Klaviyo Just Launched AI That Writes Your Whole Email Campaign
Klaviyo's Spring 2026 update introduced three features that change how Shopify merchants handle email and SMS marketing. AI Composer writes full email campaigns from a single prompt. Customer Agent now responds to customer questions autonomously across email, WhatsApp, and WooCommerce. And RCS business messaging is generally available, replacing basic SMS with rich media experiences.
Most Shopify merchants are still writing every email manually, responding to every customer inquiry themselves, and sending plain text SMS that get ignored. These updates do not replace your marketing strategy. They eliminate the repetitive execution work so your team can focus on the decisions that actually drive revenue.
AI Composer Writes Full Campaigns From a Single Prompt
Klaviyo's AI Composer takes a text prompt and generates a complete email campaign including subject line, preview text, body copy, layout, and call-to-action. You describe what you want, such as "write a campaign announcing our spring collection with a 20% discount for VIP customers," and Composer produces a ready-to-send email.
The output is not a rough draft that needs heavy editing. Composer generates production-quality campaigns based on your brand's existing content, tone, and customer data. It pulls from your product catalog, past campaign performance, and customer segments to create emails that feel consistent with what your audience already receives from you.
Where this saves the most time is in the campaigns that used to take hours but follow predictable patterns. Product launches, seasonal promotions, restocking announcements, and flash sales all follow similar structures. Composer handles these in seconds, freeing your team to focus on the campaigns that require genuine creative thinking, like brand storytelling, editorial content, and strategic positioning.
The practical workflow is straightforward. Open Klaviyo, start a new campaign, enter your prompt, review the output, make any adjustments, and send. For merchants who were spending 3-4 hours per campaign on copywriting and design, Composer reduces that to 15-20 minutes of review and refinement.
One important distinction: Composer is a drafting tool, not a replacement for judgment. It does not know that your best customer segment responds better to urgency-driven copy while your browse-abandonment audience prefers educational content. You still need to choose the right prompt, review the output for accuracy, and ensure the campaign aligns with your current marketing goals. The AI handles execution. Strategy remains yours.
Customer Agent Now Handles Email, WhatsApp, and WooCommerce
Klaviyo expanded Customer Agent from its initial SMS-only capability to cover email and WhatsApp responses. The agent also now works with WooCommerce stores alongside Shopify, broadening its reach across platforms.
Customer Agent autonomously responds to common customer inquiries without human intervention. When a customer emails asking about order status, shipping timelines, return policies, or product availability, the agent pulls data from your Shopify store and responds immediately with accurate, personalized answers.
The types of questions it handles well are the ones that eat the most support time. "Where is my order?" accounts for a significant percentage of customer service inquiries for most ecommerce brands. "Can I return this?" and "Do you have this in a different size?" are close behind. Customer Agent resolves these instantly using your actual order data, inventory levels, and store policies.
What it does not handle, and should not, are complex situations requiring empathy, judgment, or escalation. A customer complaining about a damaged product needs a human who can evaluate the situation and make it right. A wholesale inquiry about custom pricing needs someone who understands the relationship. Customer Agent is designed to route these to your team rather than attempt a response it cannot get right.
The WhatsApp expansion is particularly relevant for Shopify merchants selling internationally. WhatsApp has over 2 billion users globally and is the primary messaging platform in much of Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Customer Agent on WhatsApp means international customers get instant support in the channel they already use, without your team needing to staff WhatsApp support around the clock.
For merchants running their store on Shopify with Klaviyo flows already set up, enabling Customer Agent is an extension of the automation you have in place. Your flows handle proactive outreach like welcome sequences, abandoned cart reminders, and post-purchase follow-ups. Customer Agent handles reactive responses when customers reach out with questions.
RCS Business Messaging Replaces Basic SMS
Rich Communication Services messaging is now generally available in Klaviyo. RCS replaces the plain text limitations of traditional SMS with rich media capabilities including high-resolution images, interactive buttons, carousels, and branded sender profiles with your logo and business name.
The difference for customers is immediate. Instead of receiving a plain text message with a shortened URL that looks like spam, they receive a branded message with your company logo, product images they can swipe through, and buttons they can tap to shop directly. The experience is closer to an in-app notification than a text message.
RCS messages deliver higher engagement than SMS because they look trustworthy and provide more information without requiring the customer to click through to your site. Early data across ecommerce shows RCS achieving significantly higher read rates and click-through rates compared to standard SMS.
The limitation is device coverage. RCS works natively on Android devices and is expanding to iOS through Apple's adoption of the RCS standard. For Shopify merchants with a primarily US audience, the Android user base is large enough to make RCS worthwhile alongside your existing SMS campaigns. You do not need to choose between RCS and SMS. Klaviyo sends RCS to supported devices and falls back to SMS for the rest.
Setting up RCS in Klaviyo requires brand verification and approval, which takes a few days. Once verified, you create RCS messages using the same flow and campaign builder you use for email and SMS. The creative options are richer, so budget time for creating image carousels and designing interactive elements that take advantage of the format.
What This Means for Your Shopify Store's Email and SMS Revenue
Email and SMS marketing typically drives 30-40% of total revenue for well-optimized Shopify stores. These Klaviyo updates affect all three components of that revenue: campaign creation speed, customer support efficiency, and message engagement rates.
Campaign velocity increases without adding headcount. AI Composer means one marketer can produce the output of two or three. A merchant who was sending two campaigns per week because that was all they had time to create can now send four or five with the same time investment. More campaigns targeting more segments means more revenue without proportional cost increase.
Support costs decrease while response quality improves. Customer Agent handling routine inquiries means your support team focuses on high-value interactions that actually need human judgment. Response times for common questions drop from hours to seconds. Customer satisfaction improves because nobody likes waiting 24 hours to find out where their package is.
SMS becomes a richer channel. RCS transforms SMS from a notification channel into a shopping channel. Customers can browse products, view images, and tap to purchase directly from the message. This expands what SMS can do for your revenue beyond the basic "here is a discount code" messages that most merchants send.
The combined effect is that email and SMS marketing becomes more productive per hour of effort invested. You send more campaigns, respond to customers faster, and deliver richer messages, all with the same team size. For growing Shopify stores where the founder is still handling marketing, these tools are the difference between email being a part-time afterthought and a consistent revenue driver.
How to Set Up Each Feature
AI Composer
Open any new campaign in Klaviyo and look for the AI Composer option in the content editor. Enter a descriptive prompt that includes the campaign goal, target audience, key offer or message, and any specific products to feature. Review the generated output, adjust tone or details as needed, and preview before sending. Start with your next promotional campaign to test the output quality against your manual campaigns.
Customer Agent
Navigate to Klaviyo's Customer Agent settings and enable it for your desired channels: email, SMS, or WhatsApp. Configure which types of inquiries the agent should handle automatically versus route to your team. Connect your Shopify store data so the agent can access order status, inventory, and policy information. Test with a few sample inquiries before going fully live. Monitor the first week of responses to ensure accuracy and adjust routing rules as needed.
RCS Messaging
In Klaviyo's SMS settings, apply for RCS brand verification by submitting your business details, logo, and brand colors. Approval typically takes a few days. Once verified, create RCS templates with images, carousels, and interactive buttons. Set up your flows and campaigns to send RCS to supported devices with SMS fallback for unsupported ones. Test on an Android device to verify the rich media renders correctly before launching to your full list.
When AI Marketing Tools Help and When They Hurt
These tools are powerful but they are not a substitute for marketing fundamentals. AI Composer cannot fix a bad offer. Customer Agent cannot save a terrible product experience. RCS cannot make customers care about a brand they do not trust.
Use AI Composer for campaigns where the format is proven and the variable is speed, such as promotions, product announcements, and seasonal content. Keep writing manually for brand-defining campaigns, sensitive communications, and anything that requires deep customer empathy.
Use Customer Agent for high-volume, data-retrievable inquiries where the answer exists in your system. Keep humans on complex complaints, relationship-building conversations, and any interaction where getting it wrong costs you a customer.
Use RCS for visually-driven messages where the product sells through imagery, such as new arrivals, lookbooks, and curated collections. Keep standard SMS for time-sensitive alerts where simplicity and speed matter more than rich media.
The merchants who get the most from these tools are the ones who understand what AI is good at and what it is not, then deploy it accordingly rather than either ignoring it or over-relying on it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Klaviyo AI Composer free or does it cost extra?
AI Composer is included in Klaviyo's existing plans at no additional charge. You access it through the standard campaign builder. The feature uses your existing Klaviyo subscription and does not require a separate AI add-on or upgrade.
Can Customer Agent handle questions about custom or made-to-order products?
Customer Agent works best with data-retrievable inquiries like order status, shipping timelines, and standard product availability. For custom products, made-to-order items, or questions requiring specialized knowledge, configure the agent to route these to your support team rather than attempting an automated response.
Does RCS work on iPhones?
Apple has adopted the RCS standard and is rolling out support on iOS. Coverage is expanding but not yet universal across all iPhone models and carriers. Klaviyo automatically falls back to standard SMS for devices that do not support RCS, so you do not lose reach by enabling it. You simply get a better experience on supported devices.
How does AI Composer compare to writing emails manually?
Composer produces campaigns in seconds that would take 1-3 hours to write and design manually. The output quality is strong for promotional and transactional campaigns. Where manual writing still wins is in brand voice consistency for unique campaigns, nuanced storytelling, and communications that require deep audience understanding. Most merchants find the best approach is using Composer for 60-70% of campaigns and writing the rest manually.
Will Customer Agent replace my support team?
No. Customer Agent handles routine, data-retrievable inquiries that consume support time without requiring judgment. Complex issues, complaints, and relationship-building conversations still need humans. The realistic outcome is that your support team handles fewer repetitive questions and spends more time on interactions that actually need their expertise and empathy.
Want help setting up Klaviyo's AI features for your Shopify store? At ExactWhy, we build complete Klaviyo automation systems including AI Composer workflows, Customer Agent configuration, and RCS messaging setup. We integrate everything with your Shopify store so email and SMS become your most profitable and lowest-effort revenue channel. Get in touch and we will audit your current setup and show you what these tools can do for your specific store.