After this week’s Salesforce and Braze news, one thing is clear: enterprise martech stacks will look very different in 18 months.
We think that marketing stacks will continue to consolidate. But maybe not in the way most people anticipate. M&A will happen, of course, but innovation is what will really drive the change.
Hightouch itself is the best example of this: today we're announcing that our agentic marketing platform has enterprise-grade delivery capabilities. Paired with the Composable CDP, that means enterprises no longer have any need for an engagement platform in the traditional sense. Yes, Hightouch sends the messages now, too.
Wait what? How does that work?
First, let’s decompose what a CEP (Customer Engagement Platform) or ESP really is. It’s four primary capabilities bundled together: customer data, workflows for content and orchestration, and delivery infrastructure.
Let’s quickly go through these.
Yes, Hightouch can send the messages now
Customer data has shifted to the data warehouse. The largest and fastest-growing companies in the world already use Hightouch to orchestrate customer journeys on top of their warehouse, not just for lifecycle marketing but also advertising, product experiences, and more.
Marketing workflows are starting to be transformed by AI. With Agentic AI, we’re seeing marketer workflows completely flip on their head. Juan Mendoza of The Martech Weekly recently surveyed hundreds of enterprise martech teams and he found something startling:
“In almost every organization we surveyed, there are lifecycle marketers that are doing the majority of their work with agents. They’ve literally stopped using their engagement platform in any form I recognize.”
I’m proud to say that we’re enabling this shift for leading brands like MoneyLion, Fullspan Health, Thumbtack, XP, and many more. Using our agentic marketing platform, every one of them are running far more personalized campaigns much faster, with timelines dropping from weeks to days (and sometimes hours) as they reinvent their workflow to be AI-first.
The missing piece has always been Delivery. And delivery is not trivial. It must be bullet-proof and enterprise-grade. Fortunately, we have been building this for a couple years now and we’ve rolled it out to a number of complex customers running extremely high-scale lifecycle programs.
Hightouch supports all the major messaging channels, including email, SMS, push, in-app messaging, and WhatsApp, with both batch and real-time messaging. That includes consent and compliance controls, domain management and warming, and a very long tail of small (but critical!) things that enterprises expect. We also have all the in-house deliverability expertise and operational support that enterprise lifecycle programs need.
Our solution is deployed in production at large retailers, media companies, health care companies, financial services firms and more. Medium is a great example:
“In under a month we'd moved our sending onto Hightouch, and today it handles millions of messages a day. Having data, personalization, and delivery in one place means fewer tools to manage and far more flexibility in what we can send. And with AI agents working on that same data, our marketers can do more on their own.”
SJ Crawford
Director of Marketing at Medium
But with all that said, we also know that enterprise technology doesn’t change overnight. That’s why we built our capabilities to be composable. If you are ready for Hightouch to handle delivery - we’ll do it. But if not, we can configure the Composable CDP and Agentic Marketing Platform to send from your existing CEP.
We think it will make a lot of sense for many companies to simplify their architecture around Hightouch, but that’s not even the most disruptive part.
Delivery is just where it starts. The whole “workflow layer” of Martech is being eaten by AI
We frequently meet companies that have bought the best marketing tools but still struggle to consistently deliver effective, personalized campaigns across channels.
Their teams spend weeks coordinating data requests, writing briefs, producing content, and setting up campaigns. Even after launch, finding out what worked and deciding what to change takes more manual work.
Our Agentic Marketing Platform addresses three problems:
- It takes 50+ steps, 5+ teams, and 4-8 weeks to go from idea to launch. The current generation of marketing tools leave 80%+ of the work to the marketing team - briefs, content, production, deployment, launching, etc. Our marketing harness gives teams a way to leverage agents within their own marketing processes in tools like Asana, Workfront, etc. and have the full context of your brand, legal/compliance, and marketing program.
- Companies have tons of data but little signal/insights. You need proactive agents that are working 24/7 to discover insights like underserved audiences, why campaigns are underperforming, and new opportunities ranked by potential impact. This is exactly what our Agentic CDP does.
- Static campaigns are too focused on your agenda, rather than the customer. Journeys should be self-evolving in a governed way based on what’s actually happening in the market.
We are tackling all three of these things head-on with the Agentic Marketing Platform. Just last week, we saw an 80-year old media company that operates in hundreds of countries cut their campaign production time from about 6 weeks to literally 3 hours. This would’ve been impossible even one year ago.
The transformation of not only marketing organizations but martech stacks is really just beginning.
What about composability?
We firmly believe that lifecycle marketing should be powered by the strongest data foundation, the data warehouse. We are also deeply committed to an open ecosystem and customer choice.
We founded Hightouch on those principles and we won’t depart from that.
Hightouch can bring an AI-first and warehouse-native way of working to any organization regardless of their CEP. Or, we can help consolidate the stack and replace tools that are no longer needed. We believe that the most composable architecture will win, whether that’s data, content, delivery, or anything else for that matter.
This is a time of significant disruption in martech, but it’s also an incredibly exciting time to be working in marketing. We think genuine workflow transformation for lifecycle marketing is right around the corner.
Come talk to us. We’d love to show you the next evolution of your martech stack.
