Martech Therapy: CDP strategy and agentic AI

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

The Forrester Wave halo measures your reference program

Forrester's customer-feedback halo rewards the reference program as much as the customers. What the 2024 notation change added, and what it removed.

Last week the Forrester Wave for B2C customer data platforms came out, and I spent more time on the legend than on the chart. That's not where I expected to end up.

Ten companies on the graphic.

One of them, Amperity, carries a halo around its marker. Forrester's own footnote spells it out:

A halo means above-average customer feedback, and a double halo means the vendor is a Customer Favorite.

Nobody else on the chart carries a halo at all. And nobody at all carries the double, so the Customer Favorite designation went unawarded in this market.

Martech entropy

The Martech Stack you bought twice

Unused features cost nothing. A second contract for a capability you already own costs what the invoice says, and no utilization survey will find it.

Just like my previous article, and most because of the fast moving pace of Martech, I revisited some early work.

Back in July I went at whether AI closes the gap in Martec's Law, and part of that piece dealt with the Gartner utilization number. 58% of stack capability in use in 2020, 42% in 2022, 33% in 2023, with the 2025 reading climbing back toward 49% under a slightly different question. Directional rather than gospel, as I put it at the time.

I still think that's right.

What I didn't do is ask why the dead

Latest Posts