Martech Therapy (Page 10)

contextual cdp

Contextual CDPs: Contextual Fluency

Part 6 of 6: Being contextual is also about competence.

Over the last five posts, we’ve moved from speculative to strategic to practical. We’ve looked at how memory, inference, and model context protocols can enhance personalization, orchestration, governance, and architecture in and around the CDP. So, where does that leave us?

Right here.. yes, with the last post in the series, but more importantly, with the people, with YOU!

Because it’s one thing to build a system that can understand context. It’s another thing entirely to make that understanding usable across your organization. That’s what this final piece is about, turning contextual awareness into team

digital analytics

The trophy analyst, the hippo CMO, and the myth of “just one more tool”

But Steen tells it like it is... It’s not the tool. It’s us.

Some conversations catch you off guard in the best possible way. This one with Steen did exactly that.

We were meant to talk about analytics, why it still doesn’t deliver on its promise, despite all the new tools and fancy dashboards. And we did. But what surprised me was how personal it got. Not emotional, but honest in a way that made me uncomfortable in a good way. The kind of uncomfortable that makes you realize how often we’re just going through the motions, pretending things are working because admitting otherwise might mean admitting we don’t really

marketing technology

Letting go of control

What agentic AI can teach Martech about trust, autonomy, and actual intelligence

I used to think I understood AI agents. In Martech, we talk about them all the time. Tools that take action based on data, automate tasks, score leads, and optimize send times. That’s what we call an agent, right? A helpful script or model that executes a narrow task faster or more accurately than humans can.

Then I had a conversation with Aampe’s CEO Paul Meinshausen on my podcast Couch Confidentials, and something clicked. Paul introduced a distinction I hadn’t fully grasped. An AI agent follows instructions. Agentic AI operates with goals, persistence, and the ability to

marketing technology

Contextual CDPs: Composable, not chaotic

Part 5 of 6: Contextual CDPs need lightweight structure, not heavyweight rebuilds

By now, we’ve explored what context can unlock in a CDP, from dynamic profiling to real-time orchestration and trust. We’ve talked about layering memory and inference without blowing up your current stack. So in this fifth part, let’s look at what happens when you want to make these contextual layers stick… without making everything feel like a pile of duct-taped services.

Because that’s the risk. Composability gives us incredible flexibility, but without some architectural discipline, it becomes hard to explain, harder to maintain, and impossible to govern.

Let’s explore how to structure context-aware systems in

aampe

Agentic AI & the art of letting go

When control gets in the way of progress

Paul suggested the idea of doing something different. No intro. No big kickoff. Just two people talking.

That’s how this episode with Paul Meinshausen (CEO at Aampe) started and I’m glad it did. Because I fumbled at the beginning (you can skip ahead in the podcast...).

Feeling like a one-trick pony, I tried to steer the conversation toward my usual topics: CDPs, AI, use cases, and organizational challenges. But it quickly became clear I was trying to force an idea, a vision, onto something I hadn’t fully wrapped my head around yet. Paul helped me take a

cloud data warehouse

If the warehouse can think, what’s left for the CDP?

A critical reflection on Databricks, data gravity, and what comes next.

Nope, this isn’t an analysis of a press release. We’ve seen all Databricks partners do that generously all over LinkedIn. It’s a reflection, a personal one (I had some spare time over the weekend), on something that’s been building quietly in the background and what it means now that someone has taken a concrete step forward. That someone is Databricks.

Last week, Databricks launched something called Data Intelligence for Marketing. And sure, you could skim the headline and file it under “AI feature drop.” But that’s not what caught my attention.

What stood out was

Martech Therapy

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