Klaviyo (NYSE: KVYO), best known as the CRM built for consumer brands, just picked up a major industry win. The company has been named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide AI-Enabled Marketing Platforms 2025 Vendor Assessment for Small Businesses, and a Major Player in the corresponding midsize business category.

The recognition cements Klaviyo’s reputation as one of the few platforms purpose-built for consumer brands—and not just retrofitted with AI, but architected around it.

AI Built Into the Core

Plenty of legacy marketing platforms have scrambled to bolt AI onto their existing systems, but Klaviyo’s pitch has always been different: the intelligence is native. Its Klaviyo Data Platform (KDP) processes over 2 billion events daily across 7.3 billion profiles, giving consumer brands real-time insight into customer behavior.

That data foundation supports features like Smart Send Time, which pinpoints the best moment to reach a customer, and the new MCP server, which connects AI tools directly to customer data pipelines. The result: campaigns that move faster, adapt in real time, and scale personalization beyond what manual marketers can keep up with.

As Surabhi Gupta, CTO of Klaviyo, put it:

“AI isn’t just a technology shift—it’s a business growth engine. Our vision is to make advanced AI accessible to every brand, so they can compete at the highest level.”

What IDC Saw

According to IDC’s research, Klaviyo’s strengths include:

• Omnichannel automation across email, SMS, WhatsApp, and push notifications.

• Unified data and analytics through the embedded KDP for personalization at scale.

• Tight integrations with commerce platforms like Shopify that strengthen customer engagement and retention.

• AI-driven optimization for campaign strategies and performance.

In a space where consumer expectations are rising and every click counts, IDC called out Klaviyo’s ability to deliver measurable growth by embedding AI directly into workflows.

Real-World Impact

For brands, that’s more than analyst talk. AS Beauty credited Klaviyo’s AI with helping it move “beyond guesswork” to achieve 4x year-over-year revenue growth during peak sales moments. The platform’s predictive insights and automation allowed the company to personalize at scale and act on customer data instantly.

That kind of outcome reflects what’s at stake in AI-driven marketing: not just efficiency, but competitive survival. As Roger Beharry Lall, Research Director at IDC, put it, “Brands must operate with greater speed and precision to stay ahead.”

The Bigger Picture

The IDC MarketScape evaluations matter because they signal a shift from AI hype to measurable business impact. Platforms that can operationalize AI—not just experiment with it—are likely to shape the next decade of customer engagement.

Klaviyo’s positioning as a small-business leader with midsize traction suggests it’s punching above its weight against rivals in the broader AI CRM space, from Salesforce’s Einstein to Adobe’s Sensei-powered marketing cloud. Where those incumbents lean on sprawling enterprise portfolios, Klaviyo’s focus on consumer brands—and tight commerce integrations—could be its competitive edge.

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