From CDP to CEAL · Part 4 of 8

In the space of a few months in 2026, every major engagement platform opened itself up to outside agents. The interface is becoming optional.

In Part 3, I set out the CEAL stack. The platforms themselves are already moving to meet it.

Everyone is converging on the same prize

Suites are buying what they lack: Salesforce agreed to acquire Braze for about $5.66bn in October, after Informatica and Contentful. Data platforms are building marketing applications: Databricks launched CustomerLake, an agentic CDP inside the lakehouse. Composable vendors are moving into delivery: Hightouch now sends the messages too. Each is reaching for the layer where decisions about customers are made and carried out.

Headless, platform by platform

• Braze Operator Connect lets marketers plan and build campaigns from Claude, ChatGPT or Copilot, under their own Braze permissions.
• Salesforce now pitches headless marketing across Marketing Cloud through Headless 360.
• Tealium's Configuration MCP lets agents create and modify audiences and activation workflows.
• Bloomreach Loomi Connect exposes more than 180 tools to outside agents.
• Adobe rebranded Experience Cloud as CX Enterprise, built around agents.

Who moves first

The most cutting-edge vendors and lean new companies will go straight to agents. Hybrid companies with legacy stacks, including today's MarTech vendors, will add agents on top of the UI. So for a while you'll buy a UI and add an agent. Then, as adoption grows, buyers will start shopping for the agent instead: how well it understands a brief, not how the screens look.

The UI fades, but results still need rendering

You'll see and use interfaces less and less, until the agent simply plays results back to you. That playback becomes a feature in its own right: Salesforce is building a Headless Experience Layer that renders interactive widgets inside whichever agent you're working in. Regulated industries will still want to see the work in full, and writing every action back to the warehouse lets you render it in your own BI tools.

Agents will meet agents

Gartner predicts that 90% of B2B buying will be AI-agent intermediated by 2028. Yet while 63% of marketers are already publishing AI-optimised content, only 14% are measuring their AI inclusion rate or agent-referred conversions. And the most innovative brands will build their own agents: the share of B2B teams naming a custom-built or "other" platform as the centre of their stack rose from 2% to 10% between 2024 and 2025.

About this series. From CDP to CEAL is an eight-part series by Kristina Kalpokaite, Head of MarTech at Loop Horizon, on how AI agents will replace the interfaces of marketing technology. Start with Part 1, The CEAL is coming.

Next: Part 5 - Buying for the agentic era.