Making Sense of Martech

"We don't want to be the dumb pipe. We want to be the brain for your marketing. And I'm sorry, everyone can't be the brain. You can't have five brains." — Peter

Peter Oleson is back, and the guardrails are off. Part 2 picks up where the dumb pipe debate left off and delves into the operational and economic realities that a composable stack actually demands of vendors, marketers, and the AI agents everyone's betting on. The thesis gets pressure-tested from every angle: vendor survival, job market implications, and whether the economics of AI decisioning even hold up yet.

This episode covers the MAP convergence already underway, why "warehouse native" is often a marketing claim rather than a technical reality, and what questions buyers should actually ask vendors instead of accepting alphabet soup at face value.

If you missed part one, start there →

Timestamps
00:45 — Sustainable growth vs. big contracts
03:30 — 90% piloting, 23% actually shipping
04:48 — The highest and best use of your time
06:15 — Why all AI emails look the same
12:40 — The AI budget crack analogy
16:45 — The race to the middle is real
21:55 — Frontline gets it, leadership doesn't
26:03 — No one is truly adapting yet
27:30 — Stop asking if they're composable
33:21 — Marketers must reclaim their seat at the table

Sponsor
Brought to you by Hightouch, the leading composable CDP and decisioning platform trusted by brands like Domino's, Chime, and Aritzia. 90% of customers have a real use case live within their first week, delivering world-class personalization at scale. Learn more at hightouch.com/msom.


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Creators and Guests

Host
Jacqueline Freedman
Founder of Monarch + Making Sense of Martech
Guest
Peter Oleson
Solutions Engineer

What is Making Sense of Martech?

Unfiltered takes on the biggest shifts in marketing technology. We spotlight what matters, who's leading (or lagging), and what's next. In Martech, clarity is power — and we're here to deliver it.

We left off with a live wire. If an agent makes the wrong call, the accountability doesn't

disappear. It lands on whoever wasn't watching. Today, Peter and I go further into what it

actually takes to close the gap between the pitch and the production reality and who's actually

making moves he says the industry needs. If a map takes your advice and becomes a pure

execution layer, it officially stops owning the data. It narrows its own surface area, and its own

AI features can worsen because it's only seeing a slice of customer behavior. It's a real trade off

for the vendor, but it's actually a big win for the customer in a lot of different ways. So make

the case for why a marketing automation platform CEO should voluntarily walk into this. I

think at the outset, like very few will. Um, but I guess a question I would ask them

is, do you want Sustainable growth? Or are you willing to take sustainable

growth over large contracts up front with churn down the line? And the

reason why I say that is like if a marketing automation platform CEO is hyper focused on being

the best execution layer they can be. Then the contract size might be lower to start,

but I would expect it to increase over time because I expect that your messaging more people,

um, and they're also not frustrated that you're charging them to store their data and then they

ultimately leave. Um, and that's in contrast to let's sell all the bells and whistles

and then churn out of those bells and whistles as the organization finds. Oh, actually, like the AI

agents that I have access to inside of here only live inside of these four walls

and don't have access to the things that I'm not even thinking about or didn't know existed inside

of the data warehouse. And I needed to work with a data and engineering team to figure that out.

Right. And so when we're talking about, like, predictive models,

anything AI agent, um, I expect that a lot of people will buy those to start and then

eventually they'll not renew them. And now your customer success team just took a churn

because they don't have a leg to stand on. When the customer says, well, we do all this upstream

anyway, and we're really getting a less strong model because it doesn't have access to the same

amount of data, because your contracts require me to reduce the amount of data that I have inside

of here to make you affordable, right? And so I would just say, yeah, you're going to take an

initial hit. The contract sizes will be lower, but you would have less churn. Quite a catch 22 for

the vendors. It's either evolve and prepare or stay

stagnant and wait it out and see what happens. Right. Like the obvious answer there is like just

connect to the data warehouse. Make your platform data warehouse native. Yeah, that takes a

lot of work. So like, I understand why the traditional marketing automation

platforms either are taking a long time to do that or won't do that,

because for sure, the data touches every surface inside of your platform. So when you change that

model, you have to make it work with everything. Yes, I'm building on that. So the the infamous got

Brinker and Franz Ramirez in their state of martech research this year. They found that 90% of

marketing orgs use AI agents somewhere, but only 23% of them have it in full

production, so the rest are stuck in this pilot mode or assist only mode. And if the dumb pipe

model hands more decisioning to AI agents is your thesis. This gap closes fast. There's a

lot to unpack there. Um, I would also note, like Scott Brinker has broken my brain a few times

in the last year with a lot of the work that he's doing around AI agents and AI in in marketing.

So here's what I would say is nearly everyone that I talk to has

some AI initiative at their organization. And I'll quote a former manager of mine,

Katie Behrens, is like the question that people need to ask is, what is the

highest and best use of my time right now? And to take that a step further, I think

you also have to use that same question with agents like what are they actually

good at? The challenge that we have here is that it, simply put, takes a lot of time to figure

out for your business context and for the data that you have, what are these agents going to

actually be good at? Um, because every business is slightly different, right? Like they have a

different data setup. Maybe they have a different loyalty program structure, like whatever your

flavor is. Um, and I want to be clear, like I am not suggesting or never will

suggest that all decisions just get handed to an agent and you say, all right, run with it. Right. Um,

but what I am suggesting is that today's decision making,

in many cases, is going to be limited to the data that exists inside of whatever

platform that you're using. I'm going to push and add. It's also limited by the

creativity and development of the individuals, because if you can't

recognize the very simple tasks you're doing on a daily, weekly, monthly basis that are repeatable

and are straightforward, and instead you're focusing on the advanced multi-step

multi thing, you have to build it in brick by brick. And it's similar is that investment for a

dividend. And you really have to invest there. I completely agree. Yeah. Um

I'm not generally a fan of like reading dusty old white dude books. Um,

but me either. But I will say like that your statement reminds me of like

the The Effective executive, which is like, if we don't understand where our time is going,

then we have no way of changing the way that we operate for good. Right.

And so I would say, yeah, you have to really understand what am I spending my time on?

Is that a good use of my time? What does an agent need to understand in order for them to do

this, as opposed to me to do this? And then how do I need to wrestle with this agent in order to get

the output that I wanted and not stop at good enough? Like you stop at

this? Is production ready? So like I would posit that like, this gap is gonna close

fast. But it does take time and effort on the part of the people using these agents.

Yeah, it's the concept of like, player coach. You need to be the coach of your agent player because

they're going to make mistakes or there's going to be this unusual play that happens in a corner

case and you're like, oh gosh, how did we did not prepare for this? We need to rethink how we

approach when something like this happens. I see some platforms maybe getting better at the agent

side of things, but, um, it doesn't feel like it's enough. Like there's not enough

context for these agents to be really good. Um, and most of them just end up looking like, uh,

especially on the generative side, the crap that gets thrown out there, like, looks like any

Gemini or Claude or, like, fill in the blank on your AI harness. Like, all emails start to look the

same. Um, and that comes down to it's really difficult to build in

guardrails and brand guidelines that are worth their weight. Right?

Um, it's just tough. It takes a lot of time. The AI harness, like there's the large language model and

then there's the AI harness. Right. Which is how do you drive the model? Like if you're talking about

creating a campaign, the AI harness would be the one that breaks down. We start with an idea that

also has a goal. Now we connect that to data like so. It's the order of operations,

um, is what the AI harness would handle. Um, and ultimately, like you need to train that AI

harness how to do what you do manually every day on a daily basis if you want to, or almost like

your company objectives and goals. It's like you have an OKR for your agent and then for the

individual agents. Hey, I need to answer basically a campaign brief if this is exactly what I need

you to do and not do and things like that. Exactly right. And if you don't have like that really good

AI harness. With all the guardrails, you end up getting different outputs every single time you

ask the same question. Correct. And that can be really frustrating. Um, and so I

don't blame marketers for, for going in and saying, oh, I tried this thing. It didn't give me the

output that I want. And so therefore the product is broken. It's like it takes more than that. Like,

let's not say that the product is broken yet. Let's also, again, looking inward is really

important and saying, did I give it everything? Hard fought token costs

are rising in the post funding subsidization. And it's it's coming to an end seemingly.

Maybe I don't know. I don't know how much more open free cash there is in the world because it

doesn't feel like it. And you have said that the price and volume economics don't work at the

current scale, so isn't let the agents make the decisioning calls a thesis that's economically

unproven right now and not just architecturally proven. I think that's fair, right? And admittedly,

that's not an area where I'm spending a lot of time focusing is like, how much does it cost for

me to use an agent for this versus using a human? I think, though, that again, going back to

that statement of like, what's your highest and best, you know, save the really difficult things

that you maybe wouldn't even be able to do, like analyzing massive sets of data. Like you can't do

that efficiently. I don't know a lot of people who can. When we're talking about

at the scale of data that or enterprise organizations have. So I guess what I would say is

we don't have to use agents for everything. Like if it's just a simple trigger, like you don't need

an agent for that necessarily, or if it's a simple rule, you don't need an agent for that. But where I

think it's useful is when you have a problem that you've only ever dreamed of solving, and your

brain starts to break. When you think about solving that problem or you don't even know where

to start. That's where I think being a thought partner, at the very least with an AI

agent, becomes really useful. The economics of it. Yeah, it's it's unproven right now. I don't think

anyone knows what's going to happen with token costs in the next two weeks, let alone two years.

But, um, have to be really smart with where you dedicate your time and budget for these things. Um,

so you you do have to be tracking it. Oh, yeah. I mean, I know so many instances where

the enterprise is like, use AI for everything, and now they're receiving monthly budget limits per

cost center per department, and people are freaking out like you gave me crack, and

now I cannot use it, I. You're not allowing me to do what I was doing. Enabling it. Well,

yeah. And if you're in the finance department, if you don't have a tool that allows you to easily

track that and set guardrails, like maybe not the right tool for you. Exactly. Brought to you by our

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can do for you at high Touch. Awesome. And now back to the hot seat. We've been getting super duper

nerdy in the best possible way. AKA my favorite. And what are everyday conversations are like?

So taking a step back to our industry at large, or maybe like the main line if we're talking

plumbing. So the map market is no longer a theoretical debate. It's

a live restructuring with winners and real losers or casualties. Depends on how you look at

it. And let's name what's actually happening, not what everyone's decks are saying.

So your dumb pipe thesis has a dependency problem. You still need a map for email sending

workflows, forms, and campaign management. So the composable stack doesn't eliminate maps, it just

denotes them a bit and changes their role. Does that mean that the business model requires

maps to survive? And isn't that true of every composable or reverse ETL vendor right now.

And this is not inclusive and solely just about high touch. I think broadly, what we're going to

see in the next couple of years is CDPs or composable

platforms start to do some of what marketing automation platforms do and vice versa. Right. Like

we're already seeing that in the space. It's been a race to the middle for years. Exactly. The

convergence, even just the term CEP, all of these things are converging and also extra

confusing amongst alphabet soup. Totally. So everything regresses to the mean. But I would also

say that it's not really true today that

the composable stack requires a true marketing automation platform. Like I

have, I've spoken with many people and know a lot of organizations that

go direct to an MTA, and they manage templates themselves like that is possible for you to do.

You absolutely need to have the right butts and seats on your operations and your engineering

team in order to solve that. You could probably meet a lot of those people if you go to like

Twilio signal, like those are all people that are just building it. Like the people that go direct

to infrastructure are a real special breed. They are fascinating people, super smart

people. Um, but that's a specific type of organization. So I think it's not true today that

a map is required in a composable stack. Um, nor will it be tomorrow, because I expect

that, you know, the data activation side, um, converges with the

map side. And we're art like we're seeing this on both ends. Like Treasure Data has engaged studio

Bres has CDI and zero copy personalization like they're already working on this stuff. It's

just like, how much are the lines going to blur moving forward, and who's going to be the best of

both worlds? Um, forms are maybe a separate issue. Like a lot of marketing

operation, marketing automation platforms themselves don't actually solve this problem at

the level needed. Um, maybe another feather in the cap for Salesforce marketing Cloud. Cloud pages

was like pretty awesome. Absolutely not. Know that you're not getting away with that one. It's a

bridge too far, I know I crossed that's crossing the line.

People need it. People use it. I'm just saying, oh, I'm not saying they don't need forms, but Cloud

Pages is not the answer. I don't disagree there. I don't disagree, especially when you start breaking

down what super messages actually are. Oh right. Yeah, that uses a super message. But it's not a

message. But it's still a super message. Yep. Yep. Okay. In your essay

that has, I think, rocked the martech world in the best way, between all of the debates

that are happening, the private DMs, the messages, and really, I think it's been an illuminating

moment for those who just haven't quite gotten there yet or really put the words in

such a succinct manner. I think everyone had thoughts of this or or worries, but didn't really

understand that it's kind of happening. That's it. You did also give for

reasons and laid out the reasons for maps to survive, and you were very clear.

And so just for those who haven't read the essay, we've got build bigger API's, own

more of the funnel without owning the data Support both head and headless

interfaces and stop forcing customers to store data inside of the platform. Every single one of

these cannibalize an existing revenue stream or completely kills a roadmap item. Which one is the

hardest sell internally? The one a map's own sales team fights hardest against, and why? I

kind of see this specifically on the sales side. Like I kind of see it as being the opposite. Every

sales team wants to have all four of these things. Um, I think though, if we're

talking about which is the hardest to sell internally, it has to be storing the data inside

of the platform. Um, because and this is not a sales point, I think,

again, we're seeing more and more RFPs where one of the top line asks is, can you operate directly

off of my data platform data. So like they want to be able to check that yes box. Um,

so I would say it's probably where the data lives if you have a

solid MCP server. Like, I don't think your sales team particularly cares whether or not someone

logs into the platform or not. Um, I could see customer support

and, uh, customer success and product caring about that, right? Because they have metrics that they

have to work against. Um, especially on the product side. Like is your product piece that you've

if your product feature that you've developed actually making money, is it being

used? Um, they are held to a higher standard. Their,

um, bigger API pipes that allows you to sell into organizations that you couldn't before. Right. So

like You're selling into the organizations that, in my experience, have to, because of

their needs, build their own setup and go direct to an MTA. Nothing bothers me more

than really small API limits. Oh yeah. It's so frustrating and limiting.

It's it's incredibly reasonable. I mean, I have questions about why are you sending this much, but

it's incredibly reasonable for an organization to say, I only want to trigger messages, and

I want to trigger 150 billion of them a year. Like

R.I.P your inbox. Yeah. I have questions with the overall strategy. Right. But there

are certainly organizations out there where that's a reality. Right. If you're talking at the

scale of of like an Amazon and granted like they have Amazon SES so like, they own their own pipes

and, you know, they drink their own children use other maps. Just kind of saying that multiple

actually, they definitely do. And organizations of that size tend to. Right. Um, but it's

reasonable to ask that question, um, even owning the data, like I think so long as

the salespeople and the engineers and the products are getting the product, people

are getting the feedback that, hey, this is awesome, and I can activate my data in the way that we

need to inside of this map. Like, I don't think it's a tough sell internally. I do think it's a

tough thing to actually build. I feel like it's a tough sell. Top down,

bottom up. Makes sense. Sure. Yeah. The frontline people. That's worth noting. Like the frontline

folks who are in my DMs or are texting me, they're like, yes, okay, great.

Like the marketing ops people, they get me. Um, and I get them. It's the it's

the higher ups where sometimes it's like, no, I don't see that in a world, because then how do we

be strategic? Like, we don't want to be the dumb pipe. We want to be the brain for your

marketing. And I'm sorry, everyone can't be the brain. You can't have five brains. That doesn't

work. There's a reason why we don't have five brains. Not five brains. Exactly. Yeah, you got a lot

to digest. Five stomachs? Totally fine. Um, I have brains. I feel like that would be difficult. Agreed.

So if maps really do shrink in the future to execution only does that kill the

martech job market as we know it? Like the strategist, the ops person, the platform admin,

all of it. I mean, I'm not super doom and gloom here. Like, do I think in general from

AI, there's going to be a general reduction in terms of the total headcount that we need across

every industry. Yes, I think that's probably a realistic expectation. That's also been super well

documented. Um, I do think, though, what this opens

up is those same functions may be operating in a different environment. So like

instead of being masters of tools like Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Bray's iterable fill in the blank

like they become masters of their organizational data. I

also think like this opens up avenues that didn't exist before. I'm a marketing ops guy. I am not a

creative like you asked me to do. Creative. Maybe I could do some copywriting. Like that's basically

where it ends. But like, I'm not that full, creative, sweet person. But if I have a

thought partner in an AI agent that's actually good at creating on brand imagery and things like

that. Maybe I can dip my toe into the creative side. So, like, to answer your question, yes, there's

probably a reduction in force across every industry known to humanity right now. Um, but I

think there is still time spent in the other things that we've talked about before, like making

sure that these agents and guardrails are being reined in and having their work checked, and that

we're building the guardrails to make it have a good output. Um, they're just not solving the same

problems that they are today. Yeah. New problems require new solutions and up leveling and

upskilling in a lot of ways. Mhm. All right I'm going to ask the spiciest question of

the hour. So which ISPs are actually adapting shrinking towards

execution, opening their APIs and getting out of the data business in which a refusing name, who's

adapting and who's stalling. And if you won't answer, tell me why. I mean, blanket

statement. Pretty much no one's adapting in the way that they need to yet, so that's why I

won't call out a specific, uh, organization. Um, what I do think, like,

let's talk about the shifts that we're already seeing. Zero copy, composable warehouse native. Like,

fill in the blank. That's the new alphabet soup, by the way, is like, what do you call just building?

What do you call building on top of the data warehouse? Right. I call it modularity because I

like being able to plug and play different bricks of so I can create the best in breed,

no matter what it is for that set of business. Yep. Lego blocks and like the promise of the Lego

block is that it connects with other Lego blocks, right? What we don't need are is a

composable approach that is connecting a Lego block to a Duplo to a magnet tile. Right.

Like zero copy and modularity is getting talked about more and more. This is a good thing

for everyone involved. Where it falls short is often that it's only partially

modular or composable. Like I can create an audience without moving the data. But if I want to

use personalization tokens, merge parameters, whatever you want to call them, dynamic content

inside of a message. Like inherently there has to be some kind of data transfer, right? Um,

so that part is really challenging. So like it ends up being more warehouse connected than

warehouse native, right? Um, what I would leave the audience

with is like to the organizations that are evaluating these platforms. Some important

questions to be asking, like, can you build and activate an audience using, you know, 50

million rows from a warehouse table without copying the data into the platform?

When building the audiences using an agent, can you show me the generated SQL

that it's using so I can validate it? What does latency look like? Like what

is the latency? Um, and by the way, saying it all needs to be real time is a cop out. That is

not real. Stop saying that. There's so few use cases where real time is actually

needed. Password reset. Yes. Right. One time password. Right. Yeah. It is

so rare. And yet I think because of, uh, you know, inventing, becoming

a lot faster in the industry. We're all chasing that next thing. Like we can't get enough sexy to

say this is in real time when it's like, you know what? A schedule of, like, once a day or twice a day

is more than enough. Yeah. Think about the use case. Think about the customer experience. Think about

what is actually needed. But to say that it's all needs to be real time. That's just categorically

false. Like just stop it. And also a waste of resources. Every stretch you're going to pay for

it. Like you can get real time on everything, but you're gonna pay through the nose for it. Um, and

then I think the, the final thing to be asking, if you're really invested in a

composable or a modular approach is what are the artifacts that persist

when I send the message? Because that's always the place where the most artifacts are going to exist.

What exists? How long does it persist? Where does it persist?

Um, and what controls do I have over that? And then finally, like, is this just an audience builder

or can I actually do personalization with this? Can I go beyond who

and making a decision in a branch split to, oh, now I can get inside of the content of the

message and personalize it without storing data inside of the platform. I loved your answer, even

though it was a cop out as well. It's a total cop out. No one's getting free advice or kudos here.

Uh, it's just not going to happen. I think there are two platforms that do deserve at least a

shout out, and they've already been mentioned via Luke Ambrosini in some capacity. Just because

Luke gets it and he's always gotten it. Message gears did start this years and years and years

ago. This is not new, but to your point, they never really capitalized on

making it friendly for the marketer. It's primarily friendly for the engineer, and it's a

you need to satisfy both personas. Yeah, and I will say it's not the most proven platform

yet, but Salzman is a is data warehouse native and they are doing

what they're doing. And so there are two platforms, one far more mature and one far less.

But it all matters on what your requirements and needs are and what already

exists before you have to uplevel, because this is up leveling your entire infrastructure

and totally puts you in. It's like we we prefer to like legacy players, like Marketing Cloud and

Pardot and Marketo and then like next gen as iterable Bray's boom reach, you name it. And it's

like, okay, what is this next frontier? Because next gen Is next gen. There's no question about it. But

this is a completely different business model and also operating model. And we've got to coin that

term at some point. Yeah I don't know what it is. Like um C copy

model CMP composable marketing platform I don't know. We're quoting it here. Zero

copy marketing I don't know zc, CCF. So if an agent

is deciding channel timing, message content, what's actually left for a human marketer to do

in five years? So many things. You and I talk about this a lot, but, um, agents

don't have taste. Um, and agents and AI in general is

inherently looking in a rearview mirror. Right. So the things that humans are doing

there. number one. Obviously, they're reviewing agents calls. Um, so the decisions that agents

make. You know, everyone calls that human in the loop, right? Um, which I kind of roll my eyes at. But

it's true. Like you need to have a human in this process. Yeah. Um, but they're inserting their taste

into the equation. Um, and they're looking forward and determining how they are going to steer the

business. Right. Because of that rear facing nature of context, it's. What's the next thing? Um, what

are the things that haven't happened yet in our business context that I need to now prepare

the agent for? If you're using an agent. Um, and also, like, if you're getting into a new

channel, like, how can you evaluate emerging channels like, say, RCS? Right.

Without that foundational understanding of where do I want to take this? Because

an agent can be your thought partner, but they're probably not going to be that good at coming up

with the first thing to test. Um, you need to do that without a

doubt. I, um, I just think it means a combination of you get more time to be more

strategic, but you have to get the foundation right. And that's honestly the hardest part for

any and every aspect of marketing. Because so few I have that. Yeah. It's also like a conversation

that a lot of marketers have been edged out of, uh, correct for the wrong reasons. Like, they are

absolutely a valuable person to have at the table. I would love to see need to have a seat at the

table. Otherwise you're misinformed. And I think, you know, that's incumbent on the data and

engineering side, making sure that they have a seat. But it's also incumbent on the marketers to

say, I like have some sharp elbows and say like, hey, I need to have a seat at this table.

Yeah. Agreed. Well, Peter, this conversation, in my personal opinion,

is what everyone needed to hear. What I've been wanting to hear in a less

Babli way that we normally talk in a more streamlined approach. And so it's really,

I think, the conversation that particularly those who've held the keys to a map SP ep and it's it's

interesting because you're both an insider and have done things on the outside, both as a

marketer and on the agency side. And so we'll definitely be watching whether this

timeline you're hedging proves to be conservative, too generous. And I think this level of

critique is so valuable because if we cannot self-reflect on where we are and where we can be

going And where the market is already choosing and going. That is the downfall of

any business model, product, platform, system, way of thinking. Yeah. And

before I let you go, who is someone we should have on the podcast? I namechecked her

already in this episode, but you need to have Katie Barron's on this show. Um, Katie

Love Katie was a manager of mine at iterable. I would love to see

her on the Making Sense of MarTech podcast. I would too and talking about taste, she has

completely transformed my wardrobe and it's all her fault. And she already knows this. She is a

tastemaker that is undeniable, without a doubt. Well, Peter, thank you

so much for coming on. Where can folks find you and also listen to more of your musings.

Um, mostly on LinkedIn is probably the best place to see me. Yes, we miss Professor Pete. I

miss Professor Pete. It's gonna come back. I don't know when in what format, but, like, low production

video is my love language to this industry. Um, I just I

love talking about things, um, in a really unstructured format and just rambling. I never

edit anything, so I'm there. DM me like anyone who's DM'd me on LinkedIn or any other

channel knows that I respond. Um. And I would love to chat. We covered a lot of ground today

and in part one, and the uncomfortable truth here is most of it is actually really fixable. So

here's where to start. The data tax argument cuts both ways. Maps charge to store data you already

own, but composable stacks carried their own headcount cost. The difference truly is ownership

and not price. And that means before you sign any contract, ask whether the investment you're making

stays with you when you leave or disappears when you leave the platform. In my opinion, that's the

real audit. And it's not just an invoice. Total. The next takeaway. Vendors must support composable

architecture. It has a near-zero survival rate past the six month implementation

because most platforms market as warehouse native are actually warehouse connected. The

data still moves, which means stop asking vendors if they're composable. Ask them to show you the

generated SQL when their system builds an audience, and ask what happens to your data after

it is sent? If they can't answer either. Particularly specifically, you have an answer and

takeaway number three. Only 23% of organizations running AI agents have them in full production.

The other 77% are stuck in pilot or assist only mode. And Peter's own framing is that the gap

closes slowly, because it depends on understanding what agents are actually good at for your

specific business, not a universal timeline across all businesses. Which also means if your team is

waiting for agents to just get better on their own, you're waiting for the wrong thing. You're in

the wrong line altogether. The unlock is building the harness, the guardrails, and the order of

operations, not the model. Thanks for tuning in to the making sense of martech. Try not to think

about your map as a leaky faucet all week, or a kitchen sink for that matter. See you next time. A

special thank you to Christine Murtaugh, who edited this episode. In an extra special thank you

to Jenna Carter for believing in this passion project meets business. Stay curious.