Consumers claim to love their favourite brands, B2B buyers claim loyalty to key suppliers and partners — but their behavior increasingly tells a different story. As customers drift and buyers cling on out of habit, AI is the tool that transforms engagement blockers like dark data into the connected experiences loyalty now depends on right across the enterprise.
The illusion of loyalty
Loyalty has always been hard to win and easy to lose. But in 2026 we’re seeing a new trend in loyalty emerge, one that’s hard to spot until it happens. Loyalty is quietly eroding.
Consumers will still say they trust their favourite brands and will still appear engaged. B2B buyers may still renew contracts. But beneath the surface commitment has become fragile, conditional and easily broken.
At NRF 2026 in New York recently, this disconnect dominated conversations across the show floor, from luxury to grocery to global enterprise. It’s backed up by SAP Emarsys research highlighting that what look like loyal behaviors today often mask disengagement tomorrow. Whether we’re talking B2C or B2B, brands and enterprises are mistaking inertia and habit for intentional commitment. And they’re paying the price when customers quietly quit.
The danger of quiet quitting and default loyalty
Our 2025 Global Customer Loyalty Index (CLI) found that 77% of consumers claim to ‘love and trust’ a favourite brand. But dig a little deeper and that loyalty is often built on shakier foundations. More than half of consumers surveyed (57%) will switch to a competitor for a better price, 52% leave after a poor experience, and a third walk away following a controversy. Nearly a quarter of consumers say they would exit over sustainability concerns alone.
Quiet quitting has arrived. Outwardly, customers don’t complain, instead they disengage quietly. They open fewer messages, browse less often and reduce purchase frequency long before switching. These early warning are there, but too often remain invisible because data and insight is fragmented across marketing, service and commerce.
The picture is even more deceptive in B2B. According to SAP Emarsys’ 2025 Buyer Loyalty Index (BLI), 71% of enterprise buyers describe themselves as loyal. However, 70% of that loyalty is what the research identifies as ‘Default Loyalty’. These buyers stay not because the value or experience is exceptional, but because of habit or because switching feels complex, risky or simply too difficult. Integration dependencies, contractual structures and internal resistance combine to create inertia that looks like commitment.
This dynamic misleads business suppliers. As long as switching barriers remain high, dissatisfaction stays hidden. But when those barriers fall — through improved interoperability, competitive innovation or external disruption — that apparent loyalty disappears. In this context, loyalty isn’t earned through trust or engagement but loaned temporarily by friction. The risk is obvious: without value creation and connected engagement, B2B loyalty collapses.
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What’s driving the loyalty disconnect?
So why now? Why is this disconnect between what brands and businesses believe and how their customers behave emerging and even accelerating?
Certainly, budget constraints, rising customer expectations and fragmented journeys all play a part in making loyalty increasingly fragile. However, the core blocker is dark data. Despite the vast amounts of customer data held across marketing, service and commerce more than half of brands say their data is too unstructured to use. The signals exist, but they sit in disconnected systems; they’re not interpreted by a single intelligence layer; and they can’t be activated in real time. The result is that brands and enterprises assume commitment because isolated data points predict loyalty even as behavior starts to suggest otherwise. Price sensitivity, service missteps and values clashes can all trigger disengagement long before anyone complains, but the early warnings are lost in silos.
Moving to connected and evidence‑based engagement requires unifying data, applying AI to connect signals, and continuously orchestrating one customer, one journey, one view. This is what SAP Emarsys calls the Engagement Era, a fundamental shift from transactional marketing to continuous, connected customer relationships. And the brands that thrive in this era are those able to understand and respond to how people engage, not just what they buy.
At the centre of this shift is AI as the fundamental intelligence layer modern engagement depends on. AI that connects data, interprets early indicators of disengagement, and activates personalized responses in real time. It brings dark data into the light, transforming thousands of disconnected interactions into one coherent customer journey. In this scenario, engagement becomes an enterprise‑wide capability rather than a marketing tactic, and loyalty becomes the natural outcome of AI-driven relevance delivered consistently across every touchpoint.
How Molton Brown boosts loyalty by delivering connected journeys
Luxury beauty, bath and fragrance brand Molton Brown is already putting connected engagement into practice. By unifying data and upgrading to SAP Commerce Cloud and SAP Emarsys, the brand now delivers seamless, personalized journeys across channels – helping drive a 20% uplift in repeat purchases, 5× more revenue from email, and contributing to a 30% increase in sales with record omnichannel performance.
Key takeaways – building blocks for loyalty in the Engagement Era
To compete in the Engagement Era, brands need to build four enterprise‑wide capabilities. The first is the ability to activate dark data: unifying signals across technology, service, marketing, commerce and revenue so early signs of disengagement — price sensitivity, friction, values clashes — surface before customers disappear. The second is to mitigate the risk of quiet quitting and in B2B the danger inherent in default loyalty. That means using predictive analytics and AI‑driven personalization to anticipate needs and turn passive retention into intentional commitment.
Next, brands and enterprises must deliver properly connected experiences. Customers expect one journey, not a collection of disconnected touchpoints, and that requires a single AI intelligence layer interpreting behaviour in real time. Finally, organisations and brands must embed values‑based engagement, treating factors like sustainability and ESG as genuine decision triggers and aligning proof points with the customers who care most. Together, these capabilities create a genuine loyalty engine powered by relevance, responsiveness and trust — not habit.