AI-powered marketing tools promise to transform how we create and optimize campaigns. But how well do they actually work in practice? As a Digital Campaign Creator at Inside Labs, I've spent several months working with Braze's Sage AI tools across our destination clients. Here's an honest assessment of what works, what's promising, and what still needs improvement.
1. Intelligence Suite
The Intelligence Suite is the most mature and valuable component of Sage AI. It includes Intelligent Timing (sending messages when each individual user is most likely to engage), Intelligent Channel (automatically selecting the best channel per user), and Intelligent Selection for A/B testing (automatically allocating more traffic to winning variants).
In our experience, Intelligent Timing alone has measurably improved open rates and click-through rates across campaigns. The ability to optimize send times per user — rather than choosing a single send time for an entire audience — is a genuine step forward for campaign performance.
2. Predictive Suite
The Predictive Suite offers two main capabilities: predicting churn risk and predicting purchase likelihood. Both models analyze user behavior patterns to score each user on their probability of churning or making a purchase in a defined time window.
These predictions are useful for segmentation — for example, creating targeted win-back campaigns for users with high churn risk, or exclusive upsell offers for users with high purchase intent. The accuracy improves over time as the models learn from more data.
3. Copywriting Assistant
The Copywriting Assistant uses GPT to generate message copy based on prompts. It can produce subject lines, push notification text, and email body content. While it's a useful starting point for drafting, the output typically requires significant editing to match brand voice and ensure accuracy — particularly for tourism-specific content and multilingual campaigns.
4. Image Generator
The Image Generator, powered by DALL-E 2, creates images from text prompts. In its current state, it's the least practical tool for our use case. Generated images rarely meet the quality standards needed for destination marketing, where authentic photography of real places and experiences is essential.
Overall Assessment
The Intelligence Suite is highly valuable and delivers measurable results today. The Predictive Suite is promising and improves with more data. The Copywriting Assistant and Image Generator are still emerging — useful for ideation but not yet reliable enough for production use in tourism marketing.
