Oct 16, 2025

The idea of “Customer 360” has captivated marketers for years. It promises a unified view of every customer, the ability to personalize at scale, and seamless campaign execution across platforms. But here's the problem: The tools built to deliver on that vision, traditional customer data platforms (CDPs), have made the data problem worse. Instead of helping marketers activate what they already have, CDPs often duplicate infrastructure, fragment logic, and create new sources of truth. Most teams already have the data they need, but it's trapped in silos or locked behind systems that weren't designed for activation. This isn't a tooling problem. It's an architectural one. If your company has invested in a modern cloud data warehouse, you've already built the foundation. You don't need another system to manage customer data. You need a way to turn that data into action. THE WAREHOUSE ALREADY KNOWS YOUR CUSTOMER For most technical teams, the data warehouse is already the source of truth. Tools like Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, and Redshift track behavior, build customer segments, and even generate predictive scores. This is where the most accurate and comprehensive customer data lives. Subscribe to the Daily newsletter. Fast Company's trending stories delivered to you every day Privacy Policy | Fast Company Newsletters But for marketing teams, that data is often out of reach. They're promised that a CDP will fix this, offering plug-and-play personalization without involving engineering. Instead, CDPs make a copy of that warehouse data, recreate it in a separate ecosystem, and enforce a new set of definitions. It's not just redundant. It's risky. Marketers end up with a partial view of the customer, while data teams are overwhelmed with support tickets for a platform they didn't choose. This leads to more than frustration. It leads to delays, misalignment, and ultimately bad decisions. According to eMarketer , data is the number one bottleneck for marketing teams. A recent report found that preparing and transforming data can take between 45% and 80% of an analyst's time. COMPOSABLE CDPs ARE BUILT FOR WHAT'S NEXT The future isn't another all-in-one CDP. It's a Composable CDP, one that's modular and built around your warehouse, not on top of it. Rather than replace your existing stack, a composable approach keeps the data where it is and connects best-in-class tools for identity resolution, audience building, consent management, and activation. Companies like Warner Music Group, PetSmart, and Calendly are already moving in this direction. They are unifying their data strategies around the warehouse and choosing modular tools that enhance what's already working. This model is especially powerful in the era of large language models (LLMs). LLMs rely on clean, high-quality, and up-to-date data to generate accurate outputs. Whether powering customer-facing chatbots, internal decisioning agents, or generative personalization tools, these models require data that is well-governed and easily accessible. With fragmented and disconnected systems, the results will be inconsistent or flat-out wrong. Composable CDPs provide the clean pipelines and alignment that LLMs require, without introducing additional complexity. BUILD ON WHAT YOU ALREADY TRUST Leading teams are making a mindset shift. Instead of adding more tools, they are getting more out of the data infrastructure they already have. advertisement That means skipping the traditional CDP entirely. Instead of copying data into another system, industry leaders are activating it directly from the warehouse to downstream tools, such as CRMs, ad platforms, and email service providers. They are reusing the same data models that their analytics and operations teams have approved. Instead of waiting months for implementation, they are launching campaigns in days. Customer 360 doesn't have to be a promise. It can be reality. But it won't come from buying another black box. It comes from unlocking the value of your warehouse, working from a single source of truth, empowering every team to act on trusted data. Sometimes, the best course of action is not to buy the thing at all. Tejas Manohar is the co-founder and co-CEO of Hightouch The extended deadline for Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies Awards is tonight, October 14, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply today.