Databricks has introduced CustomerLake, an agentic Customer Data Platform (CDP) designed to provide marketing and data teams with automated agents that analyse behaviour, make decisions, and execute actions. The platform aims to deliver automated, personalised customer experiences at scale.
CustomerLake operates natively within the Databricks environment, integrating customer data, AI models, and agents. Built on the lakehouse architecture and governed by Unity Catalog, the offering consolidates customer data, identity resolution, audience generation, campaign automation, and activation into a single foundation.
This launch represents Databricks’ ongoing expansion into enterprise software categories, following the previous release of Lakewatch, a security lakehouse. CustomerLake is currently available in Private Preview, with initial users including HP, Circle K, AB InBev, and Getnet by Santander.
Shift toward agentic marketing infrastructure
The marketing sector is currently navigating two simultaneous transitions: marketing to consumer-deployed AI agents that research and transact on behalf of individuals, and restructuring internal marketing technology stacks to be operated by autonomous agents. Traditional marketing technology and legacy CDPs generally utilise a waterfall model, where campaigns are planned and executed across fragmented systems. This structure can lead to prolonged deployment times and siloed data, which can complicate identity resolution and scalable personalistion.
Conversely, autonomous agents require real-time access to context, data, and execution capabilities within a unified environment. CustomerLake addresses this by embedding CDP functionality directly into the Databricks platform, allowing the same models that generate insights to handle direct activation.
“Marketers need to reimagine their entire foundation — not just the campaigns they run, but the customers they run them for, which now include agents,” stated Ali Ghodsi, Co-founder and CEO of Databricks. “With CustomerLake, customer data, AI models, and agents live in one governed platform. Marketing stops being a series of campaigns and becomes a continuous loop — agents that constantly analyse, decide, and act on every customer in real time. For the first time, enterprises can deliver infinity campaigns and 1:1 personalisation at scale.”
An agentic CDP is a category of marketing infrastructure developed for evolving buyer behaviours, where human consumers deploy AI agents to evaluate and purchase goods, and marketers use agents to interact with them. Unlike traditional CDPs, an agentic CDP consolidates governed customer context, AI models, and execution capabilities. This setup operates continuously without requiring manual campaign triggers, utilising the same underlying models for both insight generation and activation to eliminate data duplication, pipeline latency, and governance trade-offs.
Core capabilities of CustomerLake
CustomerLake features several enterprise-scale marketing functionalities:
- Continuous engagement (infinity campaigns): Replaces traditional, one-off campaigns with ongoing, agent-driven interactions to provide individualised customer experiences.
- Campaign agents: Allows marketing teams to construct audiences, automate campaigns, and personalise interactions directly from the core data foundation, independent of storage location.
- Profile agents: Converts raw customer data into structured, business-ready records for marketing and customer-facing teams via an automated loop.
- Open partner ecosystem: Facilitates data ingestion and activation across various platforms and partners, including Adobe, Meta (Audience and Conversions API), Acxiom, Epsilon, LiveRamp, The Trade Desk, Braze, Bloomreach, Iterable, Snapchat, Magnite, TransUnion, Adstra, Twilio, Integral Ad Science (IAS), and Unity.
- Native integrations and reverse ETL: Establishes bi-directional pipelines connecting Databricks to external marketing and advertising technology stacks.
- Agentic identity resolution: Combines rule-based logic and AI agents to merge disconnected records into comprehensive customer profiles.
- Built-in identity marketplace: Enables profile enrichment using third-party identity graphs and data from providers such as Acxiom, Epsilon, LiveRamp, TransUnion, and Adstra.
CustomerLake is now available in Private Preview. CustomerLake pricing will be designed around a specialised, value-aligned consumption model rather than a traditional software license, providing a highly cost effective alternative for enterprise brands looking to consolidate the martech stack and reduce technology spend.
