- Tension: Every vendor promises a single, living customer record; every marketer knows the record dies the moment it meets real-world data entropy.
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Noise: Hype cycles chant about “real-time CDPs,” drowning out the quiet fact that the hardest part is deciding which version of a customer you’ll let the algorithm believe.
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Direct Message: Until brands confront the messy governance beneath their dashboards, no amount of cloud horsepower will keep the customer’s story alive.
Read more about our approach → The Direct Message Methodology
Adobe’s latest Summit wrapped two months ago in Las Vegas, but the air-conditioned echo still rings in my ears: Ten million events per second… Agent Orchestrator… Sensei GenAI everywhere. The numbers dazzled, yet the core drama felt eerily familiar. Six years after Adobe first declared its Experience Platform a “real-time CDP,” executives again stepped on stage to swear the patient now has a stronger heartbeat—new AI assistants, deeper consent wiring via OneTrust, B2B-B2C profile stitching baked into May’s release notes, all humming across Microsoft Azure like a data center the size of a small city.
Back in 2019, Anjul Bhambri called the platform a “new architecture for Experience Cloud,” a layer able to drink from the firehose of trillions of signals. The claim landed as both revelation and provocation: if Adobe could solve unified identity at that scale, what did it mean for Oracle’s CX Unity, Salesforce’s Customer 360, or the scrappy independent CDPs nipping at their heels?
Fast-forward to 2025, and the question has mutated, not disappeared. Oracle now positions Unity as the nervous system for its generative-AI push; Salesforce renamed its stack “Genie” before quietly rolling it back under Data Cloud; nearly every niche player has either pivoted to privacy tech or been acquired. The race never ends, it only widens its track.
What has changed is the cadence of the promise.
At Summit 2025, Adobe stopped talking about a monolithic answer and started scattering solutions like seeds: ten purpose-built agents to automate segmentation, copy generation, and journey orchestration; Sensei GenAI fused to the data layer, ready to whisper next-best offers in whatever syntactic style the brand requires; a session roster packed with workshops on “Real-Time CDP Collaboration” and “Using Partner Data to Win.” Personalization at scale, they tell us, is no longer a moonshot—just connect another source, tick a consent box, and let the model cook.
Yet personalization is not a math problem; it is an epistemological one. The moment a profile is declared “real,” the customer changes phones, clears cookies, opts out, toggles VPN, or simply evolves as a human being. Adobe’s own release notes admit the need for continuous identity graph recalibration, a polite phrase for wrestling uncertainty every millisecond.
The platform can assign probabilities, but probability is faith dressed in decimal points. Even the new Agent Orchestrator — an impressive piece of agentic AI—still relies on inputs sanctioned by data stewards at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday. Tomorrow the schema shifts, and the agent must relearn the world.
Why does this matter now?
Because the cost of being wrong has escalated. Third-party cookies are an archaeological artifact — privacy fines crest into the billions; one rogue predictive offer can spark social backlash that outlives any campaign. Into that tension strides every vendor slideshow, promising “one-to-one engagement” while omitting the governance slide that explains who decides which fragments of truth earn canonical status. The gap between rhetoric and practice is not malicious—it is human. We hate admitting that identity is a forever beta.
Adobe’s answer, publicly at least, is transparency and extensibility. Open APIs, federated queries, and what it calls an “Experience Data Model” sieve to standardize the flood. In private hallway conversations, product leads acknowledge the heavier lift: persuading clients to retire internal taxonomies they have loved since the Macromedia Flash era. That work cannot be automated. It is negotiated, political, and slow. The irony: real-time capability forces organizations to slow down long enough to agree on first principles—What is a household? What is consent when a household splits between devices?—before the system can speed up.
The Direct Message
A real-time CDP is not a technology purchase; it is an organizational decision about whose version of the customer will shape tomorrow’s revenue.
Once you accept that, the Summit theatrics refract into something more sober. The AI agents are astonishing, yes—they demoed an audience builder that spun a look-alike cohort in fifteen seconds — but each agent also inherits the blind spots of the model that feeds it.
Sensei GenAI can draft a push notification in brand tone at lightning speed; if the tone guidelines were written by a committee that never met an actual customer, the copy will still hum with polite irrelevance.
This is not a critique of Adobe alone; Oracle, Salesforce, Twilio, Acquia all skate the same thin ice. The difference lies in how openly each vendor surfaces the fragility. In Las Vegas, Adobe’s CMO Lara Balazs spoke about “experience-led growth” and the requirement to earn data through value exchange. It sounded like moral clarity, and perhaps it is, but moral clarity becomes operational only when dashboards flash yellow at the first sign of data decay rather than green for meeting volume targets.
I left Summit convinced of two things. First, Adobe Experience Platform has matured into a formidable piece of infrastructure—its new AI assistant inside Query Service can explain SQL outputs in plain English, a small miracle for marketers who glaze over at LEFT JOINs. Second, no vendor can sell governance in a box. Brands must choose to govern, or the dream of a unified identity will slip again into next year’s roadmap.
A year from now, cameras will swivel to the next conference stage; product teams will unveil agents smarter than today’s, perhaps even self-debugging models. Meanwhile, a loyalty manager will chase down yet another duplication bug that sent two conflicting birthday offers to the same person, causing a support ticket spike that no keynote will mention. Whether that story ends as a footnote or a post-mortem depends on decisions being made right now in rooms far quieter than the keynote hall.
The CDP race endures, not because the prize remains elusive, but because the track extends whenever we think we’ve crossed the finish line.
The real race is inward: persuading ourselves to slow down, clean house, and decide whose narrative about the customer we’re willing to defend when the live data stream flickers.
In that race, speed is easy. Accuracy is art. And art, inconveniently, still demands human judgment.
