When my co-founder, Mark, and I started Monocle in 2023, the idea was simple: give D2C brands access to the same kind of AI-driven decisioning technology I helped build at Lyft and Instacart.

We began with incentives, helping brands stop over-discounting, protect margin, and use data-driven logic to determine the right offer for each customer. That product helped us earn the trust of incredible teams at high growth brands such as True Classic, Mejuri, Hulken, Underoutfit, and more.

But as we grew alongside these brands, it became clear that incentive optimization was only the beginning.

Why We're Expanding Monocle

Over the past year, the ground shifted underneath every D2C brand we work with.

Acquisition is more expensive and less predictable

CAC keeps climbing. Discovery is fragmenting. Paid channels are volatile. The brands growing sustainably are the ones who extract far more value from the customers they already have.

AI is everywhere, but most AI features under-deliver

Marketers are rightly skeptical. Too many AI features sound exciting but fail to deliver production-ready value, often adding effort and cost rather than reducing it.

Personalization has never quite met its promise

Most brands still talk to every customer the same way:

• The same winback flow, triggered at the same time
• The same post-purchase sequence, regardless of behavior
• The same welcome offer, shown to every new visitor

Even the most sophisticated lifecycle teams tell us the same thing:

“We know this isn’t good enough, but it’s too complex to personalize at scale with the tools available.”

Those conversations made something very clear: Retention needed a step-change.

What We're Launching Today: AI Journeys

AI Journeys is our biggest launch since Monocle began.

It takes everything we learned building AI-powered incentive decisioning and applies that intelligence to the entire customer lifecycle.

Our AI agents now design end-to-end journeys at the individual customer level, reasoning through thousands of data points and deciding:

• Who to engage
• When to send
• Which channel to use
• How many touches are needed
• Which creative makes the most sense
• Whether to use an incentive, and if so, how much

From email and SMS to onsite, we’ve built a system that brands are already using in production to drive meaningful revenue. Marketers tell us the biggest shift is time: less time maintaining flows, more time shaping the story, the strategy, and the experience customers actually feel.

And importantly, we added robust guardrails and the ability to use your existing content, so every customer experience stays on-brand and aligned with your standards.

This is the moment where personalization finally becomes real at scale.

How AI Journeys Work Behind the Scenes

Most retention platforms treat personalization as segment-level tweaks. We built Monocle to make decisions at the customer level. Here is how it works behind the scenes:

Easy onboarding

Connect Monocle to Shopify, your CRM, ESP, and SMS tools. Setup is plug and play. The platform trains on your real first-party data without requiring new creative or rework.

Deep customer understanding

For every subscriber, our AI reasons over thousands of behavioral and predictive signals, including:

• Purchase & browsing patterns
• Time-of-day engagement
• Product affinities
• Predicted click/unsubscribe likelihood
• Incentive sensitivity
• Past channel performance
• Category trends
• and more

AI Journeys replace static experiences

Instead of pushing everyone into the same winback or post-purchase sequence, the AI creates individualized paths. It selects the timing, cadence, channel, and message for each person based on their intent and behavior. The result is a dynamic journey that adapts in real time and outperforms traditional flows without adding work for your team.

Proving real impact

Every use case can run with holdouts so teams can clearly measure incremental revenue and understand what the AI is driving.

Where We're Headed

The way people discover and shop is changing fast. Agentic commerce is personalizing the front end of the buying experience, from search to recommendations to checkout.

Retention has to catch up.

AI Journeys is our answer: technology that feels intuitive, works reliably at scale, and helps brands get far more value from the customers they already have.

This is the next chapter for Monocle, and I couldn’t be more excited to share it with the teams we partner with and the ones we’ll meet next.