# Kirsten Schlau

Kirsten Schlau is a Stitch Client Partner who works with enterprise marketing teams on customer engagement, CRM, and the use of customer data to create more personalized experiences.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/kirsten-schlau/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kirstenschlau
- LinkedIn followers: 3,363
- Topics: artificial-intelligence, agentic-commerce, crm, first-party-data, retail-media
- Based on 15 dated posts, latest 2026-09-29

## Summary

Useful for thought leadership on customer engagement, CRM, first-party data, and agentic commerce for enterprise marketing leaders.

- Best for: Enterprise CRM, martech, or data platform thought leadership webinar on agentic commerce and first-party data.
- Not for: Consumer product trial campaigns, creator-led paid content series, or short-form video for everyday shoppers.
- Check first: Confirm audience composition and results from comparable content before contacting them.

### Takeaways

- First-party data is only as valuable as the team's ability to use it.
- AI agents are becoming the buyer, and most retail media is still built for a person.
- A Stitch team built a game experience inside Braze for RaceTrac.

## Main ideas

- **First-party data is only as valuable as the team's ability to use it**: Kirsten Schlau argues that the industry's enthusiasm for first-party data hides an operational failure: many teams hold large amounts of customer data but cannot reach it in time to act. The issue is timing and cost, not technology capability. When marketers wait on tickets for audience pulls, custom queries and data science analysis, plus handoffs between teams, the moment that made the data valuable has passed. The same logic extends to AI: structured, accessible data — loyalty history, purchase records, behavioral signals — determines whether a brand appears in a machine-generated recommendation at all.
- **AI agents are becoming the buyer, and most retail media is still built for a person**: The argument is that agentic commerce has moved past prediction. If AI agents decide where to stop, what to buy and increasingly complete the purchase, then the audience a retail media strategy serves has changed, and the older funnel model no longer applies. The posts draw two consequences: data architecture must support machine-readable consumption, not just human reporting; and measurement must serve two audiences at once — advertisers seeking closed-loop return on ad spend and incrementality, and AI systems needing clean taxonomies and programmatic access. Retailers launching networks in the near term can design for this from the start; retrofitting later is harder.
- **Who owns the intelligence layer — and is the architecture owned or rented?**: An agency buying a data and identity company signals where marketing power is consolidating; it is not routine deal news. When identity resolution, data collaboration, AI agents, media activation and measurement sit inside one ecosystem, the operating model changes, and brands may lose leverage without noticing. The practical question is commercial and strategic as much as technical: where valuable customer data should live, how neutral an identity or measurement partner can be when it also influences planning and activation, and whether the brand controls its engagement architecture or rents it from a vendor.
- **Plan for people, not the calendar**: The recurring challenge to clients: annual CRM planning produces a schedule, not a strategy. Mapping quarters and locking seasonal moments feels like planning, but really decides what goes out and when. Kirsten Schlau argues that technology can now support planning around individuals rather than calendars at usable scale. The shift extends beyond CRM: when paid media, lifecycle and data teams work from one unified foundation, channel silos dissolve and data teams stop being a queue others must wait on. For live environments, the idea is even more direct: real-time signals trigger personalized moments while an event is still happening, instead of scheduled campaigns.
- **An engagement platform is a place to build experiences, not just send messages**: Kirsten Schlau repeatedly draws a line between using a customer engagement platform as a messaging channel and using it as a place to construct an experience. The claim is practical rather than philosophical: the same tooling can produce something a customer chooses to participate in, and that shift in framing is what makes the difference visible. Related to this is the description of continuous engagement, where systems learn and adapt with every interaction instead of running as a series of separate campaigns — a change that affects strategy, marketing operations, and the marketer's role, not only the stack.
- **A tension worth noticing: vendor-aligned stack advice alongside a neutrality warning**: The posts consistently advocate a specific pairing — unified data on one platform feeding activation on another — and describe it as what makes individualized marketing operationally real. They also warn brands to scrutinize the neutrality of data, identity and measurement partners when one partner influences planning, activation, optimization and reporting. Both positions can coexist, but the posts do not explicitly reconcile them: the clearest stack advocacy and strongest call for partner neutrality come from the same author. For a buying decision, ask whether the named vendors are paid partners; the posts describe tools used in a client-partner capacity but do not state a paid relationship.

## Work to read

- [Why agencies are buying the customer-data layer: Publicis and LiveRamp](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kirstenschlau_datainfrastructure-customerintelligence-crm-activity-7462602917607563264-Hs45)
- [Retail media when the buyer is an AI agent](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kirstenschlau_retailmedia-agenticcommerce-marketingstrategy-activity-7459647607246684160-y6GZ)
- [First-party data you cannot use](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kirstenschlau_we-talk-a-lot-about-first-party-data-and-activity-7463208246263042048-VfUw)
- [Planning for people, not the calendar](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kirstenschlau_stitching-brazeforge2026-activity-7509027311002767360-8wH-)
- [Building a game inside Braze: the RaceTrac campaign](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kirstenschlau_brazeforge-customerengagement-crm-activity-7510702210008309760-rtpa)

## Brand relationships

- **Stitch** (employment)
- **Braze** (disclosed_partnership)
- **Databricks** (disclosed_partnership)
- **RaceTrac** (client)

## Partnerships

Kirsten Schlau's LinkedIn posts describe their work as a Stitch Client Partner: they advise enterprise marketing teams on customer engagement, CRM, and first-party data, and name platform relationships behind that work, including Braze and Databricks. The posts also describe client campaign work, such as a game experience built in Braze for RaceTrac that took a partner award at Braze Forge. There is no published sponsorship program, paid partnership format, media kit, rate card, booking process, or confirmed inquiry route. Brands would need to approach directly to discuss availability and define the scope. Topics the posts consistently cover — agentic commerce, first-party data as infrastructure, real-time personalization, and moving CRM from campaigns to continuous engagement — could support a joint project.

## Alternatives

- Anand Chhatpar: Choose Anand Chhatpar when the webinar audience is Amazon marketplace sellers or brands whose revenue runs through Amazon, and the session should cover how agentic shopping changes marketplace advertising rather than enterprise CRM architecture. The two posts address that task directly: one describes Amazon's live agentic shopping features (Rufus for product discovery, Buy for Me for reorders, full purchase-by-agent in testing) and argues that an AI agent filters on trust signals such as return rate, review sentiment and complaint patterns instead of responding to a keyword, image, price or review the way a human shopper does. The other walks through Amazon reversing a cash-flow billing policy in nine days and reads it as a sign that the advertising business depends on seller health. Together, they offer a sponsor a concrete, contrarian angle: agentic commerce does not just change discovery; it changes what qualifies a brand to be considered at all. The platform mechanics are already live, not forecast. A webinar built around this would land with an operations or seller-side audience in a way the same argument aimed at enterprise data leaders would not.
- Jason Zollan: Choose Jason Zollan when the webinar audience is retailers and retail media network teams, and the session should cover building and monetizing a retail media business on top of commerce search and product discovery. One post reads like a state-of-the-business argument: Constructor named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Search and Product Discovery, $120 billion in ecommerce GMV flowing through the platform, 122 percent year-over-year growth in active advertisers, nearly 3,000 brands advertising, and the claim that the same platform carries its own retail media network. The other announces an inaugural retail summit in Melbourne with executive sessions on retail media, offsite discovery and changing architecture, plus an AWS fireside chat on the future of agentic commerce. For a sponsor selling retail media infrastructure, measurement or onsite ad products, this is a closer match to the buyer than a general enterprise CRM argument: the audience is the ad-network operator, and the figures are the operator's own growth metrics.
- Abhijeet Mishra: Choose Abhijeet Mishra when the webinar audience is B2B distributors, manufacturers and field-sales organizations, and the session should cover replacing fragmented systems with a unified buyer portal. The posts make a structured argument for that buyer: one uses a B2B food and beverage distribution portal as a case study, quantifies the cost of fragmentation (hours per week lost hunting for data across disconnected systems, millions in annual savings from consolidation, incremental sales from digital personalization) and lists three actions for the next quarter, including mapping data fragmentation and designing AI-first from day one. The other attacks the alcohol distribution industry's phone, email and fax ordering process, cites fewer order errors and more selling time for reps after going digital, and describes an AI agent being built into the portal to serve procurement, finance, operations, sales, dealers and support with different data needs. That is a useful angle for a sponsor selling B2B commerce or portal infrastructure: agentic AI framed through buyer personas in a distribution context, with numbers attached.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/