Forrester’s Joe Stanhope (Featured Speaker) on The Role of CDPs and AI Now and in the Future
Last updated February 4, 2025
Joe Stanhope, Forrester VP, Principal Analyst, said that marketing’s north star is focusing on the customer and driving great customer experiences. This is no easy task. Customers are constantly evolving, becoming more connected and empowered, and the number of devices, platforms, and channels available leads to an infinite set of permutations for engaging them.
Stanhope discussed this in his session, The Future Is Now: Harness Disruption to Drive the Right Experiences, at CDP World 2024, where he was a guest speaker. He shared how organizations can deliver the right experiences with the help of a customer data platform (CDP) and AI.
The role of the CDP in customer experience
Disruption is everywhere, and delivering the experiences that customers demand is no easy task. Stanhope likened it to rebuilding a car as it’s driving. It’s also about constant iteration.
Customers expect a seamless experience across physical and digital channels. What’s important today is not being good at individual campaigns or touchpoints but winning in customer moments. And those moments can happen anywhere the customer engages across the entire customer lifecycle.
For marketers to engage customers this way, they must shift away from individual channels and campaigns to journeys. They must adopt technology that supports customer profiles, flexible applications and integrations, and automated workflows. Stanhope said marketers need technology and processes that can quickly evolve as things change and can scale up the decisioning, content, and channels needed to serve all these moments.
Data becomes the backbone of everything, but challenges remain. Stanhope talked about challenges such as a lack of foundational data management, poor data quality, data silos, and the time it takes to deliver value to the business.
That’s where the CDP comes into play.
The future of the CDP
Stanhope said the future of the CDP is the future of customer experience.
He walked through the evolution of the customer data platform, from its beginnings as a data store supporting profiles and basic messaging to a customer CDP supporting engagement with known customers and then to the more complete marketing CDP we know today.
In 2025 and beyond, Stanhope said we will see the enterprise CDP, where companies will leverage it outside of marketing to support more touchpoints and use cases. He discussed broader personalization strategies and campaigns, including e-commerce and the contact center.
To understand where the future of the CDP lies, Stanhope provided four areas where companies can more broadly apply the CDP – and AI is a critical component.
From simple data feeds to orchestrating customer journeys
The CDP syncs data across the customer journey and creates customer profiles. It can also activate that data to customer endpoints to support the orchestration of customer journeys, but Stanhope said there’s a need to take it further.
He said we need a true journey orchestration feature that includes a real-time, individual-oriented, and triggered decisioning engine. This new engine would take everything off individual endpoints and orchestrate everything from one facility at the CDP level.
AI is the new personalization flywheel
Stanhope said AI is essential for personalization. It allows marketing and customer engagement teams to scale up and accelerate efforts to create relevant customer experiences.
We’ll see it manifest through marketing tools, including the CDP. Stanhope said part of the opportunity is to embed generative AI functions in the CDP in a consolidated place rather than disbursing them across tools.
Today, generative AI supports creative development, and it’s a good place for the CDP to get involved in these creative elements. Leaders in the CDP space have already implemented mid-term solutions where the CDP can make a strong play, generating insights, natural language queries, and supporting reporting that is faster, better, and more user-friendly.
Also, in the mid-term there are offerings that enable marketing operations use AI to improve planning, resourcing, coordinating schedules, campaign briefs, and more. Stanhope said this could all live within a CDP centralized orchestration facility.
Then, in the longer term, we would see a singular journey orchestration feature where AI could help design, monitor, orchestrate, and optimize journeys over time. Stanhope said AI can help scale up our use of journey orchestration in a practical way.
Stanhope also provided a process to help organizations go beyond experimentation, including thinking about how to apply a generative AI function, how to deliver that function, and who’s involved with using it. He said data will be critical, and organizations will need to consider the data’s provenance, quality, security, and privacy, something the CDP can help with.
Finally, Stanhope said we need to think about how generative AI will operate and change our workflows and collaboration. Organizations will need to replan their processes to incorporate gen AI tools and define business and customer experience KPIs that are explainable, predictable, consistent, and transparent.
The next generation of marketing measurement
Forrester talks about the idea of data deprecation that shatters marketing measurement. Privacy regulations, browser and operating system restrictions, consumer actions such as using ad blockers, clearing browsing history, and limiting data sharing, and the walled gardens of companies like Facebook, Google, and retail media networks affect an organization’s ability to do traditional marketing measurement.
However, Stanhope said it has never been more important to show the efficacy of our investments and efforts. He said we need a system to provide the data and the algorithms to do the next generation of marketing measurement. This, he said, could be the CDP.
The CDP holds first-party customer data, which will be the backbone of any measurement strategy going forward. Stanhope said we need to think about how we can extend the CDP to support measurement, including organizational KPIs, marketing mix modeling, and even tactical measurement around campaigns, customer interactions, programs, and tactics.
Enable strategic marketing technology
We need to own a central core of martech capabilities, which includes two things unique to every company: data and the ability to orchestrate that data. Everything else, he said, plugs into that core.
The CDP can be that controlled core that provides the data and integration capabilities and can support AI investments and marketing measurement. You can also integrate all the insights and data strategy components into it, giving you flexibility for the future.
Prepare for today and the future with a CDP
Stanhope said organizations have to change; there’s no question it has to happen. So why not make the changes that will help us today and in the future? He said we need to meet the landscape where it is. Think about data and integration as the secret sauce that brings together the ecosystem of tools you need. Also, plan for agility by focusing on controlling and maximizing the data and orchestration core.
We need to work and push the CDP further, Stanhope said, into new places to maximize it.
Think about how to plan for, expand, and advocate for your CDP internally and make the most of the opportunity to leverage the CDP across the entire customer lifecycle. You can replay the session and download the presentation slides in Treasure Data’s Level Up community. Not a member yet? Join for free to continue the conversation with other CDP enthusiasts.
