If you lead product, lifecycle, or growth, you recognize the shift: the era of "batch-and-blast" is ending. Customers are moving past generic outreach; they expect brands to engage with them, not just market at them. The crucial place where this relationship is built or broken is simply: the mobile messaging inbox.
That's why the combination of AI and RCS (Rich Communication Services) is driving a major change in engagement. RCS transforms basic SMS into a channel for rich, interactive, branded experiences that live in the native messaging app. AI provides the essential context, timing, and intelligence to make those experiences feel genuinely personal and helpful, moving past scripted, robotic interactions.
1. The conversation itself is the product
For years, the standard playbook relied on static campaigns: calendar creation, segment definition, and superficial measurement. That model, built on cheaper attention, is losing effectiveness.
Today, customer attention is focused on their phones, and they expect two-way, real-time conversations. They evaluate your brand not by its best campaign, but by the quality of the last message they received when it was needed.
In this environment, the conversation itself becomes your core value proposition: Did you save them time? Did you remember their preferences? Was the interaction helpful? RCS is engineered for this reality, turning messages into functional, beautiful micro-experiences:
- Rich cards and carousels provide immediate context and action, replacing bare links.
- Verified branded senders instill instant trust, solving the issue of unknown short codes.
- Quick-reply buttons simplify complex decisions into one tap.
Integrating AI shifts the strategic focus from "What's our calendar?" to "What is the next best conversation we can have with this specific person, right now?"
2. Moving beyond blasts: Designing living conversation threads
The traditional campaign model is cyclical and lacks memory: a message is sent, the transaction ends, and the thread is forgotten. The customer starts every new interaction from scratch.
With RCS, the industry adopts a thread-first paradigm. This creates a single, persistent conversation where every stage - onboarding, promotions, support, and loyalty - coexists. This familiarity establishes trust, as the customer recognizes, "This is the reliable place to talk with this brand."
This shift requires designing for continuous journeys. Instead of planning "What's our next blast?", the focus moves to What ongoing journey does this conversation support?
- Is it reducing friction points, such as comparing options or finalizing checkout?
- Is it aligned with a lifecycle stage, like activation or smart replenishment?
RCS allows you to build these moments into a cohesive, on-brand thread, instead of scattering updates across disjointed SMS and email.
How AI collaborates within the thread
AI transforms that persistent thread from an archive into a living, responsive system. It functions as the intelligence partner:
- It interprets specific behavioral signals from your product (what a user did or didn't do).
- It applies logic to decide whether to reach out or, intelligently, hold back.
- It dynamically adjusts conversation flows based on real-time customer choices.
Your team moves beyond pre-scheduling rigid, "set in stone" campaigns. Instead, you define the strategic rules, boundaries, and goals - and use AI to orchestrate the most effective individual conversations.
A practical AI + RCS playbook for growth leaders
If you’re leading product, growth, or lifecycle, the path to adoption should start with one focused, high-impact initiative.
Step 1: Isolate one high-value journey
- Strategic Candidates: Onboarding, Cart/Browse Recovery, or Post-Purchase Care.
- Criteria: Select a journey with strong volume, clear business impact, and one currently slowed down by fragmented channels.
Step 2: Architect the RCS conversation flow
- Define the trigger event, the core steps, the decision points, and the success metric.
- Map the RCS features to the flow: Where can a rich card reduce friction? Where can a quick reply simplify a key decision?
Step 3: Layer in AI collaboratively
Start small to validate the intelligence:
- Use AI to suggest on-brand copy for your flows.
- Employ AI to rank the audience, identifying the cohort most likely to benefit from the conversation today.
- Use AI to dynamically recommend content or products inside the rich RCS flow.
Once results are proven, expand to full AI-driven decisioning and real-time path tailoring.
Step 4: Measure outcomes, not just volume
The metric must reflect the customer's journey and business value. Define metrics such as:
- Activation rate within seven days.
- Incremental revenue per conversation.
- Reduction in support tickets for the journey.
- Value per Conversation (VPC) - a metric for the flow's sustained economic impact.
Your goal is to prove that intelligent, collaborative messaging drives superior, measurable business outcomes.
3. AI-Powered hyper-personalization: From static segments to behavioral signals
Today, genuine personalization is often limited to inserting a first name and targeting a broad segment, which often fails to reflect the customer's actual state.
RCS provides a powerful way to capture richer behavioral signals directly within the messaging interface:
- Which product tiles were tapped in a carousel?
- Which quick-reply option was chosen ("I'm interested," "Not relevant")?
- How often is the thread re-opened, signaling intent?
The integration of AI leverages this precise data, enabling a modern engagement brain to move efficiently from large segments - to real-time signals - to precise, actionable decisions.
The intelligent engagement loop for value
A platform built for this future must enable your team to execute the full intelligent engagement loop. This means the system should be able to:
- Describe: Synthesize behavior across all channels (app, web, email, push, and RCS) to accurately map the customer's current lifecycle stage (exploring, loyal, or at-risk).
- Predict: Model the individual's likelihood to convert, upgrade, or churn, and determine their sensitivity to specific incentives (e.g., value vs. discount messaging).
- Prescribe: Identify the precise RCS flow to trigger, the exact content blocks to feature, and which buttons offer the clearest path to achieving their goal.
- Optimize: Learn from concrete business outcomes, not just clicks, promoting only the journeys that maximize Value per Conversation (VPC).
Let’s see it in practice: Sarah’s fitness app subscriber journey
Let’s see how this plays out.
The Situation: Sarah downloaded your fitness app three weeks ago, completed onboarding, then hasn’t logged a workout in 10 days. Normally she’d get a generic “We miss you!” message. AI + RCS changes everything.
Describe: The brand’s internal data and analytics system synthesizes her full profile: she completed beginner yoga, browsed intermediate videos, opened “30-day challenge” emails without clicking, and usually engages between 7–9 PM.
Predict: Using predictive models built on behavioral patterns, the brand’s intelligence system identifies her as high churn risk and highlights her likely barrier: lack of confidence to move up a level- not motivation or price. Based on this, it recommends sending an RCS message around 7:45 PM, when she typically engages.
Prescribe: At 7:45 PM she gets:
- “Ready for your next level? You crushed beginner yoga, Sarah! Most people feel nervous about going intermediate - but you're ready.”
- A carousel displays three intermediate classes (all 15 minutes or less).
Quick replies: “Show me the easiest one” / “Not sure I’m ready” / “Remind me this weekend.” - If she taps “Not sure,” the AI pivots instantly:
“No worries! Try this bridge class- intermediate moves at a beginner pace.”
(With video preview + new quick replies.)
Optimize: After testing across users like Sarah, the system finds this conversation boosts 7-day retention to 41% vs 18% from generic campaigns and drives stronger VPC. The platform then elevates this as a proven playbook.
The Outcome
RCS provides the expressive canvas. AI provides the intelligence.
Sarah doesn’t get a message because she’s in “Inactive_10days.”
She gets one because the system understands her hesitation and how to help her move forward. That is the difference between automation and intelligent engagement.
4. Designing for empathy at scale
The primary risk with increased automation is the creation of noise. The brands that succeed will be those that combine the efficiency of AI with a clear, humane perspective.
RCS is the ideal, expressive canvas for empathetic automation because it surpasses the constraints of basic SMS:
- It allows you to show, not just tell, providing visuals, context, and immediate decision options in a single view.
- It invites customer choice through options like "Remind me next week" or "Only send big updates."
- It unifies touchpoints, removing the need for customers to leave the thread for another app or email.
What empathetic automation delivers
Intelligent AI + RCS experiences should be designed to build trust:
- Listen before they speak: Proactively ask preference questions within the thread, allowing customers to influence their message frequency and topics.
- Respect boundaries: Pause journeys when signals suggest frustration or potential overload.
- Maintain transparency: Clearly label interactions with a virtual assistant and provide simple, visible paths to human support.
- Measure what matters: Focus on resolution, satisfaction, and long-term retention, treating low opt-out rates as a key indicator of trust.
The underlying principle is that AI decides how to move efficiently, but your brand strategy must define why and where the conversation is moving to deliver maximum value.
Start building where your customers already are
If you're ready to unify your engagement and bring the customer experience into the single, high-quality thread where it belongs, OneSignal provides the solution. We enable growth teams to quickly launch RCS, design richer in-thread journeys, and apply the unified intelligence needed to transform high-friction moments into seamless interactions.
The brands that win in the future will not be the ones who shout the loudest - they will be the ones who listen the best and respond the smartest.
Reach out, and we’ll show you what an end-to-end RCS experience looks like for your business.
