Klaviyo has had a busy 12 months on the partnerships front.
Google, Shopify, Canva, and now Anthropic – each integration has added another layer to what the company describes as a connected marketing ecosystem.
But behind the announcements is a deeper CX lesson. Klaviyo believes that fragmented platforms actually move beyond being an operational headache for brands, to a quietly compounding cost that customers are already paying.
That’s certainly the view of Chano Fernandez, Co-CEO of Klaviyo, who sat down with CX Today following the company’s expanded integration with Anthropic to unpack what’s driving demand for interoperability, and why he believes the window for brands to get their house in order is narrowing faster than most realize.
The Cost Lands on the Customer, Not the Brand
Ask Fernandez what a disconnected stack actually looks like from the customer’s side, and he reaches for a scenario that will feel familiar to most consumers: a customer files a complaint, and hours later, a promotional offer lands in their inbox.
“Why are you sending me this promo when I just filed a complaint yesterday?” he said.
It’s a small example, but Fernandez’s point is structural. Klaviyo’s infrastructure processes around 2 billion data points a day across more than 8 billion profiles.
At that scale, he argues, the value of unified data is only realized if it can be actioned in real time. Routing data through a warehouse or data lake, he says, kills that entirely:
“Those are great for getting insights and evaluating data for strategies you might do later on, but they are not great for real-time actioning or decisioning.”
Interoperability is the Real Gap, Not the Data
When asked how much of the persistent distance between omnichannel ambition and omnichannel execution comes down to data versus interoperability, Fernandez is unambiguous about where the problem actually lives.
“I think it is more [about] interoperability,” he said, “because you could access data into different systems, but that would not be a really omni-channel experience. It would be potentially a separate experience, seen on separate channels.”
The consequences show up in what Klaviyo calls “flows,” intent-driven automations triggered by specific customer behaviors.
According to Fernandez, flows drive around 10 times more revenue than general, broadcast-style campaigns. But they only deliver when the underlying context is complete across every channel a customer has touched:
“What happens when you don’t have that unified data? You could have a connection on WhatsApp or on text, and another one through web chat, and another one through email, but you are not connecting all those interactions that we have with you as an ultimate single buyer.”
Agentic AI is Further Along than Most Brands Think
Klaviyo currently runs two primary agents: Composer and Customer Service.
Composor sits on the marketing side, generating campaign ideas, managing workflow setups, and flagging misconfigurations in flows.
In one example Fernandez cited, the agent identified that 300 customer profiles at an unnamed brand had quietly dropped out of all communications, correcting the issue before it compounded further.
As the name suggests, the second agent handles customer service, with some impressive results. It has resolved 96% of queries autonomously for one Klaviyo customer, and over 84% for another.
But the bigger claim Fernandez makes is about trajectory. He believes agent-to-agent commerce, where a consumer’s AI agent transacts directly with a retailer’s AI agent, will represent 20-30% of retail e-commerce within three to five years:
“I can see significant agent e-commerce in the next 12 to 18 months kind of becoming very common. It’s going really quickly.”
The implication for brands appears to be that retailers that don’t open their infrastructure to agent-driven discovery risk losing not customers in the traditional sense, but the agents acting on their behalf. The channel simply won’t be accessible.
The Tolerance Gap is Already Closing
On where customer expectations actually sit today, Fernandez is candid, explaining that the frustrations consumers currently absorb won’t stay absorbed for long.
“Right now those frustrations are a little bit more accepted,” he said, “but as there are brands that are going to do them better and better, having more interoperability, more omni-channel, more unifying on a real-time basis, we all, as consumers, are going to differentiate between one and the others, and have less acceptance for the ones that don’t hit the bar.”
He compares the situation to two restaurants offering similar prices, where one is delivering significantly better food. Over time, the worse one loses the table
Customer experience, he argues, follows the same logic, and the brands raising the bar are already redefining what acceptable looks like for everyone else.
For Klaviyo, that’s both the pitch and the pressure. With 350-plus pre-built integrations and an agentic infrastructure it’s been building toward for some time, the company is betting that brands which unify fastest will pull clear, and that those sitting on disconnected stacks will find the gap considerably harder to close.
