Thoughts and rants from a veteran Martech contractor and interviews with my peers.

Contextual CDPs

What does the context layer actually have to do?

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 the time. However, a year

Martech Events

Plotting my course to AntiCon

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 the same underlying question

Vibe Coding Martech

The iceberg under the demo

An investor's AI contest landed in my inbox the same week the UK government published an open letter to business leaders about AI cyber threats. Read together, they describe the same reality from opposite ends. And they leave a gap most boards aren't going to notice in time.

Last week two things crossed my ~~desk~~ screen that, on the face of it, had nothing to do with each other.

The first was an email from an investor running an internal AI contest across six of their portfolio companies, one of which I used to work with. The framing was good, and I was happy to see this development. They were asking employees (and somehow former contractors like me) to record a two-minute screen capture of an AI workflow they'd started using. A 15-minute task done faster. A draft response written in half the time. You get the idea.

state of martech

The readiness thread inside the State of Martech 2026

Scott and Frans handed us value engineering and context engineering, both useful. The thread they didn't have time to pull is what your team has to actually become to operate any of it. Picking it up here, with a navy metaphor and the bit of the IKEA Billie story nobody talks about.

Like many of you, I watched the State of Martech 2026 keynote on MartechDay this past Tuesday. Around the forty-minute mark, Scott Brinker made a passing remark about MarOps careers.

AI is not taking over this work.

Quite the opposite.

As a result of AI, there is so much work to be done.

Frans Riemersma nodded. They both clearly believe it, and so do I. The line had no follow-up. A 55-minute keynote can only do so much, and the organizational implications of value engineering and context engineering were always going to be a thread to pick up rather than

Vibe Coding Martech

Comprehension is where the value lives now

Production used to prove competence. AI broke that chain. The same break is happening to martech stacks, and the fix isn’t more tooling.

So, before we sit down and enjoy MartechDay 2026, let's take a moment to reflect on the Hypertail situation as described in the State of Martech 2025, where companies are starting to leverage AI to build production solutions to fill the gap left by off-the-shelf Martech.

"The rise of low-code/no-code platforms over the past 5-10 years has steadily changed that equation, making it easier, faster, and cheaper to build, giving rise to “citizen developers” who could increasingly scratch their own itch by creating lightweight apps and automations." Source: State of Martech 2025 (page 6) by **Chiefmartec.com**

A scale-up

Martech Development

What Martech development services actually means in 2026

Most Martech development services in 2026 answer the wrong question. Here's what precision builds on top of your existing stack actually look like.

Last month a CMO emailed me a screenshot. It was a Google search for "Martech development services" and she had circled three of the top results in red pen. (Digital pen, on a screenshot. I know. Oh, the irony) Her question was a single line.

"Which one of these am I supposed to approach?"

None of them, as it turned out. But I understood why she was asking. When you Google that phrase right now, you get agencies pitching campaign microsites, systems integrators quoting discovery phases, and vendor-certified partners offering to configure the Salesforce or HubSpot or Braze stack you

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