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Posts tagged with artifical intelligence

Agentic AI in Martech: From complicated to complex

Agentic AI in Martech: From complicated to complex

Part 2: What happens when your Martech stack becomes a rainforest?

Last week I wrote about the scale problem with agentic AI, how systems making billions of decisions weekly break traditional governance models. But there's another dimension to this. One that goes beyond just volume.

It's about predictability. Or rather, the slow erosion of it.

Your Martech stack used to be a Ferrari. Now it's a rainforest.

Scott Brinker and Frans Riemersma used this metaphor in the State of Martech 2025 report to explain how AI is changing martech systems from "complicated" to "complex." They were focused on the technical implications. I want to explore what this means for governance and

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Data is boring. And by extension, CDPs are kind of boring too

Data is boring. And by extension, CDPs are kind of boring too

A candid conversation with CDP Institute founder David Raab on AI delusions, data denial, and the awkward art of explaining Martech to your in-laws

CDP Institute’s David Raab coined the term Customer Data Platform, which makes him either the godfather of modern Martech or the guy responsible for every PowerPoint slide with a data unification triangle on it. Possibly both.

In this episode of Couch Confidentials, we talk about the slow death of CDP hype, why AI is just a mirror for your data mess, and why companies keep renaming “data plumbing” as “activation” in hopes it’ll feel more important.

We also cover how vendors are racing to bolt AI onto every surface like it’s a startup-themed version of Iron Man,

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Agentic AI in Martech: The billion decision problem

Agentic AI in Martech: The billion decision problem

Part 1: Why scale changes everything about AI in Martech

I've been having a strange, recurring thought lately. It started after my conversation with Paul from Aampe, when he mentioned their AI agents handle somewhere between 15 and 200 billion decisions every week.

I love astronomy and the awe-inducing scale of the universe. Nevertheless, that number still amazed me, probably because I couldn't quite wrap my head around it. So I did what any reasonable person would do. I grabbed a calculator and started doing some deeply unnecessary math.

Let's say you're a marketing ops manager making about 50 meaningful decisions per day. Which segment gets the email blast, what

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Contextual CDPs: Contextual Fluency

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

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Letting go of control

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

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Contextual CDPs: Composable, not chaotic

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

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