DMS 2026 — Featured Panel | Is the Funnel Dead?

Is the Funnel Dead?: Redefining Growth in the AI Era

AI doesn’t replace the funnel — it upgrades it. In the AI era, experimentation speeds up, data access becomes instant, and funnels evolve into personalized paths for every customer.

Session Overview

AI isn’t here to eliminate the funnel — it’s here to make it smarter. Traditionally, marketers designed a single funnel and tried to fit every customer into it. Running one experiment could take weeks, and even creating a single customer segment often meant waiting on the data team.

In an AI-driven environment, three things happen at once: (1) Experiment velocity — AI can help validate hypotheses faster, shrinking test cycles from weeks to days. (2) Data access — the moment you describe a customer in natural language, segments can be created instantly. (3) Funnel personalization — one funnel becomes thousands, while the core flow (acquisition → activation → retention) remains, executed through the best path for each customer.

This panel takes a closer look at how leading platforms like MUSINSA and Today’s House are making that shift real — and what it means for how growth teams operate moving forward.

Panelists

Jaechul Lee
Jaechul Lee
CEO
Afterwork Lab
Jaechul Lee is a hands-on growth practitioner working at the intersection of marketing data and AI. He has delivered MarTech-based data infrastructure builds and growth consulting for 50+ companies, including MUSINSA, Burger King, and SK Telecom—using tools such as Amplitude, AppsFlyer, and Braze.

He also teaches startup marketing at Kookmin University and Ewha Womans University. Today, he leads Afterwork Lab, building AI tools that replace repetitive marketer tasks—ranging from SEO/GEO optimization to product detail page creation and video production—so growth teams can focus on experimentation and strategy.
Junho Kim
Junho Kim
Personalization Team Lead
MUSINSA
Junho Kim leads the Personalization Team at MUSINSA and previously worked as an AI Research Scientist at LG Electronics CTO and KIST’s Robotics Research Institute.

He believes the essence of marketing lies in deciding who to show something to, what to show, and when to show it. Yet in many organizations, those decisions still rely heavily on human experience and intuition.

At MUSINSA, he has helped build MATCH (Musinsa Audience Targeting & Customer Hub), an Audience Decision Layer designed so that these decisions are learned and made by the system itself, not manually by people. Using AI/ML, vector search, and LLMs, the system defines cohorts, expands targeting, and feeds execution results back into the learning loop.

In this session, he will discuss how ML-based audience targeting connects across CRM, advertising, banners, and recommendations; how LLMs can expand marketer productivity; and why the real transformation is not simply “AI adoption,” but a shift in the very structure of decision-making in marketing execution.
Haeun Kang
Haeun Kang
CRM Marketing Manager
Bucketplace
Haeun Kang is a growth marketer who moves beyond traditional funnel optimization to champion a User Flow-driven approach. Guided by the belief that conversion is created by flow, she focuses on the exact intersection where solving customer problems delivers measurable business impact.

With experience across MarTech solution providers and major commerce platforms, she builds structurally repeatable growth through real-time personalization systems, cross-channel journey orchestration, and AI-driven automation. Currently, she extends CRM learnings into product experiments—connecting fragmented touchpoints into a seamless conversion structure.