conflicts..."
— Tara DeZao [13:32]

Operational Efficiency and Process Optimization

From an operational standpoint, Tara highlights how the blueprint tools streamline processes by enabling pre-testing of strategies. This proactive approach allows organizations to anticipate and address potential issues before deployment, thereby saving time and resources.

"Being able to test and not... take down a bunch of time and resources and doing that, you can really just kind of make it work, make it seamless and take steps out of process."
— Tara DeZao [15:06]

Integration with Customer Decision Hub (CDH)

Tara elaborates on how designs created in the blueprint tool integrate seamlessly with Pega's Customer Decision Hub. CDH acts as an AI-powered decision engine that personalizes customer interactions in real-time, enhancing customer lifetime value and loyalty.

"Customer Decision Hub is an AI powered decisioning engine... It's a way to hyper personalize in milliseconds the creative that you're serving to your customer along their journey."
— Tara DeZao [16:37]

She underscores the importance of a robust action library within CDH, which the blueprint tool helps scale by providing a diverse array of personalized actions across various stages like acquisition, cross-sell, retention, and service.

"It's really important to your customer lifetime value and your customer loyalty to not just sell to your customers every minute."
— Tara DeZao [18:47]

Future Highlights and Staying Agile

As Pega World 2025 continues, Tara shares her excitement for upcoming keynotes on agentic AI and insights from esteemed speakers like Rob Walker and Don Sherman. She emphasizes the importance of collaboration, trend analysis, and networking in maintaining agility within her role.

"What I do to stay agile in my role is surround myself with really smart team members that I can trust... networking is always great to stay agile..."
— Tara DeZao [19:51]

Conclusion

The episode wraps up with Greg Kihlström reiterating the transformative potential of generative AI in customer experience design. Tara DeZao's insights into Pega's innovative tools highlight a future where marketing strategies are more dynamic, personalized, and efficient, fostering sustained business growth and enhanced customer loyalty.

"You can learn more about Terra and Pega's Customer Engagement Blueprint by following the links in the show notes."
— Greg Kilstrom [20:30]

This episode underscores the critical role of agility and advanced AI tools in navigating the rapidly evolving landscape of customer experience and marketing technology.

Notable Quotes:

• Greg Kilstrom [00:00]: "Your brand may be staying on top of current trends, but are you agile enough to stay relevant, resilient and successful as customers, competition and the world continues to change at a breakneck pace?"

• Tara DeZao [03:50]: "It's a tool where you can visualize creating AI powered next best action customer journeys."

• Tara DeZao [07:07]: "Gen AI makes it actually more aspirational... you can actually turn those into real pieces of creative and then you can change it up."

• Tara DeZao [09:54]: "It reduces risk. It reduces the amount of iterations that you have to do."

• Tara DeZao [16:37]: "Customer Decision Hub is an AI powered decisioning engine... It's a way to hyper personalize in milliseconds the creative that you're serving to your customer along their journey."

Learn More:

For additional information on Tara DeZao and Pega's Customer Engagement Blueprint, refer to the show notes and visit Pega's official website.