"Service is the new storefront" has been a slogan for the better part of a decade, usually followed by a promise to turn a cost center into a profit center that never quite arrived. What changed is not the ambition. It is that the plumbing finally exists.

Recorded live at K:LDN 2026 in London, this conversation is about what becomes possible when a brand can pull customer data from any channel and hand it, in real time, to a human or an AI agent.

Phillip Jackson sits down with Kelly Thacker of Klaviyo's product marketing team. Her argument is that the prize is democratization: taking the best in-store associate, the person who knows both the products and the customer, and making that experience available on every channel and to every brand, not just the ones who can staff a great team.

Kelly is candid about the failure mode too, the dumb bot that asks a loyal VIP for an email address it should already have. The fix is an agent that knows the business and the customer, with escalation rules the brand sets and widens as trust grows. The number that makes the case is blunt: where is my order is still the most common question to any agent, human or AI, and automating it hands time back to people for the work that actually needs them.

She closes by looking further out, to a world where marketing and service stop being separate departments and brands begin building for agent-to-agent shopping, where a customer's agent transacts with a brand's.

"You could be the most loyal VIP customer, and then a chatbot asks, can you give me your email address, and you think, you should just know me." — Kelly Thacker, Product Marketing, Klaviyo [TK]

"We meet customers where they are. You build for the future, and you help them slowly get comfortable with that change." — Kelly Thacker [TK]

"A poor experience with an agent feels worse than a poor experience with a human, so the human in the loop has to be so important to this." — Phillip Jackson [TK]

"This is the moment where people will either rise to the occasion or they'll be forgotten." — Kelly Thacker [TK]

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