Together, the two platforms bring everything a brand knows about its customer to every send and every session [LINK TBD: press release].
Simon AI has been acquired by Monetate, connecting the customer intelligence and agentic workflows of Simon AI to the most valuable surface for lifecycle marketers — your website. Monetate is the leader in AI-powered digital and omnichannel personalization, experimentation, and experience optimization, delivering more than 100 million personalized sessions a day.
Before I get into the details, our customers can be confident that both the Monetate and Simon AI products will continue as individual products with dedicated teams and roadmaps, along with a new integration that delivers greater value to our combined customer community. There will be no disruption to current customers, and Simon AI will continue bringing new customers onto our product.
The acquisition comes with new capital, and Monetate is significantly increasing its investment in product development as well as Concierge and strategic services across both platforms. At a time when agentic capabilities are dramatically changing what is possible for marketing teams, this is the right time for rapid product development and the support that teams need to adopt AI and deliver measurable results.
The problem we set out to solve
Matt Walker and I founded Simon AI more than a decade ago after having watched companies spend millions on data their marketers couldn’t use. We built the platform to change that, and today it shapes messages and offers across more than 100 channels.
D2C brands continue to work towards using everything they know about a customer, in the moment, on every surface that customer touches, from email, SMS, and ads to their website and app. Showing returning customers highly personalized messages. Putting the right offer in front of them at the right time. Making every checkout easy no matter what channel they begin their journey on. Using their real-world context and their last action to decide what they see next. Then letting what happened on the site shape the next email or text.
What makes this hard is that the pieces run on separate systems. Customer data in one, the website in another, email and ads in a third. And the website, the surface customers see most, is the one CRM/lifecycle teams have the least impact on.
Personalization across all digital experiences
When I first met with Steve Maher, Monetate’s CEO, about this opportunity, we started by asking some big questions, such as “What would a platform that optimizes all digital experiences look like?”
The solution to this has three parts:
- Data that’s fast and deep. Capabilities that can make real-time “same page” decisions as customers browse the web. And capabilities that can reason about LTV, 10-year transaction histories, inventory levels, and even the weather, when making the best customer-level decisions.
- Delivery that integrates on-site along with paid and owned channels so that each customer has a single, personalized experience across all surfaces. It should all work with knowledge of a customer and their real-world context, in real time.
- An AI-enabled global delivery model. The solution needs deep human domain expertise, complemented by always-on AI agents for 24/7 guidance.
Steve and I saw that Monetate and Simon AI were building two halves of the answer. Simon AI unifies customer data where it already lives, combines it with real-world signals, and activates it across email, SMS, push, and ads. Monetate owns the moment of experience on-site and in app. Monetate’s on-site capabilities further the vision we set out with.
With the combined products, every send and every session is now shaped by everything a brand knows about its customer. That gives brands deep customer intelligence and full control of their digital experiences to optimize conversion and customer lifetime value.
Day One benefits
While realizing the full potential of the vision is still out in front of us, there are some big “Day One” benefits that we’re thrilled about:
- A new “Tier One” integration. We’ve been working hard to integrate the Monetate on-site optimization platform into Simon AI to enable fast, easy workflows, built for marketers, that drive personalization at scale on-site. Our product teams have already created an integration connecting the two platforms, so the audiences and customer signals you build in Simon AI can now drive Monetate experiences and experiments, starting today.
- Hands-on global support. We’re all hands on deck to help our customers solve problems and deploy new agentic capabilities. By bringing both teams together, we now have full global reach, a much larger team, and new investment in product development and customer success.
With our new combined capabilities, your website starts treating customers like it knows them. The audiences and signals you already built will decide what a shopper sees, so the sessions you pay for convert better. And the site will react in real time. When a shopper acts, the experience changes on the next page view, not in the next campaign.
Agentic capabilities that make campaign exploration, setup, and activation easier and more effective are already showing results at leading brands. SeatGeek achieved a 70% performance lift matching fans to thousands of events with AI agents. A leading global fashion retailer doubled engagement with weather-triggered campaigns, increasing click-through rates 106% and revenue per session 40%. And an apparel brand increased SMS conversion rates 50% with contextual personalization.
We can now bring these results to your site and your app through the Monetate products.
What’s next
The integration between Monetate products and Simon AI will continue to develop alongside new features in the coming months.
In addition, we’re rolling out our first incentive program and will share more in our conversations with customers in the coming days. Our shared philosophy is “show don’t tell”, so we will do our best to put innovation into your hands as early as possible.
Please reach out to me or your customer success contact with your questions and to begin exploring the possibilities of the combined products for your brand.
Thank you to the customers and partners who got us to this point. We can’t wait to show you what comes next.