Martech Therapy: CDP strategy and agentic AI

Agentic CDP

Your agentic CDP will optimize whatever you measure

Every agentic CDP will be sold on goals-based marketing. That assumes a goal an agent can chase and a signal fast enough to learn from. Most teams have neither.

The last dimension on the scorecard in part 3 was goal and measurement fit.

Can the tool take the goals and the clean signal you can actually give it?

I saved it for its own part because it is the dimension the entire category rests on, and the one where the distance between the pitch and the average marketing team is widest. And it bears the roots of my entire post-military career.

Every vendor is selling you goals-based marketing

Before we jump into the deep end, let's briefly look past the architecture arguments, and you will see

Agentic CDP

How to evaluate an agentic CDP on your own

Vendor litmus tests are built so the vendor wins. A fit-to-need scorecard for evaluating an agentic CDP, where different tools win for different buyers.

In part 1 I showed you a scorecard.

It was the five-point "litmus test" on cdp.com, the page that ranks first when you search for an agentic CDP, written by Treasure AI's CEO, and it scored Treasure AI five out of five and its rivals one and two.

That test is not

Customer Data Platform

Right-time marketing and the speed of context decay

"Real-time" hides three different clocks. What it means from a data warehouse, why context decay is the real metric, and where five CDPs draw the line.

Every customer data vendor sells real-time. It's on the homepage, in the demo, in the answer to question fourteen of that RFP in front of your nose. The word carries a lot of weight, yet most of that weight stays out of view.

Ask what real-time actually means once the data lives in a warehouse, and that single word splits into three separate jobs that you can remember with the CDP acronym, too.

The first is collect: getting an event into the system at all. A click, a purchase, a page view, arriving through an SDK, a

Composable CDP

How Snowflake recruited Zeotap's composable CDP

Zeotap's composable CDP now runs inside Snowflake as a Native App. Snowflake recruited it, the way Databricks built CustomerLake.

Zeotap's composable CDP is live on the Snowflake Marketplace, running inside your own Snowflake account as a Native App. That is the announcement, and it is the boring half.

The half I care about came from Jonaten Kraus at Snowflake, who spent about six months on this before it shipped and then wrote up what really happened on LinkedIn. His framing is the whole thing. Snowflake wasn't deciding whether to approve another marketplace app. It was deciding whether to treat Zeotap as a partner instead of a customer.

Snowflake picked a category vendor and pulled it deeper into

Agentic CDP

From operator to director: the marketer's job after the agentic CDP

When the agentic CDP builds the campaign, the marketer's job moves to briefing and judging. What changes, what gets harder, and a brief to start.

In the first part of this series I defined the agentic CDP as a platform you mostly stop operating by hand, where you set the goals and the limits and check the work. Without many of you realizing it, that sentence hides a career change, so this part is about the job on the other side of it.

For about a decade, being good at martech meant being good at the tools. You knew where the audience builder kept the condition you needed, you could get a journey out of the platform without filing a ticket, you remembered which export

Agentic AI

Will AI close the gap in Martec's Law?

Martech ships faster than any team can absorb. Martec's Law says the gap only grows. Here is the case that AI might, conditionally, close part of it.

You already know your stack ships more than your team can keep up with. That is not the interesting part, and it is not why I have been chewing on this for months.

The interesting question is whether AI is about to help with that or make it worse. Not in the abstract, but for the specific job of staying current with everything your tools ship after you have signed.

Here is the perspective I keep reaching for. Scott Brinker named the shape of this more than a decade ago and called it Martec's Law, yes, without an 'h'

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Every vendor is selling you goals-based marketing