Every business wants the same thing: Customers who keep coming back. Ideally, they’d show up daily—like clockwork. Realistically, they’d just remember you when they need something you offer, and not drift to a competitor. Either way, more frequent engagement = more revenue.

But here’s the catch: Very few products are “daily habit” material. You’re not their morning coffee. You’re not TikTok. For most businesses, the job isn’t just capturing intent. You have to:

• Create intent

• Nurture it over time

• And finally, convert it into revenue

That’s hard—because good marketing is all about experiments. Most teams don’t lack ideas and experiments, but launching them is hard and time-consuming

‍Finding the best journey for each user

At its core, lifecycle marketing is a high-stakes optimization game. Your goal?

Design a sequence of actions—messages, offers, push notifications, ads—for each user that maximizes their revenue potential, based on their evolving behavior and preferences.

To find the right journey, you have to test. A lot. And fast. But most teams are bottlenecked long before they get there.

Why it's so hard

The problem isn’t ideas—it’s execution constraints:

• Accessing data takes weeks (avg TAT: 2–8 weeks)

• You need engineering to send data to your ESP

• Impact is hard to predict without running the test

• QA, content, and setup eat up bandwidth

So most campaigns never launch. The few that do stay broad and safe. You fall short of “the best journey for each user.” It’s not a strategy problem. It’s an execution bottleneck.

How big companies solve it

Amazon, Home Depot, and others throw teams and models at the problem. They ask:

“At this moment, for this user, what’s the next-best action that will drive revenue?”

And they answer it with:

• Teams of engineers and data scientists

• Massive data infrastructure

• Proprietary ML systems

But for most businesses, that level of investment isn’t realistic—financially or operationally.

Everyone else relies on human judgment and manual iteration

For everyone else, lifecycle still runs on human judgment:

• You analyze behavior

• Form hypotheses

• Fight for data

• Manually build segments and journeys

• Wait for results

This is fragile. Slow. Resource-draining. And at every step, you’re limited by one thing: bandwidth. You can only test so many hypotheses, write so much content, run so many campaigns—before the system breaks.

The result? Most campaigns stay generic. Segments stay coarse. Logic stays shallow. You never get close to “the best journey for each user.”

Because the strategy isn’t broken. The execution model is.

AI has fundamentally shifted the resource bottleneck

By now, most marketers use AI tools like ChatGPT weekly — if not daily. It’s superhuman intelligence on tap. Imperfect, yes, but transformative. If someone in 2020 said this would be normal by 2025, you’d laugh them out of the room.

Initially, generative AI helped with outputs — text, images, music, videos. In lifecycle marketing, that translated to faster content creation. Helpful, but only one piece of the puzzle.

Content was the easiest to automate. The rest required:

• Deep context about your business

• Access to first-party data

• Precision beyond text — actual actions

• A high bar for accuracy

That’s why AI alone couldn’t solve the whole problem. Until now.

Enter Sortment: AI agents that don’t just suggest — they execute

We’ve crossed a new threshold in 2025. AI can now do things — not just talk about them. Book a trip. Manage your inbox. Plan a day. And now, run your lifecycle marketing. That changes everything.

With Sortment’s AI agents, marketers no longer need to rely on cross-functional teams for every test. The agent can:

• Suggest a hypothesis

• Query relevant data

• Draft content

• Set up experiments — end-to-end

This compresses the entire cycle from months to days. More tests → more learnings → faster iteration toward the best journey for each user.

Think of it this way: You now have 2x or 3x the operational bandwidth — without hiring. The bottleneck shifts from doing to thinking. Your only limit is your imagination.

How Sortment’s AI agents actually work

Most tools operate in silos — disconnected from the company’s data, limited to narrow execution use cases. Sortment is built differently.

How Sortment integrates into your tech stack

It plugs directly into your company’s source of truth — typically a data warehouse or lake — and listens to real-time event streams for context.

But it doesn’t stop at analysis. Sortment has its own execution engine:

• Build audiences dynamically

• Create custom metrics

• Sync with Braze, Iterable, or run campaigns natively

• Execute full journeys across email, SMS, push, in-app

In short, the AI doesn’t just see the data — it acts on it. You get a 24x7 teammate with infinite bandwidth.

No tickets. No delays. No handoffs. Just hypotheses, launched.

What lifecycle marketing looks like in 2030

We don’t know which AI claims will hold up. But one thing is certain: Lifecycle marketing is being rewritten — and faster than expected.

We see a future where:

• Teams are smaller, closer to the customer and the product

• Marketers act more like strategists than operators

• AI agents handle 90% of the manual work

• Humans guide, review, and set direction

• Campaigns are fewer, but far more relevant

• Spam fades, signal strengthens

The outcome? Better experiences for users. More leverage for marketers. Massive efficiency for businesses.

Want to learn more?

AI is reshaping how lifecycle marketing gets done. Sortment is built for the teams leading that shift. If you're figuring out what AI means for your lifecycle strategy, book a call with us.