AI Tools Aren't the Problem (Your Data Is)

Once trust breaks with your brand, no amount of personalization can fix it. Recorded live at K:LDN 2026 in London, this conversation is about the thing every brand now has in common. Everyone has access to the same AI tools. So what actually separates the brands winning with them from the ones just using them? Phillip Jackson sits down with Jake Cohen, VP of Insights at Klaviyo, and Tim Martin-Harvey, Head of Ecommerce at The Bottle Club, a UK multi-brand alcohol retailer carrying roughly 9,500 products. Their answer: memory. Not the AI kind, the brand kind… meaning the stored, structured context a business builds about its own customers and products over time. Tim explains how one mandatory checkout question, asking whether an order is a gift, for self-consumption, for hosting, or for trade, reshaped his customer insight and exposed why standard RFM and lifetime value metrics break down across different buyer types. Jake widens the lens, arguing that loyalty is better measured through engagement across touchpoints than through money spent, and that the brands seeing real gains from AI are the ones writing customer and product knowledge down as reusable context, what Klaviyo calls "artifacts." **WHAT YOU'LL LEARN: ** – Why context, not performance marketing spend, is becoming the real competitive moat as every brand adopts the same AI tools – How one checkout question corrected years of wrong assumptions about who buys and why at The Bottle Club – Why standard RFM and lifetime value segmentation breaks down once you separate gift buyers from self-consumption buyers – Why loyalty is better read through engagement than through total spend – The exact kind of recommendation mistake that destroys customer trust, and how layered product data prevents it – Jake Cohen's 30/60/90 day plan for building AI context that compounds over time *TAKEAWAYS:* As every brand uses the same AI tools, the real differentiator becomes stored context, meaning written detail about the brand, the customer, and the products, what Klaviyo calls "artifacts." The Bottle Club added one mandatory checkout question (gift, self-consumption, hosting, or trade), which corrected wrong assumptions about which products are gifts and showed that standard RFM and lifetime value metrics break down across different buyer types. Loyalty reads better through engagement across touchpoints than through money spent. The goal is asking the right questions instead of pushing a discount, then building context on each customer over time. Recommendations get dramatically stronger when product data (margin, weeks of cover, gift versus self-consumption, category nuance) is layered onto customer data. Recommend a Jack Daniel's to a lifelong Jameson drinker and you have made, in Tim's own framing, the worst recommendation possible, one that costs more than the sale. Jake's plan: set up a service agent and build its skills first, then use Composer to explore your data and test ideas, then keep improving the skills as you learn, since the value compounds over time. *CHAPTERS:* 0:00 Cold open and introductions 2:08 Memory is the new moat, why context beats tools 4:48 The checkout question that rewrote The Bottle Club's customer data 7:26 Why RFM analysis breaks down across buyer types 9:09 Showing up for the customer the way they need, when they need it 10:26 The running shoe example, questions over discounts 17:00 The whiskey mistake, the worst recommendation in retail 18:49 Why Klaviyo believes it can power the agentic storefront 21:00 Jake's plan for the next 90 days Check out The Bottle Club: www.thebottleclub.com Learn more about Klaviyo’s Composer: www.klaviyo.com/composer