AWS for Industries

How AI Is Reshaping Retail Marketing Personalization

New research from Coresight Research reveals a five-pillar framework for AI-powered personalization, and why brands that act now will lead the future of customer engagement.

Consumers don’t have an attention problem. They have a relevance expectation. Across email, social, streaming, and even rideshare apps, they encounter thousands of brand messages a week, but few earn their attention. The brands that break through deliver personalized experiences that address the needs customers recognize — and surface the ones they might not have discovered on their own.

A new report from Coresight Research examines how generative and agentic AI are transforming what’s possible in marketing personalization at scale. The research highlights how Cloudinary, powered by AWS, is helping retailers solve some of their most pressing personalization challenges: delivering the right visual content, to the right customer, at the right moment, across every channel.

Five Pillars of AI-Powered Personalization

The research identifies five interconnected capabilities that together form a modern personalization operating model:

  1. Unified Customer Intelligence: Data from CRM, mobile, in-store, and loyalty programs merge into a single consumer profile, powering sharper segmentation and predictive insights.
  2. Next-Best Action: AI determines the optimal offer, channel, and timing to maximize engagement, conversion, and lifetime value.
  3. Hyper-Personalized Content: Generative AI creates and optimizes personalized creative assets, product recommendations, and dynamic digital experiences at machine speed.
  4. Real-Time Orchestration: AI agents operate continuously, responding to customer behavior, location, inventory, and context in the moment that matters.
  5. Continuous Relationship Management: AI adapts communications as customer needs and life stages evolve, predicting opportunities for upselling, cross-selling, and retention.

Cloudinary + AWS: Turning Insights into Visual Experiences

Retailers know what their customers want. The challenge is turning that intelligence into personalized visual content that performs at scale. Cloudinary’s visual content intelligence and delivery platform, powered by AWS cloud infrastructure, bridges that gap. Using sub-millisecond latencies and high throughput from AWS, Cloudinary enables brands to manage, optimize, and deliver personalized images and video globally. From generating thousands of image variants in minutes to ensuring fast load times across devices and channels, the solution turns AI-driven insights into experiences customers actually see and act on.

The Opportunity

Coresight Research sizes the global retail marketing technology (MarTech) market at $54.7 billion in 2026, growing at a 12.2% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) through 2030. Retailers investing in AI-powered personalization today are positioning themselves to capture outsized value as these capabilities compound.

Real-World Impact

From luxury fashion to mass-market retail, brands are already seeing results: faster content production, higher conversion rates, improved customer satisfaction, and reduced churn. The report features case studies from retailers like Marks & Spencer, Zalando (which saved 5-7 days by generating 1,800 image variants in minutes), and Mattel (which achieved 80% faster load times, tripling its activation rate).

Learn More

Read the full report: How AI Is Reshaping Retail Marketing Personalization

Cloudinary and AWS Sponsor Coresight Conference

Cloudinary and AWS are partnering with Coresight for an executive forum on how digital leaders are delivering transformative visual experiences at scale.

The forum features our customer, Hejar Oncel, CIO at Follett, and Bridget Roman, Sr. Director, Product Marketing at Cloudinary. They will discuss their shared insights on the topic: The Next Era of Personalization: How Follett Is Reimagining Visual Experiences With AI.

Interested in attending? Register here

This research was produced by Coresight Research.

Austin Willis

Austin Willis

Austin Willis leads Analyst Relations globally for the Retail and Consumer Goods industry at AWS. Based in Texas, he partners with leading industry analysts to shape and amplify AWS's retail narrative and go-to-market strategy. With a background in technology strategy and analyst engagement, Austin is passionate about connecting AWS innovation with the insights that help retailers and consumer brands accelerate their cloud and AI journeys.