← The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
From CRMC: Phaedon's Jaclyn Wands on humanizing loyalty in an AI-driven world
00:21:13
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Hi, I'm Greg Kilstrom, host of the Agile Brand and here's a question for you. As brands invest billions in AI to personalize the customer experience, are they inadvertently creating a more transactional and less human relationship with their most valuable customers? Agility requires not just the rapid adoption of AI based solutions, but the wisdom to know when and how to apply them to enhance without replacing the human element of the customer relationship. Today we're going to talk about the growing disconnect between what AI powered loyalty programs deliver and and what discerning customers actually value. Practical strategies for using AI to understand non transactional signals and create more meaningful customer interactions and how to evolve measurement beyond simple engagement metrics to quantify the strength of genuine brand affinity.
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Welcome to season eight of the Agile Brand Podcast. This season we're going all in on Expert Mode, MarTech, AI and Customer Experience, talking with the people and platforms behind
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the brands you know and love.
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Again, I'm your host Greg Kilstrom and I help Fortune 1000 companies make sense of MarTech, AI and marketing ops. Hit, subscribe or follow to make sure you always get the latest episodes and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. This episode is brought to you by crmc. Drive your customers to new horizons at the premier retail event of the year for retail and brand marketers. Learn more about CRMC 2026, June 1 through 3 in Frisco, Texas at www.thecrmc.com.
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to help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Jacqueline Wans, VP of Product and AI at Faden. Jacqueline, welcome to the show.
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Hi. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.
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Yeah, looking forward to it. And of course we're here at CRMC in Frisco, Texas. And how's it been? How's the conference been so far?
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The conference has been great. It's my first year here. Yeah. The venue, the Omni's been stunning. They've done a really good job at managing and hurting such a large group of people, which I think from an operations perspective is always impressive.
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Yeah, yeah, I know. Yes.
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And then, you know, the keynotes have been fascinating. The teams, the CRM team has been great. So I've really enjoyed it. Yourself?
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Yeah, yeah, same.
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Yeah.
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I actually I got a chance to interview all three of the keynotes before the event. So I got to, I got a little, you know, and listeners got a sneak preview of, of some of what they talked about, but definitely a lot more here on site.
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Love it.
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Yeah, yeah, love it. So, and before we Dive into the topic. Why don't you give a little background on yourself and your role at Faden?
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Yes, So I have. So I'm a data scientist by training. I have a master's of science in data science. My capstone project, my large thesis is based on causal mathematics and discovery of causal predictive algorithms using machine learning techniques and technologies. And the approach was to determine if we could build better, smarter predictive algorithms for economic outcomes if we start to incorporate computer science and mathematics in a computer science setting more fluidly into kind of those economics and large industry evaluations that we do at like the government level.
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Yeah, yeah. Nice, nice. We'll have to talk more about that later. We'll touch on some of that. But yeah, fascinating.
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Yeah.
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So, yeah, let's talk a little bit though. Your research highlights a growing gap between how brands use AI for loyalty and what customers actually want. Like I was kind of saying in the intro. So from a strategics perspective, what's the single biggest misconception that leaders have about AI's role in building customer relationships?
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Hi. So I'm going to lean on this because it's pretty much a theme in my general kind of education efforts around AI, that it's going to be right. As a leader in marketing, you need to have at least a conceptual understanding of just how frequently these models can be wrong. And I quote my favorite statistician, EP Box. All models are wrong, but some are useful. And when you approach your AI technologies and you approach your AI strategy with this fundamental understanding, you are more likely going to implement fail safes and the ability to do human in the loop checking that allows for a more powerful integration of AI, keeping it safely implemented within the parameters that it's made to be used. Right?
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Yeah. Yeah. So talking about loyalty then. Most loyalty programs are built on this foundation of very transactional rewards. You get points for purchases, you do something, you get something directly in return. How does this legacy model clash with the goal of creating deeper connections that go beyond being transactional? And how does AI kind of end up amplifying this transactional nature instead of offering a way to transcend it?
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So this is a fascinating question because I completely agree that the base part point economic system is a fundamental requirement of loyalty. If you're not. If a customer doesn't feel as if they're being, you know, they can track their progress in your system and then redeem for something. This is like. Right. The absolute base level. Would you agree? Yeah, like the loyalty system. And so I feel like building off that fundamental Structure. If you haven't done the research around your customer to understand how you can enact more emotional loyalty and you implement AI, you're going to amplify that transactional nature of your loyalty program. Right. But if you are building on top of your transactional point, economic systems with understanding your consumer, understanding their experiences with your brand, understanding what uniqueness you bring to their kind of life, their environment, like Nike is shoe wearing, right? Like how are you uniquely entering this life, this person's life? You, you can start to learn the emotional loyalty drivers around your brand and then you can build loyalty programs outside of mere transactional. Right. Surprise, delights and rewards, shared empathies and values, these things you can start to communicate with your consumer. And then if you implement AI to enhance this, it will enhance it in a way that is more of an emotional loyalty driver than a transactional loyalty driver.
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Yeah, yeah, well, and I mean I think some of this comes down to, and you touched on some of this already. But you know, getting non transactional cues from people as well, you know, because it's, it is a reinforcing thing of, you know, if there's action, reaction, you know, I travel somewhere, I get points, I buy something, I get points. It's this self reinforcing thing. But what can brands do to look at things like sentiment, intent, life stages, other things to tap into what you were just talking about to create a more general, genuinely human moment.
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Yes. So I have some examples of my favorite ways brands are doing this today. One of them is Nike. I'm going to do a nod to them. They have implemented AI to scan your foot to find the best foot shoe fit for your foot. And that is brilliant. Right. Nike is in itself this legacy shoe brand. They do a lot of other athletic gear, but it's the shoe, it's the Michael Jordan, it's the Air Jordans, it's just where you live. And so they implemented AI to enhance their qual, quite literal product experience. And so I encourage brands to think that way across the board. And then Chewy is doing something really fascinating. They're analyzing search input analysis to determine life stage of pets to then augment the promotions and the way they approach their, their loyal consumers. And so now you're talking about you're not going to be advertising puppy treats to a senior dog for someone who just got a new prescription for arthritis. You're going to be as a brand promoting something more beautiful around that life stage for that dog owning family or that animal owning family and then just, you know, Flowing right out of that into kind of more generic how a brand can approach it. Like approach an emotional loyalty measurement versus a transactional success measurement. I want to start seeing brands look at more than just transactional frequency. What about how quickly did your loyalty member re engage with you after a documented error? So now you're able to determine whether or not they're a habitual transactional loyalist or an emotional transactional loyalist. Because now you're talking about what was that distance of time for them to re engage you and trust you again. And this is the way measuring around error and around product like product issue or service issue, this is how you start to paint a picture of how loyal your customers are to you on an emotional level versus transactional level.
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Well, and of course doing this, I mean there's technology involved, but it's not just about technology. Right. So there's also this cultural shift away from again, we're just mapping action, reaction. How can marketing leaders equip their teams to think differently and think in this way to you know, again, some of, some of those things may be obvious to some that have been working in an industry for a while, but some are surely not, you know. So how do you kind of work on the non technology part of this?
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Really talk about, see, let me think about this. So if we're moving away from technology and you want to ramp up your team, you want to ramp up your team around loyalty, all the different types of loyalty, some of the ones we talk about in our research is emotional, transactional, habitual. These are all different. Yeah, I would almost coach my loyalty team like if I was leading one. Tomorrow I want you to start externally observing yourself and how you interact with every single brand in your life and go out and seek new brands out of curiosity. See, see how these transactions are coming or how these interactions are really starting to come to you. How are these brands representing themselves? And I think when you take a moment and you incur and I think as just loyalty in general, we operate this way, we remove our consumer hat and we just observe ourselves as a consumer and see how brands interact with us. We'll really start to amplify and create discovery around how you could implement technology so customized to your brand. Right. In a way that it is amplifying their experience. Very, very much in tune with like your brand voice and your brand effort.
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Yeah, well, and then how do you. Traditional loyalty metrics aren't going to go anywhere. You know, they, they, they don't take things away, they just keep adding more. Right. So so but what should be added to, you know, to some of those traditional metrics or even you know, organizational KPIs that aren't going to go, sales that aren't going to go away and things like that. But what other metrics can be used to help with this?
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Right, so leaning in a little bit more into what I was speaking on earlier, imagining metrics around the fail point or the success point and removing yourself from just measuring a purchase point. So you know, I fly American Airlines. I my flight, I woke up in Rome and my flight was canceled. My flight was booked over 48 hours out. So you know, I'm on the phone immediately with American Airlines guys, what's going on? Like my flight isn't here and you're putting me in Europe another two days. Right. So this is, this is a very, this is a failure of service, this is a failure to launch across the board and all of their systems are rebooking automatically. So like what did American Airlines do in order to test the next time I booked an American flight? Did I stay with them? Did I cancel my credit card? Yeah, did I. You know, and measuring actual recurring transactions around specific use cases or events are going to be more informative around emotion versus transaction.
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Yeah.
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And then of course I think this is one honestly that we've been talking about for 12 over a decade because I worked in social media CRM for a little bit. There is something to be said around brand sentiment on non tagged conversations. Brands have gotten really good at engaging customers when they're engaged purposefully. Hey guys, you lost my bag. Hey, my room isn't ready. And I've been, it's 7pm Hilton, you know, like these hospitality travel are really easy examples. Hilton's gotten really good around tracking when they're tagged and their service like intervening. But something that you may not know about Hilton is that they do track non tagged sentiment analysis because they look for travel disruptions for incoming clients. And so then they can tailor and customize that person's entrance into their property to try to turn the tide for that trip. And so that's use of AI, that's an external sentiment analysis, allows operations to adjust directly for the situation and could be an ongoing metric measurement. When we did all of this for this customer, did we see it increase frequency? Did we see a decrease? And now you can really start painting a larger picture that takes into account the emotional component.
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Yeah, and that's a great. Because AI is being used and is going to increasingly be used for this. I mean it just, it Makes sense because of the scale. Especially when you're talking about the Hilton example at now we're not just waiting for a hashtag to show up, we're looking at broader things and I guess, you know, beyond that Hilton example, you know, is, is what else can be done to help to train AI to look for these things to continuously improve where human scale just can't scale quickly enough.
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Absolutely. I actually talk about AI in a way that artificial intelligence is such an interesting term that we use in market. These large language models are pattern recognition at scale that we've never had before. But that's all they are. They're pattern recognition machines. So they're able to detect the most likely recurrence of something it's already seen. Therefore something that's already been trained on. And I think what's important is as we kind as we build data democratization around these AI systems, data piping is going to be the life livelihood of every single company. We as technology partners need to be talking about our ecosystems, our ease of data integration. And you want to be working with technology partners that are speaking this way because nothing is going to be more important than data accessibility because of LLMs. Right. They need the data to work. And so it's quality of data in, results in quality of data out. And all this to say to try to get to the point that when we're building and architecting these systems, data in, data out from all these different providers, nothing is more important than a human in the loop in critical touch points to prevent compounding errors through the system because all the models will be wrong. So it's super important that as you're building out your use cases and you're identifying what LLMs will be used for at your company, that you also have crucial human, it's human in the loop touch points to just check off. Yep, that looks good. We should use and, and you know that's kind of my framing. But one of my favorite things is I use a, I say this to people all the time. I use AI unapologetically. I use it to help me write my emails, I use it to help me write my social posts. I do brain dumps in IT to see if it can help me organize raw thought.
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Yeah.
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I am highly critical of the output and that's how everyone should operate with AI all the time.
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Yeah, yeah. And then you know, looking out a couple years this is going to be, you know, AI based loyalty and things like that. It's like everything else that's going to be commoditized and so there's going to be the standard things that kind of get plugged in where now to your point, you know everyone that I talk with is struggling to get their data foundation in order and everything that will get worked out to some degree for many, let's just say maybe not all. But what do leaders in a couple three years down the road what are they going to be doing or setting themselves up for that kind of the run of the mill AI based loyalty is going to fall behind.
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If you are not preparing for every single person to have an AI assistant into their pocket to talk to their loyalty program, you're behind.
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Yeah yeah.
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Every single, every single one of us trust in using Gemini is going up for search search kind of summaries and reviews. Everyone's using chat GPT for research. We did a, we presented with Forrester a little bit earlier in the, in the conference and something like in by industry and, and I was fascinated even when I learned this like retail's up there, right?
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Yeah.
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Some things also that's in the top three that just shook me Finance.
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Oh wow.
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People are going to AI to ask for financial advice regularly. Wow. And if this is happening instinctively for customers to go to and do their research, it's even more important that companies show up in the funnel basically that these users are interacting in. And so you know, I'm encouraging brands that we work with to be present in what I'm calling the MCP marketplace. Getting in the room with Google, getting in the room with OpenAI talking about how your brand can have their own MCP branded on presence in marketplace. This will immediately be a trust factor. Oh, they're already partnered. I know that brand or hey that's my favorite brand. And being able to solve the personal identification allowing them to talk to their loyalty program, it's going to be kind of the reversal of the App Store. Instead of having 1 million notifications, you're now going to have a single channel throughput and you're going to have to be the favorite right up front bringing those favorite things to the table so that they allow your notifications from their AI assist and stuff like that.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well we'll, we'll explore. Yeah, definitely. Yeah but and then you know as we close up here, you know a couple, couple last questions for you. So as I mentioned we're here at CRMC in Frisco, Texas. What's, what's been, you know a highlight for, for you so far.
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For me so far, honestly it's been learning from other brands. I've loved going to the small breakout workshops, hearing the stories and the problems that people are trying to solve. It makes you feel a little less alone in the world of loyalty. It's like everyone is problem is very, very similar with a little unique twist, like a little flavor on it. So it's been just fascinating to learn from all the biggest brands here.
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Yeah, love it. Love it. And last question for you. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
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I keep my curiosity lever at an all time high. I have found seeking understanding others experience the problems they're trying to solve. Reading up on these kind of smaller published articles actually have really interesting insight just to keep that scope broad and that allows you to really maybe hear or notice patterns that you may not necessarily get from all the biggest publications out there. So just follow the little guy and stay curious about people's journeys.
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Love it. Love it. Well again, I'd like to thank Jacqueline Wans, VP of Product and AI at Faetan for joining the show. You can learn more about Jacqueline and Faidan by following the links in the show notes.
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This episode is brought to you by crmc. Drive your customers to new horizons at the premier retail event of the year for retail and brand marketers. Learn more about CRMC 2026 June 13 in Frisco, Texas at www.thecrmc.com and thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand podcast. If you like the episode, hit, subscribe and drop a rating so others can find the show too. And if you're interested in consulting, advisory work, or if you need a speaker for your next event, feel free to reach out. Just visit GregKillstrom.com that's G R E G K I H L S T R O M 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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The Agile Brand.