I spend most of my time talking to the engagement platforms, identity solution providers, customer data platforms (CDPs) and analytics vendors at the heart of the marketing technology ecosystem. These are the companies powering how leading brands connect with consumers. And what I hear consistently, regardless of category, is a version of the same question: Where is marketing technology headed and where do we fit?
The answer starts with a simple truth: Martech product categories are becoming irrelevant. The only thing that matters now is whether the experience you help deliver feels timely and worth a consumer’s attention. When success is reduced to whether the experience lands, every company starts building toward the same moment: relevance that earns action.
And AI is accelerating the convergence of martech categories. Agents can now optimize the path to relevance in ways that static rules never could. But agents have a constraint that no amount of model improvement can resolve: They need context. An agent without context is just automation. An agent with rich, governed, real-time context is something closer to intelligence.
"Marketers have been told for years that personalization was solved, but the reality has been static segments, brittle workflows and missed customer moments. Simon has changed that by bringing reasoning, context and execution directly into the Snowflake data layer for marketing to use," says Matt Walker, Co-Founder and CTO of Simon AI.
