prompts; it actively makes decisions, solves problems, and drives outcomes. For brands navigating this shift, the implications are enormous — from transforming how customers discover products to reshaping how businesses scale personalisation.
To unpack what this all means for marketing, Martechvibe talked to Hugh Kimber, General Manager of EMEA & APAC at Bloomreach. “Customers have much higher standards for the brands they interact with, knowing that if one experience isn’t meeting their needs, they can likely find another brand with similar offerings,” says Kimber.
He shares his insights on the rise of autonomous AI, the future of search, how brands can overcome personalisation barriers, and why customer loyalty in the GCC — and beyond — will increasingly hinge on delivering deeply personal, seamless experiences.
Full interview:
What does the agentic future mean? And how will it impact brands?
We’re entering a new era of AI in which AI agents make autonomous decisions aligned with specific goals — the agentic future. Unlike traditional AI tools that require specific prompts to generate results, agentic AI can analyse situations, develop solutions, and take action without manual intervention. As a result, agents will play a critical role in automating complex workflows and tasks, allowing humans to focus on the more strategic and creative aspects of their roles. For brands, this means a massive shift in how their teams build personalised customer experiences, as well as the scale at which they can personalise.
How do you see autonomous search transform product discovery for ecommerce?
Autonomous search doesn’t just react — it thinks, anticipates, initiates conversations, and learns more with each customer engagement. It doesn’t require continuous manual fixes, instead allowing ecommerce teams to focus on the bigger picture, like what metrics will impact their business most, or how they can differentiate their customer experience. It’s also far more personal, understanding the context and intent behind a customer’s search through natural language processing and machine learning. This level of personalisation helps reduce friction in the shopping experience, increases customer satisfaction, and boosts conversion rates.
What are the barriers to personalisation, and how can brands overcome it?
The lack of a unified, real-time view of data is one of the biggest barriers to personalisation. If you want to personalise the experience for your customers, you need to understand them. Not only that — you need to understand them in the context of what you sell. Are you offering them the right sizes? Are you surfacing products that are in stock?
It’s critical that brands invest in their data infrastructure, ensuring they have the tools to gather data compliantly and in real-time. They should also ensure that, even as they have disparate data sources, they ultimately feed into a single view of data that can inform marketing campaigns, search strategies, and so on. This ensures data-driven personalisation is both thorough and consistent across channels.
ALSO READ: The Real Cost of Fragmentation and the Power of Unified Platforms
How do you see customer loyalty evolving in the GCC?
Similar to so many regions around the world, customers in the GCC are seeing a proliferation of choice that is really impacting loyalty. They have much higher standards for the brands they interact with, knowing that if one experience isn’t meeting their needs, they can likely find another brand with similar offerings. That’s why personalisation is so critical right now. Building an experience that feels unique to each customer is key to maintaining loyalty and offering value to customers who are surrounded by choice.
Tell us how you are baking AI intelligence into your products, and how it will support human resources in marketing teams.
Bloomreach integrates AI intelligence into its products through our Loomi AI, a single engine of intelligence powering each of our offerings. Particularly as it grows to power more autonomous capabilities, Loomi AI allows marketing teams to focus on strategic initiatives rather than repetitive tasks.
For instance, Loomi AI can generate insights and dashboards, create campaign copy, or build multiple variants of assets like weblayers. With their time freed up from these tasks, marketers could instead brainstorm entirely new campaign ideas, explore investments in new channels, launch more complex use cases that they didn’t have time for prior. Our AI is giving marketing teams the ability to serve as the creative and strategic leaders they were meant to be.
Kimber will take the stage in a fireside chat on how AI is changing consumer expectations at the Vibe Marketing Technology Fest in Dubai on April 24, 2025. Check out the full agenda here.
ALSO READ: Why Your Support and Success Teams Need to Merge
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