Databricks launched CustomerLake, a lakehouse-native agentic CDP. What it means for composable vendors, Databricks customers, and the next data platform.
Databricks announced CustomerLake at its Data + AI Summit just now, and the rumor is confirmed: it is a customer data platform. A real one. In 2026 no less. Marketer-facing, built natively inside the lakehouse, with agents doing the work that used to need a data team and a few weeks of lead time. The first agentic CDP a lakehouse has built for itself.
To be fair, I saw it before the keynote. Databricks invited me to a preview and asked what I made of it, which I took as a
Hightouch, Zeotap and mParticle now sell a toggle that lifts your match rate with identifiers you never collected. The gain is real. The work is the consent check nobody does before flipping it. What it does, and what to look at first.
You spend a week defining an audience in your CDP. Lapsed high-value customers, the ones actually worth winning back. You push the segment to Meta feeling good about it. Then the matched figure comes back at around sixty percent of what you sent, and the rest just isn't there. The platform couldn't recognise four in ten of your own customers.
Anyone who has run paid media knows that feeling. It's the match rate gap, and it has a few causes. People sign up with one email and log into Meta with another. Phones get replaced every
Hightouch said the packaged CDP was dead weight. Four years on, Gartner lists it in the CDP Magic Quadrant. The architecture was right. The pitch skipped a step.
In 2022, Hightouch published a piece with a headline built to draw attention: Friends Don't Let Friends Buy a CDP. I remember where I first saw it, neck deep in my client's packaged CDP project. Sure, it was vendor content. Everyone knew it was vendor content. Nevertheless, it got passed around, because the frustration underneath it was real, and most of us had heard it, or even felt it.
The argument was simple enough to fit on a t-shirt. Your data already lives in the warehouse. Why pay a second vendor to copy it into a separate
A follow-up to the follow-up. My last piece explaining "what the context layers has to do" argued that customer state has to be Queryable, Addressable, Current, and Accountable if agents are going to act on it in real time. It ended pointing at a one-page audit and stopped there.
This is that audit.
The context layer's job is to make the customer state usable when an agent needs to act on it. Whether it's doing that job is not a question anyone can answer from an architecture diagram. Architecture diagrams describe
Queryable, addressable, current, accountable. Four things the layer of customer state has to deliver if AI agents are going to act on it in real time. A follow-up to the six-part Contextual CDPs series, written a year on, now that the industry has caught up to the language.
A follow-up to the six-part Contextual CDPs series.
A year ago, I published a six-part series on contextual CDPs. It started with MCPs reframing the CDP as a dynamic context engine, then memory as the orchestration layer, then trust as the interface when systems start to infer and decide, then the practical bridge between today's stack and an agent-driven future, then composability that needs sequence and scaffolding rather than more connectors, and finally contextual fluency as a human skill rather than a technical one.
I thought I was making an argument that needed defending at
At AntiCon 2026 in London, three questions I want answered: trust-ladder criteria, real organizational redesign vs. relabelled roles, and the possible next-era framing.
AntiCon lands in London on May 21 and I'm registered for the full main-stage track on day one. Looking at what I've signed up for, the route through the day is revealing... in hindsight. Behavioral science as the human advantage, and as a former data analyst, I am looking forward to this one. The three levers of marketing transformation. Redesigning the marketing organization for an AI era. Architecting the agentic operating model. Co-pilot or autopilot. Are you prepared for the next Martech eras. Conviction at scale.
A bunch of different titles, with vastly different speakers, but