148: Stephen Stouffer: Understanding AI's Role in Customer Journeys and Messaging

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Stephen Stouffer, Director of Automation Solutions at Tray.ai and the first ever returning guest. We had Stephen on earlier in the year in episode 112 where we unpacked the practical wonders of combining AI tools with iPaaS solutions. 

Summary: AI can transform your marketing without overwhelming you. Start with one use case. Watch the results, and go from there. You don’t need to master data science to add AI value, but you need to be willing to experiment, keep what works, and let the tech do the heavy lifting. 

Customer Journey Mapping Essentials

Customer journey mapping, as Stephen puts it, is best approached as a clear, structured framework. For marketers, this often starts by examining the visitor's first few seconds on a website. Stephen’s “three, five, seven rule” is a useful guide: three seconds to capture attention, five to build engagement, and seven to prompt action. Reviewing homepage or landing page performance through this lens keeps the focus on essentials. Are calls-to-action (CTAs) clear and accessible? Does the page guide users toward the intended outcome effectively?

Stephen further notes the importance of every element “above the fold.” Content here needs to be concise, visually appealing, and should naturally lead users to the next step. A well-placed CTA, such as a prominent button, encourages forward motion, while a hidden or confusing one can derail the journey. Each interaction should be straightforward and intuitive.

Beyond landing pages, Stephen highlights the journey before a visitor even arrives. Campaign managers, for instance, should ensure that ad copy and visuals align with the landing page, creating a smooth transition from ad to action. Consistency here reduces friction and keeps the experience cohesive.

For advanced mapping, Stephen recommends storyboarding different customer personas and their digital pathways. By tuning each stage to fit these profiles, marketers can craft a journey that feels relevant and trustworthy, engaging each segment from the very first interaction.

Key takeaway: Use the "three, five, seven rule" to evaluate each customer touchpoint on your homepage or landing pages. This approach helps ensure your content captures attention, fosters engagement, and prompts action—all within a few seconds.

AI’s Role in Automating Personalized Emails

Stephen recently demonstrated how AI automates personalized emails with just a first name, last name, and email. AI uses data from sources like LinkedIn, company details, and job history to craft messages that feel genuinely tailored to each recipient, far beyond typical generic responses.

This level of automation doesn't just boost engagement; it saves significant time. Instead of setting up complex variable fields or spending 15-20 minutes per email on manual research, AI handles it all in seconds. Stephen notes that marketing teams can skip intricate field configurations, while sales teams gain back valuable time to focus on high-impact tasks.

AI also serves as a replacement for traditional enrichment tools, pulling in dynamic contact details without third-party data providers. For sales, it means delivering relevant, personalized content effortlessly. AI does the heavy lifting, creating an email that feels custom-built for the recipient—no manual assembly required.

Key takeaway: AI enables efficient, data-rich personalization for customer outreach, saving marketing and sales teams time and resources while boosting the quality of each touchpoint.

Automating Personalized Outreach with AI Agents

AI agents are redefining how teams approach personalized outreach, offering new ways to automate highly customized interactions. Stephen explains how Tray.ai leverages a powerful combination of APIs—OpenAI, Google, LinkedIn, and more—to build out complex automation processes directly within its platform. Each AI agent is designed to use the best tool for the task at hand. Given the right context and instructions, these agents can gather relevant data from press releases, Crunchbase, LinkedIn profiles, blog posts, and other sources to craft an email that feels genuinely tailored.

Imagine a marketing email generated entirely by an AI agent. With the recipient’s email, role, and other contextual clues, the AI might produce a message like, “Hey, congratulations on your recent speaking slot at AntiCon in London. Hope you had a safe journey back!” This level of personalization would usually require about 15 minutes of research by a BDR or ISR. Now, it can be fully automated, freeing up sales and marketing teams to focus on strategy and high-priority tasks rather than time-consuming data gathering and crafting.

Stephen points out that the true power of AI agents comes from implementing them in real, tangible ways. For instance, rather than abstract promises of efficiency, Tray.ai demonstrates AI’s impact with practical use cases like this automated email personalization, which resonates more directly with the people using it. By creating a functional demo that allows teams to see this technology in action, Tray.ai bridges the gap between AI's potential and its practical application.

For anyone curious to test it out, Stephen offers a live demo of the personalized email automation. This hands-on approach helps users understand the realistic possibilities AI agents bring to customer engagement and outreach, transforming the process from concept to actionable, impactful workflows.

Key takeaway: AI agents streamline personalized outreach, combining data sources and automation tools to generate highly customized emails without manual research. By automating these tasks, teams can focus on high-impact activities while still delivering meaningful, individualized interactions.

Challenges in Implementing AI-Driven Customer Journey Mapping

Implementing AI-driven customer journey mapping and personalization comes with its share of challenges. Stephen highlights three primary obstacles teams face: complexity, connectivity and compliance.

1. The technology’s complexity. Even technical professionals sometimes struggle to understand the nuts and bolts of AI integrations, making it difficult for organizations to determine how to effectively deploy these tools. The ambiguity around building and customizing AI solutions internally often becomes a barrier to adoption.
2. The challenge of data connectivity. For AI agents to deliver relevant outputs, they need access to comprehensive data across systems. Whether it’s a CRM, sales records, or product usage data, these inputs provide the context for AI to make useful recommendations. While crafting a prompt might sound straightforward, gathering and linking all the necessary data to inform that prompt is anything but simple. Stephen explains that AI can only be as effective as the information it’s fed, making seamless data integration a top priority for effective personalization.
3. Perhaps most daunting, the challenge is compliance. When feeding sensitive data into large language models, teams must navigate a maze of security requirements like SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR compliance. Many organizations hesitate to dive into AI because of the fear of regulatory risks. Legal teams often step in, concerned abo...