Martech Therapy: CDP strategy and agentic AI

Martech contracting

What is a forward deployed engineer, and who is paying for the one in your team?

Vendors are embedding their own engineers to build your stack. One Martech company's accounts show the implementation running at a gross margin of 0.08%.

At the Martech World Forum in London this month, Nate Wardwell from Hightouch talked about forward-deployed engineers and described them as a service Hightouch provides that is helping its customers. I wrote it up in my recap and left that question hanging.

Isn't that what independent consultants do?

I went and looked properly.

What I found wasn't really about job titles.

What a forward-deployed engineer actually is

In short, someone the vendor employs, who sits inside your team and builds the thing. Not a trainer, not a support contact, not a consultant who writes a plan

Customer Data Platform

How to write a data request someone can act on

A request rarely gets refused. It gets built, exactly as written. Here are the six decisions to name before you send one. One page, free, no forms.

Sponsored by Databricks. Databricks commissioned and funded this guide and reviewed it before publication for factual accuracy. They did not get to change the conclusions.
Full disclosure at the foot of this post.

A badly written data request rarely gets refused. It gets built.

That is the part people miss when they complain about the queue. You ask for lapsed customers, three weeks later you get lapsed customers, and the team who built it did exactly what the message said. Then the campaign underperforms and nobody can point at the mistake, because there was not one.

Lapsed meant a

Martech research

Can you trust AI to research Martech vendors?

I logged every source four AI assistants cited across 480 CDP buying questions. More than half came from companies selling into the category

I spent a day this week asking four AI assistants the twenty questions a marketer asks when they are choosing a customer data platform, and writing down every source each one used to answer.

Same questions, three times each, all in one day so nothing could move underneath me. About three thousand sources in total.

An article I wrote in August led me here. I'd asked whether Martech work was slowing down, and one answer that kept coming back was that buyers are handling more of the early stage themselves, with an assistant rather than a person. The claim

Customer Data Platform

Same word, different meaning

2 cranes. Same words, different meaning. Martech's vocabulary is no different.

The words marketing and data engineering both use and define differently, and what each side hears instead. One page, free, take it into the meeting.

Sponsored by Databricks. Databricks commissioned and funded this guide and reviewed it before publication for factual accuracy. They did not get to change the conclusions. Full disclosure at the foot of this post.

A client of mine moved from head of IT to head of Martech at a national UK company. Technical background, ran engineering teams for years, nobody's idea of a novice. The first honest thing he said to me was that he didn't know how to talk to data engineering.

That surprised me, and then it stopped surprising me.

He had the vocabulary, and the

Martech events

Martech stacks, empires and vague rituals

Dune Emperor's ship landing on Arakis, scene from Dune 2 by Denis Villeneuve

What Martech World Forum 2026 said about stacks that forget what they were for, and why the warehouse might be the next empire.

On the flight home from Martech World Forum in London, I did what any sci-fi fan waiting for Denis Villeneuve's final Dune film would do. I read Dune Messiah. As if my head didn't have enough to process after two days of Martech talks. 😉

Dune Messiah quote about Empires by Princess Irulan

Call it kismet, but Princess Irulan wrote this:

"Empires do not suffer emptiness of purpose at the time of their creation. It is when they have become established that aims are lost and replaced by vague ritual."

Replace "Empires" with "Martech stacks" and read it again.

Is my passion for sci-fi now

Martech strategy

The Martech contracts dates and rights

87% of Martech contracts renew themselves and 86% say nothing about whether your customer data trains someone else's model. The paper decides.

Last time I argued that the cheapest money in a Martech budget is the capability you're already buying twice, and that the way to find it is to sort your invoices by capability instead of by supplier.

Say you do that. You find one. Now what?

Now the paper decides. And the terms that decide it aren't the ones I went through in the pricing series. Not the meters, not how a vendor counts a profile or an event.

But the dates, and the rights.

I've been handed a lot of Martech contracts over the years, usually

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What a forward-deployed engineer actually is