Writing

Conversational MarTech interfaces hide system boundaries inside permissions, prompts, definitions, retrieval policies and traces. Five questions and an agent register make them inspectable again.

One frontier model landed this week, and it was not the story. The consequential releases were an administrator key that makes MCP tool approvals expire with the session, and a console for finding out which agents you are already running.

Adobe took the motivation layer of loyalty into the CEP and left the points ledger behind. Two vendors shipped remote MCP servers and sold the boundary rather than the reach. A week where every new surface arrived with its constraint attached.

The first edition of a new weekly series on agentic work platforms. This week the big three stopped selling capability and started selling control: OpenAI Presence, cryptographic agent identity in Gemini Enterprise, and governed publishing in Microsoft Copilot.

In a single week, 6sense put its intelligence behind MCP, Iterable pulled live data into journeys, and Adobe Journey Optimizer shipped both. Three vendors, one move: the line between knowing the customer and acting on them is giving way.

DXP emerged when websites became complex digital experiences and the CMS was no longer enough. Then the category expanded until it began to describe almost the entire stack.

DAM began as a searchable library for digital files. It became the governance and distribution layer for assets moving across brands, markets, channels and AI-assisted content operations.

A quiet product week still moved a boundary: paid-media execution is being pulled closer to engagement and automation platforms, while more of the campaign chain is being operated through agentic interfaces. Why that is an architecture question, not a feature one.

MarTech platform decisions are shaped by four gravitational forces: the experience suite, the CRM, the enterprise data layer and the engagement runtime. Understanding which gravity should dominate is more useful than comparing feature lists.