We sent four of our team – Head of CX Nat McHale, CX Specialist Selin, Growth Director Tyler and Client Director Hannah – to find out what Dotdigital’s 2026 roadmap looks like in practice, beyond the press releases. A full day of product launches, a behavioural science deep-dive, a keynote from a Traitors contestant and more AI announcements than you could shake a segment at.
The headline? Dotdigital isn’t betting on AI replacing marketers. They’re betting on AI making marketers better. Every agent announced requires human review and approval. Every new tool is designed to remove the repetitive, time-consuming parts of the job, not the people doing it.
That’s a position we can get behind.
Here’s what stood out.
1. Humans at the wheel
“AI helps you get there 80% quicker, but it needs human curation.”
— Juliette Aiken, CMO, Dotdigital
Everything else at the summit flowed from this. Every agent announced requires human review and approval by design. The platform’s job is to remove the repetitive, time-consuming parts of marketing, not the people doing it.
In a market full of tools promising to replace human judgement, that’s a deliberate bet in the other direction. And it’s the right one.
As our Head of CX Nat McHale put it after the event: “Their new strapline says it all. Making marketing more human. The whole day had this undercurrent – that AI alone doesn’t and shouldn’t replace the human layer.”
2. Segmentation just got a lot faster
The Segment Agent is live in early access this month. Describe the audience you want in plain English ( in any of 95 languages) and it builds the logic for you. It also works in reverse: point it at an existing segment and it explains in plain English what the rules are actually doing.
For anyone who’s ever inherited a mysterious segment built by someone who left the business two years ago, that second feature alone is worth the sign-up.
“The segmentation agent is a big one for us,” said Selin. “Using real-life questions to create relevant segments at the click of a button – that changes how you think about targeting.”
3. Journeys replaces automations
Dotdigital has replaced its automation builder. Journeys is a ground-up rebuild – real time, AI native, individually contact-level. Each person moves through based on their actual behaviour, with content personalised specifically to them.
The Journeys Agent takes it further: describe the outcome you want in plain language and it builds the full journey – segments, content, logic and timing – for you to review and approve.
“Automations becoming Journeys is the move that stands out for me,” said Nat. “It signals the shift from a stack of triggers and time delays to actually understanding the customer lifecycle.”
As Group Product Manager Fred Porter put it on stage: “What used to take days can now take minutes.”
4. Loyalty is finally part of the ecosystem
Dotdigital Loyalty launches soon. Points, tiers, rewards – the mechanics are table stakes. What isn’t table stakes is the integration.
Every loyalty event updates the contact record in real time. Which means loyalty data feeds directly into your segmentation, automation and campaign logic. No separate platform. No complicated integration. No data lag.
“The big one is loyalty,” said Nat. “Leveraging all the rich data already within the tool. No additional plugins, no complicated integrations. Just seamless journey building within a brilliant ecosystem.”
According to Product Manager, Jacek Winiarski, roughly 80% of future revenue tends to come from 20% of existing customers. A loyalty programme that sits in a silo is a missed opportunity.
5. The behavioural science session was a hit
Phil Agnew’s talk on behavioural science was one of those sessions that people are still talking about at the end of the day.
Two examples stuck out to us:
- Dyson. The clear plastic casing on a Dyson vacuum is a persuasion strategy. Watching the machine work, seeing the dirt collect, understanding the engineering – all of it increases how much people value the product. Dyson’s original ad copy leaned into this, referencing 5,127 prototypes. Effort signals value. When people understand how hard something was to make, they trust it more.
- IKEA. Harvard researcher Mike Norton found that people were willing to pay 63% more for flat-pack furniture they’d assembled themselves versus an identical pre-built version. People who filled in their own lottery numbers valued the ticket almost six times higher than one with numbers already filled in. When customers participate in building or personalising something, their attachment to it increases – sometimes dramatically.
Showing your work, letting customers participate and making the effort visible are more persuasive than claiming quality outright. As Phil put it: “If you see the effort that goes into something, you value it more.”
Worth listening to Phil’s Nudge podcast if you missed the session.
6. Stephen Libby said the most useful thing about brand trust
The Traitors contestant and customer success manager turned keynote speaker made a sharp point: “We’ve become so attuned to people, or brands, changing that we cut off really quickly now if they start to work against what they said they stood for.”
Ten years in customer success management taught him to read relationships. His view: data and AI signals are useful, but human-to-human judgement, tone, silence and behaviour still matters and shouldn’t be fully replaced.
The StrategiQ takeaway
The marketing teams we work with aren’t short of tools. They’re short of time and headspace to use them well.
Dotdigital is building something genuinely useful – a connected ecosystem where agents, journeys and loyalty all draw from the same customer data and work together rather than against each other.
But the platform is only as powerful as the data inside it. Clean contact records, rich behavioural data, well-structured segments – these are what unlock everything the new product suite can actually do.
The tools are ready. The question is whether your strategy is.
AI only gets you so far. We help with the rest. Get in touch.
StrategiQ is a Dotdigital partner. Our CX team works with clients to design, build and optimise customer journeys across email, SMS, WhatsApp and beyond.