MCP servers are clearly a fashion must. Customer data tool vendor Aqfer just added one of their own. In their case, MCP provides AI systems with access to enterprise data that remains in cloud data stores. Aqfer’s contribution is structuring, governing and contextualizing the cloud data to serve marketing use cases.
Customer engagement platform Braze avoids the CDP label but its year-old Data Platform ticks all the boxes: it ingests data, builds and stores unified customer profiles, and shares the results with other systems. They’ve just announced plans for further enhancements, such as CSV data imports for custom events, as well a Model Context Profile (MCP) server that lets user query Braze data with genAI prompts.
Marketers often cite poor data quality as an obstacle to AI success, but IT and tech professionals surveyed for DataBank have a rosier view. They cited technical issues, including integration, scaling, and deployment, as the biggest obstacles to AI success, while ranking data quality and access fourth on the list. An impressive 71% said their customer data is “very well prepared” for AI use, a far higher rate than any other data type.
It barely feels like news when industry giants add AI features, since that’s what they’re expected to do. But lots of people use their products, so their announcements are probably of higher interest than most. With that in mind, let’s note that Adobe has just announced general availability of agents for audience creation, journey orchestration, experimentation, journey insights, website optimization and agent support.