Inside Databricks’ bet on continuous marketing campaigns

It’s no secret that the power of AI in advertising relies on quality data. The companies creating that data infrastructure, like Databricks, are setting the course for the future of the industry.

The company’s CMO, Rick Schultz, has been at the helm for nearly a decade. He spoke with The Current’s Zac Wang about the early days of Databricks, how real-time data is setting up brands for always-on, continuous campaigns and how AI will impact marketers’ jobs going forward.

You joined Databricks some years ago when it was a much smaller company. Now you’re very big. What did you see back then that inspired you to make the jump?

Databricks was always a very visionary company. My first meeting ever with anyone at Databricks was a three-hour dinner with Ali [Ghodsi], our CEO. I could tell right away not only how smart he is and how driven he is, but just how visionary he and all the other (seven) co-founders [are]. 

One of the things that they saw before it became reality was that everyone was going to move all their data to the cloud. At that time, not everyone was even doing warehousing in the cloud. They saw the AI phenomenon way before November 2022 and knew that the key to unlocking AI was going to be actually your data and how unified it is and how managed it is.

We’re talking years before the explosion of AI. That’s really cool that they had that vision.

It used to be that [there was a] structured world of data for traditional [business intelligence] and analytics — [things like] employee data or customer data in structured tables. And [then there was] the unstructured world of all your content, video, documents, log files, what have you. Those were very separate worlds.

And this whole concept of unifying it into a lakehouse — where you bring together the best of the unstructured data lake, low-cost storage world and how people were doing data science — [did not exist]. You bring that together with structured data [and] the whole lakehouse concept really changed the whole landscape of the data industry.

AI’s been a huge tailwind for Databricks, but there’s also a lot of chatter about AI’s impact on marketing. How do you view that?

You mean on people’s roles?

People’s roles, yeah.

I think it’s a great opportunity for marketers. AI is not super useful in the organization unless it really understands your data — not just has access to but understands your data.

We call it “ontology,” but it’s basically a way of understanding how your data is used: What’s most popular; what are trusted data sources; what’s the lineage of data? And it allows AI to cull through your data much faster but also give you more accurate results. Context is so critical — whether it’s the customer context, who the customer is, where they are in their journey, what channel they’re engaging in — but then marrying that with the business context: What outcomes are you trying to get from the campaign; what does your brand stand for?

In terms of how it’s affecting roles, I feel like you hear both extremes a lot. You hear either it’s going to wipe out roles, or you hear everyone in marketing is a builder. I think the truth is somewhere in the middle.

I think it’s going to make a lot of marketers more productive. Some jobs, there’ll be fewer of them, and those jobs will change and evolve into different kinds of roles. You’re still going to need subject-matter experts, and what we’ve seen to have the most success is when you take the subject-matter experts and marry them with the most AI-savvy people in the org.

Team them up and then you can completely improve a process and drive either improvement in internal process — we use it for tons of different internal processes that make us more productive, because we’re a pretty lean marketing team for the size company we are — or you can use it to affect how you market to customers.

In fact, we coined this phrase just last week when we launched our customer lake, “infinity campaigns,” meaning that there’s a big shift away from the static, one-to-many, point-in-time campaigns to just a continuous engagement loop, where you’re using real-time analysis of how that customer is engaging to inform the campaigns you’re then surfacing to them.

It’s highly personalized and it’s continuous, and it’s a lot of times driven by agents. You can choose how much you want to also have a human in the loop. It can continuously operate because it’s at least partially dependent on agents running those campaigns.

Marketers are used to planning campaigns by buys but now it sounds like it’s not going to be like that. It’s continuous, and you have the data and the speed to be able to do that.

That’s right, absolutely. It just accelerates it. It makes it more personalized, makes it more productive, can result in higher conversion rates as well as more productivity of the marketing team.

It’s an exciting time to be in marketing. This change presents a lot of opportunity.