Braze has announced the winners of its 2026 Torchie Awards, highlighting customer engagement programs that combine AI decisioning, personalization, creative execution and modern data infrastructure with measurable business outcomes.

The winners were announced at Forge 2026 in Las Vegas, where Braze is positioning AI-powered customer engagement as a major focus for marketers. The company's official Forge agenda includes sessions on AI decisioning, agentic marketing workflows, personalization and data-driven growth.

Rather than focusing solely on campaign creativity, this year's awards provide examples of how marketing organizations are applying technology to operational problems, from lifecycle optimization and loyalty growth to emergency communications and fragmented martech stacks.

AI Decisioning Moves From Experimentation to Execution

Compare the Market received the AI in Action Award after deploying BrazeAI Decisioning Studio for car insurance renewals in 57 days.

According to Braze, the program coordinated six customer-level decisions across more than 195 content modules, generating more than 1 million personalized experiences for a 34-million-person customer base. The company reported a 9.07% conversion increase against business as usual, later reaching 17%, while CRM's revenue contribution increased 55% over nine months despite 25% fewer sends.

The example illustrates a broader change in lifecycle marketing: AI is increasingly being applied to determine which message, offer or experience a customer should receive rather than simply generating marketing content.

Braze's Forge program separately features Compare the Market's migration from legacy CRM toward AI-driven engagement, including changes to its data foundation, lifecycle journeys and operating model.

Creativity Becomes a Data and Engagement Strategy

AB InBev's SAB/Brahma campaign with Zé Delivery won Campaign of the Year after connecting purchases with Brazilian football fandom. The campaign generated more than R21 million in investment for customers' selected football clubs and more than R30 million in incremental revenue, according to Braze.

Wendy's received Creative Excellence recognition for its Meal of Misfortune activation tied to Netflix's Wednesday. The experience extended into customer engagement channels and an interactive in-app tarot experience, producing 1.1 million new loyalty accounts, seven million tarot interactions and 311,000 incremental loyalty purchasers.

These examples point toward a more integrated definition of campaign performance, where creative concepts are connected directly to identity, loyalty, personalization and measurable customer behavior.

Customer Engagement Expands Beyond Marketing

Wealthsimple was named Collaborative Team of the Year for its Monthly Millionaire experience, which brought marketing and engineering teams together and attracted more than one million participants during its first month.

The Braze for Impact Award went to Ridery for an earthquake alert system developed in Venezuela. Connected to USGS seismic data, the system was built in less than 24 hours and designed to send location-specific alerts to customers in affected cities. Braze says it has since become permanent infrastructure for future earthquakes of magnitude 5.0 or greater.

The latter example is particularly significant for enterprise customer-engagement architecture because it demonstrates that messaging infrastructure can support operational and public-safety use cases alongside conventional marketing.

Data Infrastructure Becomes Part of the Engagement Stack

The partner awards also highlight the infrastructure underneath modern engagement programs.

Databricks was named Technology Partner of the Year following a zero-copy data-sharing integration developed with Braze. The companies reported more than 185 shared customers.

CACI and Legal & General won Transformation Partner of the Year for a customer engagement engine combining Snowflake, Tealium, Optimizely CMS and Braze. Braze reported increases in registrations and logins, meaningful customer actions and transfer completion rates following the transformation.

The 2026 Torchies therefore reflect an increasingly connected MarTech architecture: customer data, decisioning, content, orchestration and analytics are converging rather than operating as isolated systems.

Braze says the 2026 program received more than 230 submissions across 12 categories. The award program itself includes eight customer categories and four partner categories.

Market Landscape

Customer engagement platforms are increasingly competing on their ability to combine real-time customer data, AI decisioning, orchestration and experimentation. Braze's Forge agenda reflects that shift, with dedicated programming around agentic marketing workflows and AI-powered engagement.

For enterprise marketing teams, the practical implication is that AI adoption is becoming less about isolated content-generation tools and more about embedding decisioning and automation into existing customer journeys.

Strategic Outlook

The 2026 Torchie winners illustrate several directions shaping enterprise customer engagement: AI-assisted decisioning, personalized lifecycle orchestration, creative experiences tied to loyalty data, cross-functional marketing and engineering teams, and shared data infrastructure.

The common architectural thread is integration. As customer engagement platforms increasingly connect data, AI and execution, the competitive question is shifting from whether brands use AI to how effectively they can connect AI-driven decisions with customer context, experimentation and measurable outcomes.

Top Insights

• Braze's 2026 winners demonstrate how AI decisioning is moving beyond experimentation into personalized lifecycle marketing and measurable conversion programs.
• Compare the Market's implementation shows how AI can coordinate large numbers of customer-level decisions across content, journeys and audiences.
• Wendy's and AB InBev demonstrate how creative customer experiences increasingly depend on loyalty, behavioral data and engagement infrastructure.
• Ridery's earthquake-alert system shows how real-time engagement platforms can support operational communications beyond conventional marketing campaigns.
• Databricks and CACI highlight the growing importance of data infrastructure and technology integration behind modern customer engagement.

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