Airship: Building the Future of Mobile-First Cross-Channel Experiences

Powering mobile experiences for millions of users daily, Airship's CTO and CMO explain why scale and specialist expertise still matter

Traveling to the UK, Maria Robinson, CMO noted “I couldn’t have made it through the entire travel experience without my mobile device and highly intuitive experiences. My mobile boarding pass, the ability to be alerted when my flight gate changes, and knowing where I am on the journey are now tablestakes.”

Robinson, Airship’s CMO of six months, recounted this at the company’s Elevate 25 Conference in London, where speakers from Google and Forrester joined Airship clients.

“66% of the world’s traffic is now on mobile devices,” Robinson says. “It’s no longer a question of do you need a mobile strategy, but how you deliver those mobile interactions anywhere a consumer needs them. Consumers do not see brands in terms of marketing channels, they convert where they prefer to engage.”

Every software company claims to be mobile-first now. Airship’s client roster suggests they’ve been at it longer and at a bigger scale than most.

Maria Robinson, Airship CMO

The Client Base

From airlines like Air France-KLM, Southwest Airlines, British Airways, Alaska Airlines, Hawaiian Airlines and Virgin Atlantic. Beyond aviation, Ulta Beauty reports three times the conversion improvement for purchases using the platform. The BBC, France Télévisions, NBCUniversal, OneFootball, Sky News, Sky Sports and AccuWeather rely on Airship for their mobile experiences in alerting their audiences to through mission critical experiences.

“Our retail customers and media customers are very reliant on us for speed and scale,”. “As we move into the holidays and Black Friday, we are critical to powering their experiences. Ulta Beauty is driving a 3x conversion improvement lift for purchases.”

Maria Robinson, Airship, CMO

The scale requirements for media clients are demanding. “They’re often trying to message five million, ten million, 25 million people, and they want to reach them now,” Herrick says. “So we put a ton of R&D into scaling that up.”

Breaking news, sports scores, weather alerts - these need to reach millions immediately. Robinson doesn’t mince words about where Airship sits: “When you compare Airship to competitors.there is a reason why media giants chose Airship - they can count on us to deliver results at scale”

Airlines led adoption in travel and hospitality. Hotels and other travel businesses are following now. “I called upon the airline example because we represent and power so many of the world’s leading airlines, many of them here in the UK,” Robinson says.

Financial services is another growth area, security, compliance, real-time transaction alerts all require the same reliable mobile infrastructure.

What They’re Best At

Ask Herrick where Airship leads and he doesn’t hesitate. “In-app messaging, that’s the area that we’re best at. We’re years ahead of our competition.”

We’ve developed no-code app and web experiences called “scenes”. More than pop-ups - multi-screen, interactive experiences with story modes, embedded content, form collection. They can interrupt what you’re doing or sit embedded in the app or website UI. Different contexts need different approaches.

“They’re incredibly popular because they’re really effective in getting user engagement and then collecting first-party data that can then be used for future retargeting, segmentation, just learning about your customer base,” Herrick explains. “All those other channels are important, but ultimately we’re trying to drive people to these scene destinations inside of your app or in your website, because that’s where people convert.”

Mike Herrick, Airship CTO

Mike Herrick, Airship CTO

This could be a purchase, or a newsletter signup. Either way, the scenes work.

Airlines use it for everything. Meal selection a week before travel, seat upgrades, check-in reminders, boarding alerts. Live activities on lock screens that constantly update - boarding time, flight duration, gate changes.

“It really reduces traveller anxiety, because you’re not just waiting for a notification,” Herrick says. “You can constantly just glance at your phone lock screen. You don’t have to wonder.”

Robinson relates to this personally. “I couldn’t have made it through the entire travel experience without my mobile device. My mobile boarding pass, the ability to be alerted when my flight gate changes. All of those things are sort of table stakes now.”

The mobile wallet product sits in similar territory - boarding passes for airlines, loyalty cards for retailers. Lightweight to deploy, delivers value without heavy development.

RCS Finally Arrives

Airship launched full RCS support recently. They’ve actually supported it for years for one customer, in a specific region but have waited for broader adoption. Now telecoms have implemented it and Apple’s on board.

“RCS has been claimed to be the successor to SMS for 15 years,” Herrick says. “The challenge has been that it requires action from so many different telecoms.”

Verified senders solve a real problem. “In the states, I get a dozen spam SMS messages from random phone numbers,” says Mike Herrick, CTO of Airship. “But one of the great things with RCS is now you get a verified sender, and so as somebody receives a message from your brand, it has your brand identified and it’s verified.”

For brands constantly getting their names abused by scammers, this matters. “Given our clientele, their brands are getting abused by these fake phone numbers,” Robinson says. “So, it’s a simple but powerful way to really give receivers of these messages assurances that they’re real.”

RCS also does richer formats. Carousels, interactive bits, actual images. “It’s bringing all the richness of mobile and web experiences to the messaging channel,” Herrick explains.

Apple’s adoption changes things, especially in the US where iOS dominates. “It’s been a real problem, particularly for marketers and product people, when they could do something but it only works on Android or it only works on iPhone,” Herrick says.

Analyst Validation

Airship was in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Mobile Marketing Platforms for years as a leader. When Gartner retired that quadrant, they needed new positioning.

“When they retired that quadrant, it was important to also find this space where we would be able to continue our mobile expertise but also explain to the market and to the analysts where we’re going in terms of cross-channel experiences,” Robinson explains.

They’re now positioned in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs.

“Gartner is really the gold standard as it relates to tech buyers making decisions,” Robinson says. “They want to be sure, especially for an enterprise purchase at the size that we’re operating, they really need that validation from a third party.”

Being called out as a mobile specialist is deliberate. “The analysts speak to many tech buyers. They talk about the martech stack with marketers all the time, and establishing ourselves in the quadrant as a specialist, a very proud specialist in mobile, really puts us on the map,” Robinson says.

Forrester’s Wave on Cross-Channel Marketing Hubs is next in Airship’s sights, after the research firm similarly retired its evaluation on Mobile Engagement Automation solutions where Airship was a leader.

The positioning helps against bigger names. “The leaders in the space - Adobe, Salesforce, Braze - they’re sort of legacy in that way,” Robinson says. “Many of our customers and prospects say they’re always looking for a reason and an alternative to those leaders, because they want to do things differently, and Airship provides that mechanism.”

The impact is measurable. “There have been a lot more inquiries into Gartner as well as into our organisation and starting new conversations with brands that then want to understand what their peers are doing,” Robinson notes.

Both analyst firms have been long-time partners. Robinson sees them as ongoing relationships - validation that Airship is pushing boundaries with AI and mobile capabilities.

AI Agent Work

Airship is building AI agents but making them work together rather than standalone.

Herrick compares it to service-oriented architecture from years back. “It’s not unlike service-oriented architecture that became all the rage 15 years ago,” he says. “Whereas with agents, you can configure them so that they can ask each other questions.”

They have a recommendation agent - gives marketing teams ideas, flags patterns in data they might not spot. Then there’s the scene agent - creates in-app experiences from images or prompts. Herrick’s conference demo showed uploading an image, watching the agent recreate it as an Airship scene, testing and refining as it went.

The collaboration bit is where it gets interesting. “We’ll have a button in the recommendation agent UI to say, all right, create the scene,” Herrick explains. “That button will kick off a process to the scene agent. It’ll ask the recommendation agent, what are the recommendations? It will ask the brand guideline agent, what are the brand guidelines? And it will then create the scene.”

Each agent adds capabilities others can tap into. “What’s different about networks and teams of agents working together is it unlocks all these use cases that as you build each little agent, over time, that functionality accumulates,” Herrick says. “They’re really loosely coupled and intelligent that way.”

Three or four agents are live now - brand guidelines, recommendations, scenes. Herrick reckons they’ll have about 20 within two years. They’re working with Google as a beta partner on the agent framework.

Next up is accessibility, partly driven by the European Accessibility Act. “Even though it doesn’t apply to companies in America, they have consumers here, so we’re getting significant amount of enquiries about that alone,” Herrick says.

The accessibility agent will automate the right approach. “This agent is going to make it so that the marketers and product managers using Airship, we just guide them to do the right thing, do it for them, basically with AI,” he says.

They’re also going beyond standard A/B testing. “The thing that’s been the industry standard for over a decade is AB testing,” Herrick says. “And we’re going beyond that with more advanced forms of continuous multivariate and multi-arm bandit testing, and reinforcement learning.” AI agents optimise these tests, campaigns improving themselves.

“We believe that we are pushing the envelope on a lot of things like AI and the capabilities that our brands are bringing to market,” Robinson says. “So, it really helps us differentiate ourselves.”

Why Mobile Still Matters

Robinson and Herrick keep coming back to one point - consumers are mobile-first, so brands have to be too.

“Our consumers are mobile-first, and so our experiences need to be mobile-first,” Robinson says. “66% of the world’s traffic is now on mobile devices - it’s the remote control of our lives.”

“My phone has not left my side, even through this entire conference. I think about our great use cases across airlines. Just even travelling here, I couldn’t have made it through the entire travel experience without my mobile device.”

Robinson came to Airship after CMO roles at Reltio and Nitro. The opportunity made sense. “As a CMO at a data company and a CMO at a more standard technology company, there was an opportunity here to work in my space,” she explains. “Our brands were very inspiring, and the opportunity and the mission that we have around the deep mobile expertise that we bring to the market really sets us apart.”

What’s Next

Herrick’s confident about where they’re heading. “I really think it’s more of the same. I feel like we’re ahead on these really immersive experiences - we’re years ahead - and now we’re supercharging those with AI.”

Robinson sees 2025 as an important year - Gartner recognition, RCS launch, AI agents rolling out, client base growing across sectors.

The strategy is clear enough: keep the technical lead in mobile customer experiences, layer AI-powered orchestration on top, keep serving brands that need to reach millions of users reliably. The boarding pass that just works. The gate change alert. The notification that arrives at the right moment.

Airship’s been around since 2009. The challenge now isn’t proving mobile matters, that’s done. It’s showing that deep specialist expertise in mobile-first cross channel customer experience keeps delivering value as the technology matures and bigger platforms expand their mobile features. The client roster, what they’re building, and where they’re headed suggest they’re managing it.

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