Today’s podcast is with Shafqat Islam, President at Optimizely, who joins me to talk about a new research report they have just published called Tested to Perfection, experimentation, personalization, privacy and all things in between, including the key things that marketers should be doing more of to better engage their customers.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – There are five types of loyalty but only two are growing – Interview with Sara Richter of SAP Emarsys – and is number 534 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: Today’s episode is sponsored by Qualtrics, ahead of X4 2025: The Experience Management Summit, which is taking place in Salt Lake City on March 18th-20th. It’s set to be an unforgettable event designed to empower you and your organization in leveraging Experience Management (XM) to enhance customer and employee satisfaction, reduce operating costs, and achieve remarkable breakthroughs. There, you will hear about some of the best customer experience programmes from industry leaders and companies, including Autodesk, Ford, USAA and Hilton. Find out more and register now at the Qualtrics website.

Here are the highlights of my chat with Shafqat:

• Two out of three marketers state that they are using AI within their experimentation approaches (testing efforts).
• Everyone thinks that experimentation is really important but only 20-30% feel like their current approach is effective.
• The biggest barriers to creating this culture of experimentation are lack of resources, time, tools or expertise.
• To really become good at experimentation, everyone in your marketing or product team should be having a testing mindset all the time.
• However, one of the biggest barriers to getting started is hypothesis generation. AI is helping with that.
• To me, testing and experimentation is everyone’s problem, and it’s just how we build a high -performing marketing team.
• Create a culture where you obsess about which tests didn’t end up working. And what did we learn?
• 70 % of marketers thought that AI will make experimentation faster and 62% thought that AI will make experimentation more accurate.
• AI is going to help enable and democratize testing for everyone.
• There’s a chance that AI could make personalization worse before it actually makes it better.
• With agentic AI, there is less risk of slop, and that’s where the real opportunity lies.
• Here’s a question: How much personalization is too much?
• One of the main takeaways that I have is that we’re still in a very ambiguous phase of AI, where it’s gimmicky, and people are playing with it. But are we seeing true ROI? Are we generating more revenue, cutting costs, and doing more with fewer people? Those are the things my CFO cares about. If we’re not doing those things, then there’s no ROI, right?
• Our number one priority is getting to that as fast as possible. I am bullish on that when it comes to AI agents, doing work on behalf of a human marketer.
• Jessica Bergman from Salesforce said the following at one of our events: It’s never before been as clear, like how important your content is and content governance and having content stored in a central source of truth, well tagged, well-governed, because that is the fuel for all of your AI models going forward. If you don’t have the content and the context stored in a certain way that’s well governed, you’re not going to have great AI.
• Jump in and experiment and learn and future proof your business by remembering some of the foundations like having a good data and content foundation, having the right
• tools and having the right culture of experimentation.
• Shafqat’s best advice: Be memorable, be interesting, be unique. So many B2B companies are so damn boring nowadays that just being memorable, being unique to me, that’s the right way to do it.
• Shafqat’s Punk CX brand: Go Daddy and the Northeast Ohio regional sewer district.

About Shafqat

Shafqat Islam is the President at Optimizely. A lifelong builder of marketing technology, he co-founded and served as CEO of Welcome (formerly NewsCred), the global leader in Enterprise Content Marketing, from 2007 to 2021. Under his leadership, Welcome pioneered the content marketing platform (CMP) category—now known as Optimizely CMP. Following Optimizely’s acquisition of Welcome in 2021, Shafqat served as General Manager and CMO before being elevated to President in 2024.

Check out their Tested to Perfection report, say Hi to them and Shafqat on X (aka Twitter in a former life) @Optimizely and @shafqatislam respectively and feel free to connect with Shafqat on LinkedIn here.

Credit: Photo by Hans Reniers on Unsplash