Digital Fatigue Drives Brands to AI, Says Hightouch CEO

The pressure is on marketing teams today drive digital success without delivering spam.

Against a backdrop of digital saturation, where inboxes are bombarded and brand fatigue is real, that is the fundamental question that persists: What if marketing could finally feel more human again?

“Marketing that actually adds value to the consumer’s life versus just sort of, ‘Hey, here’s my product, here’s my product,’ that is what resonates,” Tejas Manohar, co-founder and co-CEO of Hightouch, said to PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster.

Webster underscored the crux of the conversation: “Our inboxes, our text inboxes, our apps are just filled with solicitations … especially now as brands are really hoping to drive more spend.”

This collective burnout, she posited, is less a technology issue and more a failure of strategic design.

Manohar agreed. Brands, in his view, are still playing by analog rules: static calendars, batch-and-blast messaging, and audience segments defined more by guesswork than by signal.

“Our belief is that traditional channels just don’t support the [human-feeling] capability that modern digital channels do,” Manohar explained.

New Marketing Mandate

For decades, brand marketing and performance marketing have lived in separate universes, and trying to bridge them has long frustrated marketing functions trying to grow their business and capture new audiences.

“You have billions of data points across all your customers, and making sense of that is not easy at all,” Manohar said. “It sounds intuitive, but it’s actually really difficult to do at the scale that brands operate today.”

Hightouch, for its own part, was founded to combat the pervasive sense of impersonal, misfired marketing by betting on artificial intelligence (AI) decisioning: a model that pairs every customer with a personalized agent capable of interpreting intent, timing and content preferences.

The goal is simple, if technically complex: marketing that works for people instead of at them, thanks to agentic AI capabilities.

“It’s like going into a bank and meeting a teller who knows you,” Manohar said. “They’re not just going to minute-one tell you about offer X and keep repeating it. But that’s what it feels like receiving marketing communications from a lot of brands today.”

A striking implication of this new model is what it means for the people doing the marketing. Far from replacing CMOs or content teams, Hightouch’s platform aims to automate the operational side of marketing, freeing up bandwidth for strategic and creative work. Ultimately, it’s the creative work marketers do that is core and irreplaceable; while the grunt work of orchestration, targeting and calendar management represent tasks that machines can own.

“Clearly their job — the CMO — and their team, the function of the marketing organization will change,” Webster noted. “This provides kind of a turbocharged way to align marketing more with the business goals of the business.”

Marketing That Thinks

AI decisioning, after all, can help collapse legacy divisions between marketing and business goals by offering both creativity and control, all the while linking every campaign to hard business metrics.

“Not only are [personalized campaigns] more effective, they retain customers better,” Manohar said. “They don’t unsubscribe as much. And when a customer opts out of your communications, your connection with them is kind of gone.”

Brands like PetSmart are already seeing results. According to Manohar, Hightouch helped drive over 20% incremental revenue in specific campaigns, including promoting grooming salon visits and loyalty offers.

“What’s really interesting is that grooming isn’t even necessarily the highest-margin thing,” he said. “But it brings customers into the store. They buy other things. And that’s the point — marketing that drives real behavior, not just clicks.

“In the future, will I be able to just ask an AI, ‘What are the common patterns that lead customers to use my subscription offering — and how do I increase that?’” Manohar added.

As generative AI tools become new channels for discovery — think ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude — the stakes for AI-native marketing platforms rise even further.

“We’re getting more and more of our site traffic and even converting traffic from the likes of ChatGPT,” Manohar said. “So our growth team is figuring out how to optimize content not just for people or search engines, but for AI and agents.”

“This is going to be a major workstream and category,” he predicted, as Webster noted, “Marketers recognize that Google isn’t what it used to be.”