When Zack Wenthe from Tealium told me, “the next five years of data strategy will make the last look like child’s play”, I felt both intrigued and uneasy. Intrigued because Zack has been around long enough in the CDP world to know what he’s talking about. Uneasy because if the last few years already left most teams exhausted, what’s coming next?

We circled around two big forces → privacy and AI. Not in the shallow “AI will optimize your campaigns” sense, but in the way these forces are already reshaping human behavior. Zack made the point that customers