Databricks ended weeks of rumors today by announcing CustomerLake, a CDP agent.
The announcement came at the company’s Data + AI Summit in San Francisco and marks Databricks’ entry into the martech market. In March, Databricks entered the security market with the announcement of its Lakewatch product.
CustomerLake provides marketers and data teams with a workforce of agents who continuously analyze behavior, make decisions, and take action. The company says this workforce can deliver personalized, always-on customer experiences 1 billion times a day.
Powered by Databricks’ Lakehouse technology and governed by the Unity catalog, CustomerLake consolidates customer data, identity resolution, audience creation, campaign automation, and activation.
With the announcement of CustomerLake, Databricks is addressing marketing organizations facing a future where agents are used internally by marketers, while at the same time marketers will need to market agents deployed by customers to research and evaluate products.
As Databricks sees it, most traditional martech applications weren’t built with either scenario in mind.
Does the age of agents require a new generation of CDPs?
Legacy CDPs follow a waterfall model: campaigns are planned and executed across dozens of disconnected systems, can take weeks to ship, and leave customer data siled outside of the company’s core AI platform. The result is a fractured identity that makes true customization at scale impossible.
The age of agents, on the other hand, requires real-time access to context, data, and execution. With CustomerLake, Databricks brings CDP natively to the Databricks platform, so the same models that generate insights can directly drive activation.
“Marketers need to reimagine their entire foundations — not just the campaigns they run, but the customers they run them for, which now includes agents,” said Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks, in a statement. “With CustomerLake, customer data, AI models, and agents reside in a single, governed platform. Marketing stops being a series of campaigns and becomes a continuous loop: agents constantly analyzing, deciding, and acting on every customer in real time. For the first time, companies can deliver infinite campaigns and 1:1 personalization at scale.”
Databricks also announced an open partner ecosystem that will ingest and activate data across platforms and partners, including Adobe, Meta (Audience and Conversion API), Acxiom, Epsilon, LiveRamp, The Trade Desk, Braze, Bloomreach, Iterable, Snapchat, Magnite, TransUnion, Adstra, Twilio, Integral Ad Science (IAS), and Unity.
Native integrations and reverse ETL allow CustomerLake users to connect Databricks with bi-directional pipelines to the entire marketing and advertising technology stack.
CustomerLake agent identity resolution combines rules and agents to unify disconnected records into richer, more accurate customer profiles. An integrated identity marketplace enriches profiles with third-party identity graphs and partner data from vendors such as Acxiom, Epsilon, LiveRamp, TransUnion, and Adstra.
