Why 2026 Will Be the Year of the Intelligent Customer Data Platform

AI spending keeps climbing at an unbelievable pace. Some of the largest U.S. tech companies plan to pour more than $320 billion into AI and supporting infrastructure. With numbers like that, you’d expect breakthrough results everywhere. But when you talk to the teams actually running these systems, you hear a very different story. A lot of them feel stuck. Models are improving, but the outcomes aren’t keeping up.

The reason is pretty simple: most organizations still rely on customer data that’s scattered, outdated, or only lightly governed. You can build a great model on top of that, but it can only do so much. If the foundation isn’t reliable, the intelligence on top of it won’t be either.

That’s why 2026 isn’t going to be the year of “more AI.” It’ll be the year companies finally figure out how to turn ...