Klaviyo has spent years telling customers "we're only 1% done." At K:BOS 2026, the company's flagship conference, that message was reinforced by a letter: A, for autonomous, agentic, and anywhere. Over two days, Klaviyo speakers laid out a vision where marketing teams access their data, build campaigns, and personalize customer journeys without being tied to a single login or interface.
Here is what Barrel took away from K:BOS 2026, and what it means for CPG brands building their digital ecosystem on Shopify.
The most concrete data point from K:BOS 2026 is that orders originating from AI search are up 13x YoY. What makes this especially relevant for CPG brands is that purchases in this vertical are often repeat, habitual, and comparison-heavy, which is the kind of decision AI assistants are asked to help with. A shopper asking an AI tool for a protein powder or skincare recommendation is having the kind of conversation that used to happen through a search engine and ten blue links. Now, one AI-generated answer can shape the outcome.
As AI search and shopping tools integrate more deeply into Shopify and the broader web, fewer customers are landing on a product detail page as their first stop. Some are asking an AI assistant for a recommendation and buying directly from that conversation. Others are comparing products across surfaces before your site is even part of the equation.
Every one of those skipped visits is also skipped data. This makes the other moments where customers do share information with you more valuable. Zero-party data, meaning information customers intentionally share with a brand through quizzes, preference centers, and opt-in forms, gives brands a way to keep learning about a customer as the traditional browsing path gets shorter or disappears entirely. Brands need to be more deliberate about building and placing these collection points elsewhere in the journey.
While discovery is shifting across the industry, personalization remains the differentiator for brands. Klaviyo is leaning into onsite personalization through Customer Hub, which pushes customer data directly to the site to shape unique journeys for each visitor. Rather than treating email, SMS, and onsite experience as separate channels with separate data, Customer Hub connects them so a customer's preferences and history follow them everywhere they show up.
This lines up with how we think about personalization at Barrel. A loyalist, a new subscriber, a window shopper, and a churn risk are all in fundamentally different relationships with your brand, and each one needs a different journey, a different tone, and a different offer when they land on the site. A few examples of what this looks like in practice:
For CPG brands managing repeat purchase cycles, subscriptions, and highly specific customer segments, this kind of connected personalization is what turns a one-time buyer into a retained customer.
Klaviyo's biggest platform announcement at K:BOS 2026 is that it is going headless: brands can now access their Klaviyo data and put a wide range of Klaviyo's capabilities to work directly from Claude, ChatGPT, or a custom-built agent. A team could ask an AI tool to summarize flow performance, spot an audience whose behavior is shifting, or draft a campaign brief based on recent results, then approve the supported action from wherever they are already working.
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Access is scoped, not unlimited. What an agent can see or do depends on the connection type, the user's role, and which permissions a brand grants, and Klaviyo recommends starting any new connection in read-only mode. For CPG brands running lean marketing teams, this allows data and execution to remain within the tools a team is already working with.
Composer, Klaviyo's AI marketing agent, is where a lot of this comes together. Composer can now run recurring tasks in the background, audit flows for gaps and overlapping triggers, and turn a plain-language request into a draft campaign, complete with audience, messaging, and timing, that a person reviews and approves before it goes live. Klaviyo also introduced plain-language SQL inside Composer and its agent connections, so a team can ask a data question in plain language and see the underlying query behind the answer, a meaningful shift for brands without a dedicated analyst on staff.
For brands, this means less time spent manually building inside a single tool and more time on strategic judgment. It also allows lean teams to move faster, reading, writing, and going live from anywhere.
Klaviyo made the case that its greatest value comes from using Customer Agent, Customer Hub, and Personalization (formerly Marketing Analytics) together. Customer Agent supports and sells using a brand's own data. Customer Hub connects that data to the site experience. Personalization applies it across every channel a customer touches. Used together, they create a customer journey where every interaction, from a support ticket to a browsing session to an email open, informs the next one.
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Too many CPG brands still treat lifecycle marketing, onsite personalization, and customer service as separate workstreams. K:BOS 2026 reinforced what we already believe: leading brands build connected customer journeys by breaking out of these silos.
Barrel is the leading CPG agency for digital ecosystems, and we think about a customer's relationship with a brand as one continuous experience across channels. We're proud to partner with Klaviyo as we build some of the most ambitious customer journey experiences in CPG, and K:BOS 2026 only reinforced that this is the direction the entire category is heading.
If you want to talk through what a connected customer journey could look like for your brand, get in touch.
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