BlueConic acquires Blueshift as CDPs move from data to action

Customer data platform BlueConic announced today it was acquiring Blueshift, an AI-powered cross-channel marketing platform.

The next wave of CDPs is looking more agentic than previous generations, which were focused on collecting and unifying customer data. Agentic CDPs, as they’re starting to be called, will add AI agents to make decisions based on that data, creating content, campaigns, and optimizing their work along the way.

BlueConic builds customer profiles from first-party behavior across web, app, and offline — including what the brand has already shown, tested, and learned from prior interactions.  It turns that first-party data into real-time customer profiles.

Blueshift will take the decisioning BlueConic offers and extend it to owned channels like email, push, in-app, SMS, and web.

While many vendors in the space are talking about AI agents, BlueConic and Blueshift are focusing on context, specifically the behavioral context that helps AI agents deliver relevant experiences based on fresh data.

The combination of the two companies will help marketers close the gap between what a brand knows about each customer and what it does next: capturing first-party behavior as it happens, deciding the next best move, and executing across those owned channels in a single system. 

The combined company serves more than 600 customers across CPG, retail, DTC, and travel and hospitality. BlueConic customers include ASICS, Free People, Marmot, and L’Oreal. Blueshift customers include StitchFix, Five Below, Tuft & Needle, Udacity, and Lending Tree.

“Marketing is going through its biggest reset in two decades,” Melissa Murray Bailey, CEO of BlueConic, said in a statement. “Real-time context is the new competitive moat. Brands that own how they capture, decide, and act on first-party behavior will be structurally harder to compete with as agents become the primary operating model. That’s what BlueConic and Blueshift deliver together.”