Breaking: Braze CTO Reveals Radical Engineering Overhaul for Agentic Era
New York, NY – In a move that underscores a broader industry pivot, Jon Hyman, co-founder and CTO of Braze, has disclosed that the company’s engineering organization underwent a complete transformation into an AI-first team in just a few months. The shift, detailed in an exclusive interview, prepares Braze for what Hyman calls the “agentic era” of autonomous AI agents.
“We had to fundamentally rethink how we build software,” Hyman said. “The agentic era demands systems that can reason, act, and adapt without constant human intervention.”
The announcement comes as Braze, a $4 billion customer engagement platform, celebrates nearly 15 years of engineering growth. The overhaul marks one of the fastest organizational pivots in recent tech history.
The Transformation: From Messaging to Autonomous Agents
Hyman explains that the engineering team restructured its workflows, tooling, and team composition. The focus shifted from static campaign delivery to building AI-driven agents that can personalize customer interactions in real time.
“We moved from a feature-delivery model to an intelligence-delivery model,” Hyman noted. “Every engineer now thinks about how AI can augment their outputs.”
The change involved retraining hundreds of engineers, integrating large language models into product architecture, and establishing new guardrails for autonomous decision-making. Hyman estimates the transformation consumed 70% of engineering bandwidth for a quarter.
Background: Braze’s Engineering Journey
Founded in 2011, Braze originally built a customer messaging platform for marketing automation. Over the years, its engineering team grew from a handful of developers to over 600. The company went public in 2021. Prior to this pivot, Braze had already incorporated machine learning for predictive targeting, but the agentic shift represents a more profound change.
“We had to unlearn a lot of our previous approach,” Hyman said. “The old way of configuring workflows was too rigid for agentic systems.”
The catalyst for the overhaul was the rapid maturation of AI models in 2023–2024, Hyman said. Braze leadership decided to bet big on agentic capabilities rather than incremental improvements.
What This Means for the Industry and Customers
For Braze’s customers—including brands like Disney and NBCUniversal—the transformation means new features that can autonomously optimize campaigns, predict churn, and even create marketing content. Hyman promises a more intuitive, self-learning platform.
For other engineering organizations, the message is urgent. “If you think you have a few years to figure this out, you’re wrong,” Hyman warned. “The agentic area is here, and it requires immediate cultural and technical change.”
Industry analysts see Braze’s move as a bellwether. “This signals that even established SaaS companies must embrace agentic AI at their core,” said Dr. Elena Torres, a tech transformation researcher at MIT. “Braze is proving it can be done quickly, but it’s disruptive.”
Challenges and Next Steps
Hyman acknowledges the difficulty. “We had to manage a lot of internal resistance. Some engineers were skeptical about relinquishing control to AI agents,” he said. To address this, Braze created an internal “AI ethics and safety” council and instituted new testing protocols for autonomous actions.
“The next year will be about scaling these agents while maintaining reliability and trust,” Hyman added. Braze plans to release the first wave of agentic features in Q3 2025, according to internal roadmap documents.
The company is also hiring for new roles focused on “agent orchestration” and “prompt engineering at scale.” Hyman said the engineering team will grow by another 20% over the next six months to support the shift.
For ongoing updates, visit the Braze AI Leadership section or read about the Agentic Engineering Framework that Hyman’s team developed.