Data is the lifeblood of modern businesses, powering decisions and driving personalized customer experiences. Yet, for many organizations, customer data management is fraught with challenges—siloed systems, slow implementation cycles, and rigid architectures that limit agility.

As businesses seek to make the most of their customer data, the need for a more flexible, scalable, and efficient approach has never been greater. That’s why we’re excited to announce our investment in Hightouch, the pioneer of the Composable CDP, which enables companies to activate customer data directly from their data warehouse. By eliminating the inefficiencies of traditional CDPs, Hightouch empowers marketing teams to move faster, work more autonomously, and achieve better results. Now, with the launch of AI Decisioning, Hightouch is taking customer engagement a step further—leveraging machine learning to deliver truly personalized experiences at scale.

The customer data dilemma

For more than a decade, marketers have turned to Customer Data Platforms (CDP) to orchestrate audience segments and data across many downstream tools and channels. Once heralded as the ultimate solution for unifying customer data, traditional CDPs promised to simplify data management and drive better engagement. However, their limitations have led to frustration rather than transformation.

While designed to centralize customer data, traditional CDPs instead tend to exacerbate silos by duplicating data into standalone repositories. This drives up storage costs and fragments data across systems, undermining collaboration and creating inconsistencies that hinder cross-departmental efforts.

Implementation challenges further compound the problem. Deploying a traditional CDP often requires 6 to 12 months of effort, extensive consulting resources, and complex integration processes. These drawn-out processes delay time-to-value and strain both technical and marketing teams, making it difficult to achieve meaningful impact quickly.

Finally, rigid architectures prevent CDPs from adapting to the dynamic needs of modern businesses. Their reliance on predefined schemas limits flexibility, forcing companies to compromise on functionality or invest heavily in engineering workarounds to incorporate diverse data sources like custom behavioral models or offline interactions.

For marketing teams, there is a significant gap between the promise of unified data with traditional CDPs and the reality. Outdated processes and tools and the need for engineering support constrains agility, slows down campaigns, and limits actionable insights. These challenges, coupled with high costs and underwhelming ROI, have left many marketers questioning whether CDPs can ever deliver on their promise.

The Composable CDP: A paradigm shift

In response to the frustrations of traditional CDPs, a new approach has emerged: the Composable CDP. Unlike traditional CDPs, which duplicate data into siloed systems, the Composable CDP builds on a simple yet transformative idea: Your data warehouse is already your source of truth—why duplicate it?

Founded in 2019, Hightouch is the pioneer of this paradigm. By leveraging modern data warehouses like Snowflake, BigQuery, and Databricks, Hightouch eliminates redundant infrastructure and activates data directly—resulting in a solution that is better, faster, and less expensive than traditional CDPs.

A secure, single source of truth

Hightouch transforms a business’ existing data warehouse into a CDP, eliminating the need to duplicate and store customer data in a separate repository. They don’t store or process data outside of the secure environments of existing platforms, aligning with robust enterprise security and compliance standards. Hightouch’s flexible schema modeling also allows businesses to seamlessly adapt their data to complex use cases, accommodating unique customer attributes, behavioral models, and offline interactions.

Accelerated implementation

Hightouch’s composable architecture enables businesses to activate their data almost immediately, bypassing the 6 to 12 months of schema mapping, ingestion, and engineering resources required by traditional CDPs. Enterprises are rarely starting from scratch—they are already posting events, product analytics, and other data into the warehouse. Hightouch builds on this infrastructure, accelerating implementation so teams can quickly leverage real-time data for dynamic marketing campaigns and business operations.

Cost efficient

Hightouch eliminates the added expenses associated with duplicating and storing data in standalone repositories. With its modular platform, businesses only pay for the features they need. Its lightweight implementation also eliminates the need for costly consultants and maintenance.

The future of personalization at scale

Building on the impact of their Composable CDP, Hightouch recently launched AI Decisioning—a new product designed to enable 1:1 personalization at scale. Despite advancements in audience segmentation, journey building, and campaign personalization, marketers have been limited by the need to make decisions in aggregate. Even highly targeted audiences consist of individuals, each with unique needs—something existing tools could not fully address.

AI Decisioning is built to bridge this gap. Instead of manually defining segments and step-by-step journeys, marketers define the goals, guardrails, and content variants, and allow AI to auto-optimize interactions for each individual customer. This shift reduces the need for hands-on management of every touchpoint, allowing marketers to focus on broader strategic goals.

AI Decisioning leverages advanced machine learning and reinforcement learning to automate and optimize marketing decisions. It dynamically analyzes customer behavior, preferences, and historical interactions to empower hyper-personalized campaigns—delivering the right content, to the right customer, at the right time. Unlike traditional campaign automation tools, Hightouch’s AI Decisioning continuously learns from customer response patterns, adapting over time to enhance engagement and conversion rates. This self-improving system enables businesses to anticipate customers’ needs, delivering relevant and impactful content that resonates on an individual level.

One of Hightouch’s customers, WHOOP, has seen firsthand how AI Decisioning can transform customer engagement. In just six weeks, they gained more insights from AI-driven experimentation than an entire year of manual testing. By dynamically optimizing customer interactions, WHOOP increased cross-sell device conversions by over 10%, demonstrating the power of real-time, individualized decision-making.¹ The shift from static segmentation to AI-powered personalization enables WHOOP to engage users more effectively, proving that AI-driven marketing isn’t just theoretical—it’s driving measurable impact today. 

In this new era of customer engagement, Hightouch is redefining what businesses can achieve with their data with the Composable CDP and AI Decisioning. Marketing teams can create and execute real-time personalized campaigns, data teams gain greater autonomy by reducing reliance on engineering, and organizations as a whole can innovate faster, collaborate more effectively, and deliver deeper, more meaningful customer experiences. 

We are proud to support Kashish, Tejas, Josh, and the entire Hightouch team as they shape the future of customer engagement. For those who are equally inspired, Hightouch is growing rapidly and hiring across many roles.