From Data Chaos to Campaign Clarity: Databricks Delivers AI for Marketers
The open analytics platform has unveiled a unified data and AI solution that brings together all customer and campaign data, making it easy for marketers to understand their audience, self-serve insights, and drive more relevant and efficient campaigns.
The martech landscape is, in a word, messy.
And we don’t need Scott Brinker’s 2025 Supergraphic, now a breathtaking pointillist painting of 15,384 discrete solutions, to tell us how confusing this morass has become.
Marketers know this truth all too well. Data lives everywhere, scattered across CRMs, analytics dashboards, customer data platforms, CMSes, and dozens of other tools. Getting a complete view of their customers and campaigns has become a struggle, if not impossible.
Along comes AI, and with it, the promise of finally unlocking personalization at scale with automated variants and streamlined workflows. But despite the eagerness of non-technical marketers to tap the fabric of AI, the lack of unified data has been a barrier to success. As such, their efforts are falling flat, and their content strategies feel more reactive than revolutionary.
But Databricks might have an answer to this conundrum. The cloud-based data and AI company recently announced the launch of its new Data Intelligence for Marketing solution, which combines its popular Data Intelligence Platform with a library of out-of-the-box integrations – connecting its capabilities to an ecosystem of leading marketing solution providers.
Data Intelligence for Marketing leverages the proven power of Databricks to amplify and accelerate successful outcomes. By weaving AI across a bench of trusted marketing partners like Adobe and Salesforce, anyone can access insights, personalize experiences, and run more effective marketing – all from a single, unified platform.
“We’re launching Data Intelligence for Marketing to ensure every marketer, regardless of technical background, can get the data they need to make smarter decisions faster and run relevant, efficient campaigns,” said Rick Schultz, CMO at Databricks. “By unifying customer and campaign data and using AI to reason on that data, this platform enables real-time, conversational analytics for marketers. This empowers marketers to make financially impactful decisions faster and drive more effective and efficient campaigns. It’s what marketers need to compete in today’s data-driven era.”
Already deployed in global brands as the data and AI foundation for their broader martech stack, Data Intelligence for Marketing is giving teams an AI pathway that’s bolstered by Databricks. By combining customer and campaign data in real time, marketers can sidestep the complexities, self-serve deeper insights, and develop more relevant and efficient campaigns at scale.
Powered by an AI “brick house”
Over the last few months, we've been covering the data frontier extensively, focusing on some big moves that vendors like Contentstack and Hightouch have made in purchasing or expanding their data capabilities at the DXP and CDP levels.
In a composable world, increasingly more tools are being leveraged to augment digital experience stacks. And as recently codified on Martech Day, AI has been a catalyst for significant growth in multiple dimensions, and data is the elemental fuel for the fire.
Databricks is part of the growing data lakehouse and data warehouse ecosystems, and the company has been on a meteoric rise. Founded in 2013 by the original creators of Apache Spark – an open-source, distributed processing system used for big data workloads – Databricks is a unified analytics platform for building, deploying, sharing, and maintaining enterprise-grade data, analytics, and AI solutions at scale.
Why all the fuss? Because data systems are big – and only getting bigger. Enterprises are struggling to keep up, and marketers are drowning in the overflow. Databricks helps to unify and simplify this riptide of complexity by providing a fast, cost-effective, and highly scalable solution.
There’s also the inherent flexibility. Databricks lives on top of existing cloud infrastructure, whether it’s AWS, Azure, GCP, or even a multi- or hybrid cloud combination. The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform integrates with cloud storage and security in a user’s cloud account, and automates the management and deployment of cloud infrastructure. The Apache Spark heritage is also a key asset, providing both speed and efficiency for large-scale data processing.
Databricks is a clear innovator in the expanding AI landscape, and its Data Intelligence Platform is unlocking possibilities for leading global brands. Now, with the advent of its new marketing integrations, it’s making the promise of AI more attainable.
Unlocking the AI potential
Marketers are hungry for AI. But they’re also cautiously optimistic – and sometimes, downright resistant. According to a recent survey conducted by Brafton, AI tools are creating a lot of difficulty, even if the potential for value is clearly understood. This is especially true for marketers, who have mixed feelings about the role of AI in their content and marketing operations.
On the upside, there’s been an abundance of adoption for streamlining manual tasks. But the struggle is real: Over half of Brafton’s respondents admit to challenges with content personalization, and a quarter find it difficult to generate specific content formats.
Some of the friction with onboarding and managing AI tools is also a contributing factor. It can take time to assess AI platforms from a usability and performance perspective, and fully leveraging the capabilities can take time.
There’s also the need to create the right internal policies and governance for marketing teams – and how they should use AI-powered resources or generated content. This also includes navigating the complexities of external regulatory requirements for data privacy.
Finally, there’s the soft challenge: marketers are underwater. According to a recent survey, over half of them feel overwhelmed, undervalued, and emotionally exhausted. While AI has the propensity to complicate the matter, it could also be part of the solution.
This is where simplification is essential, and Databricks stands to make its greatest impact. By connecting marketing data substantively, marketers can streamline processes and insights in new ways, giving them greater confidence in their strategies. Adding conversational analytics further eases the complexity of engaging with data and cutting through the noise.
Leveraging key partnerships to scale AI
Along with unifying marketing data, Databricks is democratizing broad insights for everyone. Now, marketers can easily access a complete view of customers and campaigns to improve segmentation, personalization, and conversion.
With on-board AI that reasons on your customer and campaign data and understands the semantics of your business, enterprises can empower every marketer – not just technical teams – with tools to explore and act on data in real time. And by integrating with meaningful tools, Databricks can help streamline and accelerate the overall AI horizon.
Built with open standards and out-of-the-box integrations, Databricks allows marketing teams of all sizes to maximize the value of their existing martech tools and services. The company has partnered with industry-leading technology platforms across multiple categories like analytics, customer data platforms, data management, customer engagement, data privacy, and more:
Databricks has also aligned with key integrators to provide custom solutions and consulting expertise in critical areas like data decisioning, data science, customer analytics, and AI solutions for specific industry verticals:
Given the challenges and resistance marketers face in the shift to AI, this partnership model provides a unique asset for marketing organizations. It helps ensure seamless workflows and innovation at scale while helping businesses unlock the full potential of their marketing data.
Realizing value with Data Intelligence for Marketing
For marketing professionals, it’s all about efficiency. AI can’t be part of the problem, and Databricks is working to address that. With Data Intelligence for Marketers, teams can adopt AI quickly with fewer barriers––allowing them to run more effective campaigns using real-time, accurate data to power recommendations, triggers, and automation they can trust.
Marketing teams at leading global brands are already seeing the impact of Data Intelligence for Marketing while maintaining compliance with global privacy standards like GDPR and CCPA. Based on figures from highly visible customers, the investment appears to be paying off.
For example, Skechers – the global footwear brand – uses ActionIQ, a composable CDP, with Databricks. The combo helps personalize customer journeys that boost lifetime value, resulting in a 324% increase in CTRs, a 68% decrease in CPC, and a 28% increase in return on ad spend.
PetSmart, a leading pet retailer, also tapped Hightouch on Databricks. By juicing the CDP capabilities with AI, the company’s marketing team orchestrates personalized journeys at unmatched scale while powering its broader marketing and loyalty initiatives.
“We’re syncing millions of records directly to SFMC every single day to orchestrate personalized journeys for the 65+ million members in our loyalty program,” said Tino Tomasone, Senior Manager, Database & Audience Management at PetSmart. “We’re powering thousands of audiences and over four billion emails every year, and that’s not even factoring in what we do across other channels.”
Why it matters
We all live in a data-driven world, and it's getting spicy. Digital leaders are feeling the heat, but data intelligence platforms are providing a life ring of enhanced data management and insights. By employing AI models to deeply understand the semantics of enterprise data, brands and organizations are deriving faster insights, optimizing their decision-making, and scaling data analytics workflows with ease.
Marketers stand to benefit significantly from AI-powered systems that unify data. That said, AI fatigue is a real phenomenon. And while marketers are wrestling with the need for more AI, they’re also struggling with onboarding greater complexity.
What we need is less confusion, so marketers can do their jobs more efficiently.
That’s where Databricks is potentially easing the burden. As an AI pioneer, the company has long focused on the essential layers of data that power effective AI. With its Data Intelligence for Marketing, it now brings the best capabilities of data lakehouse architecture to unify data, analytics, and AI while simplifying the value for marketers.
Databricks is also greasing the wheels with purpose-built integrations that align with data-centric platforms and applications. They're also balancing the complexity equation by partnering with SIs and consultancies that can provide a foundation through the journey, which includes the perilous challenges surrounding data privacy and governance. This all translates into greater confidence and fewer limiting concerns when it comes to scaling marketing programs with AI.
I have questions about the fabric of the partnership model and the roadmap for future additions, but harnessing AI successfully requires expertise – and this feels like the right approach for delivering product and support.
From a content and digital experience perspective, we’re already seeing the potential for evolution. CDPs have been crucial components in the DXP composition, and Databricks is helping to augment their value through tangible use cases. This could have big implications for the CMS and DXP landscape as platforms continue to innovate with AI along a composable edge.
One of the things I really like about Databricks is the spectrum of usability. At its core, it's designed to simplify the modern data stack by eliminating data silos and facilitating data access and insights. But it does this for everyone, whether you’re a non-technical marketer or a data scientist immersed in deep learning.
This announcement is relatively fresh, so we can anticipate more details to emerge. In the meantime, do the intelligent thing with this data – and check it out.
Looking for guidance on Databricks? Talk to an expert.
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