Weekly MarTech Signals That Matter to Me: Part 19, Week 37
Three customer engagement platforms published what their agent may actually do, and they put the answer in three different places: the…
Read issue →📍 Bologna, Italy · MarTech Advisor & Architect
I speak Boardroom and Boolean.
The architecture always wins.
Field notes and independent advisory on the decisions behind CEP and CDP stacks from platform selection and data flows to orchestration and operating model.
How I work
Where I usually come in.
Three kinds of engagement, and the work already published behind each one.
- 01 Platform selection & evaluation Requirements, architecture fit, vendor comparison, operating model. 8 CEP vendors evaluated from production
- 02 Architecture design & blueprinting Data flows, identity, integrations, orchestration, governance. 8 acronyms mapped to their architecture
- 03 Cross-channel engagement design Orchestration logic, decisioning, pressure management, measurement. 6 literacy nodes on decisioning and identity
10 parts published in the Field Notes series
2026 Field Notes on Customer Engagement Platforms
Honest, practitioner-level assessments of the major CEP players. No vendor briefings, and no scoring against someone else’s framework. Analyst research is cited where it adds market context, but the criteria are my own: what these platforms actually do, where they fall short, and how to choose one for your architecture.
Read the series →
20 issues published · Weekly
Weekly MarTech Signals That Matter to Me
Every week I run a structured scan of official release notes across the platforms I work with: Adobe Journey Optimizer, Braze, Insider, Iterable, Salesforce, Klaviyo and more. No analyst spin, no vendor briefings. Just what actually changed and what it means for your stack.
- Weekly
- Release notes decoded
- For MarTech architects
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Weekly MarTech Signals That Matter to Me: Part 18, Week 36
Optimizely gave its agents their own identity. Salesforce and Anthropic gave theirs yours. Salesforce is also turning the agent platform on…
Read issue →Weekly MarTech Signals That Matter to Me: Part 17, Week 35
In eight days three platforms gave an agent write access to configuration rather than to campaigns, and none of them published a session…
Read issue → 7 issues published · Weekly
Weekly AI Tools That Matter to Me
The second weekly log, on agentic platforms rather than MarTech ones. Model launches are rarely the story. What decides whether an agent reaches production is identity, tool permissions, audit trails and billing, so those are what I track.
Weekly AI Tools That Matter to Me: Part 7, Week 37
In one release train, three separate misconfigurations stopped being ignored and started stopping the product. Fail-closed arrived in the…
Read issue →Weekly AI Tools That Matter to Me: Part 6, Week 36
Last edition closed on a vendor describing its organisation-wide instruction setting as guidance the model follows, not an enforced…
Read issue →Weekly AI Tools That Matter to Me: Part 5, Week 35
In two weeks the agent acquired a trigger it does not control, a credentialled session it can reuse, and a schedule nobody attends. Then…
Read issue → 8 acronyms decoded so far
Read the series → The Architecture Behind the Acronyms
Not a glossary. One MarTech acronym per article, traced back to the problem it solved, the market that shaped it, how vendors stretched it, and what it really means architecturally today.
Tools
All five tools Instruments you can operate.
Vendor-neutral and interactive. Each one takes a piece of the architecture thinking and makes it usable on your own stack, with nothing to download and no form in the way.
Diagnostic Architecture Maturity Self-Assessment Eight dimensions, from data and identity to decisioning and agentic readiness. You get a maturity tier and a focused place to start. It scores your architecture, not a vendor. Assess your stack - Reference model Anatomy of an Engagement Stack A layered map of a modern engagement stack, one click per decision. Explore model
- Glossary MarTech Acronym Decoder Plain definitions, practical usage, and the confusions vendors rely on. Decode terms
- Decision tree Which Problem Are You Actually Solving? Stuck between overlapping pitches? Answer a few questions, get a pattern. Find pattern
- RFP prep Vendor Briefing Decoder Sixteen demo claims decoded into architecture, with the questions to ask after the pitch. Decode the pitch
Latest writing
Standalone pieces, outside the running series above.
Agents in Production: How Agentic Systems Fail Silently
Six real failures from my own site, none of which were wrong answers. Truncated links that passed every build, a translation that was grammatically perfect and about the wrong thing, and what they say about where governance actually lives in an agentic operation.
Agents in Production: What the Demos Leave Out
Every agentic demo shows one task in one session. This is what an agentic operation actually consists of on month five, using my own site as the evidence: a written context layer, a memory with expiry, and one unambiguous source of truth.
Movement Notes on CEP: May to July 2026
Which architectural boundaries eight customer engagement platforms moved between May and July 2026, across data, decisioning, governance, openness and channel reach.