58% of companies say their data isn’t ready for AI. The other 42%? They’re getting customer data, just not fast enough to matter.
Data readiness is the choke point.
Everyone has seen the same AI headlines over the last year—generative this, autonomous that, agents everywhere. Meanwhile, the real bottleneck sat right there in plain sight: nobody can move fast enough because their data infrastructure wasn’t built to move fast..
So here’s what we’re doing about it.
The AI Era Runs on Context
Every AI project lives or dies on one thing: context. Not the models. Not the compute.
Context.
When a customer hits your site, when they open that email, when they’re three clicks from purchase—that moment demands customer data that’s enriched, consented, and delivered in real time. It won’t wait for tomorrow’s batch file. Yesterday’s warehouse export is already obsolete. Fifteen minutes ago is obsolete.
AI needs context right now, and it needs all of it up to the millisecond. AI makes decisions on milliseconds, not minutes, not hours, not days.
That’s what Tealium does. We deliver customer context at scale—on-device, at the edge, in the moment. Not hours later. Not after the batch job runs. Right now. Our new Mobile SDKs will power AI inference directly on mobile devices, so your models can act on real-time context without waiting for the cloud
Here’s how most companies are still doing this:
Collect the event. Pipe it to the CDP. Push it to the warehouse. Wait for some batch jobs. Run the ML. Get a score. Traverse the entire pipeline to deliver it back to where it can be leveraged.
By the time that score reaches the customer? The moment’s gone.
Why This Matters Now
The companies that can’t adopt AI are going to lose. And the ones who do adopt it?
They’re hitting a wall on data readiness, on governance, on being able to move at the speed their AI projects demand.
We’re not building a marketing cloud with AI features bolted on. We’re building the data foundation that makes AI actually work in the real world.
Transactional experiences—email, social, CRM, ads—they help you find the next journey for the customer.
Conversational experiences—the real-time, in-the-moment interactions—get them through that journey.
We’re the only ones who can deliver real-time context to both.
What We’re Doing in 2026
Our focus this year is speed and efficiency. We’re moving fast and working with our customers and prospects to build the right things, not just the shiny objects that sound nice.
The two themes that we see for 2026 boil down to helping our customers deliver Smarter AI and Better Customer Moments. To do that we need to continue helping all our customers deliver the right data to the right place, and now to the right AI ecosystems so teams who are already stretched can work smarter, not harder.
This is where we were built to win. We’re integrating directly into every major AI ecosystem. We connect seamlessly with data clouds, including now Databricks Delta Sharing. Model Context Protocol, agent-to-agent, agent commerce protocol—every standard for how agents communicate with customer data.
The piece I’m especially excited about? Invoke Your Own Model. Real-time model invocation using your models and your data, with sub-second response times.
Customers are using it to power AI decisioning that moves faster than any ETL process ever could. Next-best-action recommendations deployed in the moment, not after the batch job finishes.
And we continue to invest in the things that make us a leader in execution. More enterprise observability. Ease of use that doesn’t sacrifice power. The stuff that makes you confident to bet your infrastructure on us.
Moving Faster
Here’s what I know: We were built for this moment.
Real-time context is the unlock. And we’ve got the architecture and features to deliver it.
The companies who figure out how to feed their AI with enriched, consented, real-time customer data—at the edge, in the moment, without exposing their strategy to their competitors—those companies are going to win.
For example, Legal & General are implementing their own proprietary chatbot using a MCP integration, facilitated by Tealium, giving them rapid deployment and real-time context.
We’re not chasing someone else’s vision of what a CDP should become. We’re building the infrastructure the AI era actually needs.
That’s what we’re doing in 2026. And we’re moving fast.
—Mike
