Databricks put an end to weeks of rumors today as it announced CustomerLake, an agentic CDP.
The announcement came at the company’s Data + AI Summit in San Francisco and marks Databricks’ move into the martech market. In March, Databricks entered the security market with the announcement of its Lakewatch product.
CustomerLake gives marketers and data teams a workforce of agents that continuously analyze behavior, make decisions, and act. The company says this agentic workforce can deliver always-on personalized customer experiences 1 billion times a day.
Built on the Databricks lakehouse technology and governed by its Unity Catalog, CustomerLake consolidates customer data, identity resolution, audience building, campaign automation, and activation.
With the announcement of CustomerLake, Databricks is appealing to marketing organizations facing a future where agents are used internally by marketers, while at the same time marketers will need to market to agents deployed by customers to research and evaluate products.
As Databricks sees it, most traditional martech applications were not built with either scenario in mind.
Does the agentic era require a new breed of CDP?
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 siloed outside the company’s core AI platform. The result is fractured identity that makes true personalization impossible at scale.
The agentic era, on the other hand, requires real-time access to context, data, and execution. With CustomerLake, Databricks brings the CDP natively into the Databricks platform, so the same models that generate insight can drive activation directly.
“Marketers need to reimagine their entire foundation — not just the campaigns they run, but the customers they run them for, which now include agents,” said Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks, said in a statement. “With CustomerLake, customer data, AI models, and agents live in one governed platform. Marketing stops being a series of campaigns and becomes a continuous loop — agents that constantly analyze, decide, and act on every customer in real time. For the first time, enterprises can deliver infinity 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 Conversions 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 allows CustomerLake users to connect Databricks with bi-directional pipelines to the entire marketing and advertising technology stack.
CustomerLake’s agentic identity resolution combine rules and agents to unify disconnected records into richer, more accurate customer profiles.A built-in identity marketplace enriches profiles with third-party identity graphs and partner data from providers such as Acxiom, Epsilon, LiveRamp, TransUnion, and Adstra.
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