Hightouch Adds New AI-Powered Adaptive Identity Resolution to its CDP

It’s a data swamp out there, and brands are trudging through it. 

With customer data sprawled across a multitude of devices, platforms, and identities, enterprises are struggling to unify the chaos, glean meaningful insights, and create more personalized experiences.

As people engage via a widening channel of digital touchpoints, unifying disjointed customer records has become a huge blocker. While features in CDPs and data warehouses have provided a salve, the use of identity resolution tools – software solutions that link customer data points across different systems – has become an essential resource for keeping the mud off your boots.

But when the data picture is incomplete, things get fuzzy. This is where Hightouch is sharpening the details with precision and giving marketers more reliable insight. 

The composable CDP and AI decisioning platform just introduced probabilistic Identity Resolution, an adaptive feature of Hightouch’s powerful warehouse-native customer data platform that combines AI with deterministic logic to fill in the gaps of fragmented profiles. 

This new capability introduces what Hightouch calls “multi-zone” identity resolution, which enables businesses to jump between high-confidence deterministic matching and higher-reach probabilistic matching within a single project setup. 

In this sense, it combines the best of both worlds in one unified solution within the CDP.

“Most identity resolution tools are either rigid or opaque,” said Tejas Manohar, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Hightouch. “We’ve built something entirely new, a multi-zone identity engine that lets customers toggle between high-confidence deterministic graphs and higher-reach probabilistic graphs, without sacrificing transparency or control.”

Determining the probabilities with AI

We live in an ever-expanding world of digital touchpoints, and consumers are engaging across a litany of devices and channels. With so much data in so many places, brands are struggling to capture clean and accurate customer data from a disjointed mountain of customer records, which is eroding the effectiveness of marketing and personalization.

While identity resolution helps cut through the chaos, it has inherent challenges relative to the use case. Transactional emails, for example, perform best with high-confidence deterministic matching. Meanwhile, things like ad targeting work best with high-reach probabilistic matching. 

With Hightouch, you can use the right method for the right use case. Toggle to deterministic identity resolution to leverage exact matches with identical email addresses or phone numbers. Jump to probabilistic identity resolution and utilize machine learning models to infer connections between similar (but not identical) records. This can include linking a nickname and personal email to a business identity to help fill a gap.

Powerful identity resolution features

While other platforms offer probabilistic matching, Hightouch is the first to make both probabilistic and deterministic resolution fully configurable, transparent, and warehouse-native. This enables brands to control their identity resolution logic, optimize for different downstream use cases, and preserve data ownership at every step. 

Features of Hightouch's adaptive Identity Resolution include its noted multi-zone matching, which enables users to adjust confidence levels up for precision or down for reach. Now you can shift your deterministic and probabilistic resolution in parallel depending on your use case. It's also highly configurable and transparent, allowing you to fine-tune your matching logic, inspect machine learning decisions, and customize golden record logic without code.

Hightouch's warehouse-native architecture also allows users to perform identity resolution on their complete data, directly in the data warehouse. No need to move data into a separate CDP or black box – it's all handled in one place, and it's all configurable and transparent. 

With Hightouch's real-time activation, you can put merged profiles to work instantly across ads, email, customer success, and more through its deep integration ecosystem. 

As Hightouch contends, this isn’t a “one-size-fits-all algorithm” they’re applying, but an intelligent, transparent framework that evolves with your business needs. And with AI inside the warehouse, identity resolution steps up from being just a hygiene task to a strategic advantage.

The verdict

Identity resolution tools have been around for a while at both a warehouse-native and black box level, providing options that are native and outside an organization’s data stack. Proximity aside, there are implicit limitations that are exacerbated by the growing number of data sources and disjointed customer records. 

Hightouch is endeavoring to solve this problem with its novel multi-zone identity engine. What’s key is that customers have more power to switch between deterministic and probabilistic graphs to achieve a more complete picture and attain greater confidence. There's more control over use cases for high confidence or high reach, and this could deliver more value to marketing teams as they focus more on personalization.

The artificial intelligence piece is also pivotal, unlocking more scale and potential as the lakes of data continue to grow. But this investment in AI-powered solution is precisely what’s putting this platform on the map. Hightouch is still “riding high” as it innovates along its AI decisioning capabilities, which earned it an $80 million Series C last February.

Earlier this year, I spoke with Hightouch’s Product Evangelist, Adam Greco, about the evolution of the company’s composable CDP and how it’s challenging the category. As I observed at the time, Hightouch is plotting a unique course, and this latest foray into native, AI-powered identity resolution is further evidence of that. 

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