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After a wave of consolidation over the past six years, more than a few martech minds wondered if the CDP was a better concept than it was a product.
Vendors in and around the digital experience space, in particular, were buying up CDPs, and in some cases it was because the two vendors and their products were often used in tandem by customers anyway. Why not combine forces then?
If you were in the martech space at all, you remember those days. Twilio bought Segment; SAP bought Emarsys; Contentstack bought Lytics; Uniphore bought ActionIQ, to name just a few.
These weren’t legacy platforms. They were CDPs built for a data problem. They were developed to collect and unify customer data and profiles, build audiences, and activate campaigns. Their strengths were in identity resolution and customer profile unification.
The concepts Hightouch and Databricks are discussing have a lot in common. But at a high level, what they’re saying is this: the future isn’t customer profiles, it’s customer decisions.
If unifying customer profiles was CDP 1.0, composability was CDP 2.0, and the agentic CDP is CDP 3.0, and it consists of unified customer data + AI decisioning + autonomous execution.
While CDP 1.0 saw data as the problem that needed to be addressed, you can argue that CDP 3.0 sees humans as the blocker. We’re too slow to analyze data and make decisions. AI agents, on the other hand, move quickly and constantly.
“Agentic AI offers the pathway to not only implement new capabilities that extend the CDP’s remit but also develop a new paradigm for generating insights, targeting audiences, decisioning, and orchestrating customer journeys.”
Who’s going to own the agentic layer and where will it live?
Where Hightouch and Databricks diverge is in their philosophies about how all of this plays out.
“Five years ago, we thought we were building a better CDP architecture. In reality, we were building the foundation for intelligent agents. By moving audiences, journeys, and activation onto the warehouse, the Composable CDP connected marketing directly to a company’s richest customer and business context.”
The Hightouch vision is for agents to do their work in the data warehouse, without copying data. That’s true to the company’s roots in composability and it also adds an agentic layer to the conversation. For Hightouch, the agentic layer in CDP 3.0 sits in a marketing platform on top of the data platform.
Databricks’ CustomerLake is an example of the company’s philosophy that data warehouses — in this case Databricks’ data lakehouse technology — can double as the application platform. Databricks already did this with enterprise security when it launched Lakewatch in March 2026. With CustomerLake, it’s bringing that philosophy to marketing. (It’s worth noting CustomerLake can ingest data from sources beyond the data lakehouse.)
Databricks sees an advantage to building your CDP on the data platform because your governance, AI, and enterprise context are already there. Don’t copy it, don’t move it, just do the work there.
At first glance from here in the cheap seats, it looks like Hightouch and Databricks are on a collision course. Let’s put aside for a moment other players that will jump into the CDP 3.0 space as it matures. (BlueConic’s acquisition last week of Blueshift has a similar story about adding AI agents and actions to customer data.)
In reality, Hightouch and Databricks can co-exist because they tend to target different organizations.
For Databricks, which is selling a data platform, the primary buyer is often data, AI, and platform teams on the tech side. Hightouch sells more often to CRM, marketing, and lifecycle teams.
That means each vendor often has a different starting point in their prospect organizations. For Hightouch there’s an existing data warehouse for its product to sit on top of and an existing martech stack in place. For Databricks, there’s an existing lakehouse and an enterprise-wide AI strategy in place.
Because Databricks is working at the enterprise level, it’s looking for customers with data engineering and AI maturity. Hightouch is looking for marketing operations maturity.
The enterprise focus of Databricks means the time to value is potentially longer than it is for Hightouch customers.
But these significant differences mean the two companies will often be fishing in different ponds. Hightouch will appeal to large DTC players, consumer financial services, retailers, subscription businesses, and travel and hospitality companies where the CMO will likely play a role in the decision.
Databricks, on the other hand, will find itself talking to global financial services firms, telecoms, large healthcare systems, and large enterprises with a centralized data organization where the CIO will likely be heavily involved.
In other words, it’s unlikely either approach wins. Each approach can be a winner for the right customer.
The best we can hope for is these platforms deliver on their promises and marketers and their customers both win.
MarTech is owned by Semrush. We remain committed to providing high-quality coverage of marketing topics. Unless otherwise noted, this page’s content was written by either an employee or a paid contractor of Semrush Inc.
Mike Pastore is the Head of Content & Media at Third Door Media, the publisher of the Martech and Search Engine Land websites and the producer of the SMX and MarTech Conferences. In nearly three decades in B2B marketing, Mike has worked as an editor, writer, and marketer. He first wrote about marketing in 1998 for internet.com (later Jupitermedia). He then worked with marketers at some of the best-known brands in B2B tech, creating content for marketing campaigns at both Jupitermedia and QuinStreet. Prior to joining Third Door Media as the Editorial Director of the MarTech website, he led demand generation at B2B media company TechnologyAdvice.
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