Notes on agentic personalization.
Field notes from the agentic experience layer: cohorts, holdouts, determinism, and shipping one decision to every channel.
How to not get gaslit by your platform rep
Three questions that separate real runtime decisioning from a rules engine wearing an AI badge — and why a holdout is the only honest proof of lift.
Read →You don't need to know who they are to know what they want
Identity-first personalization has nothing to say to the anonymous 90% of your traffic. You don't need to resolve who someone is to act on what they're doing right now.
Read →Your "AI personalization" stack is solving the wrong half of the problem
Most "AI personalization" tools help you make content faster. Deciding what a specific visitor sees in the moment is a different job — and the one that moves the number.
Read →No hallucinating agent in your decision chain
A language model in the live decision path demos beautifully and bills you three taxes in production — cost, confidence, and a standing eval burden. The fix is AI upstream, a deterministic hot path.
Read →When a vendor brags about 13 agents, run
The agent count is marketing, not capability. What the agents are wired into tells you everything.
Read →The three-stack tax on customer journeys
A CDP, an A/B tool, and an automation platform: three contracts, three teams, and a seven-figure tax on the seams between them.
Read →Your segmentation is backwards
You wrote a thousand rules and still only spoke to half your audience. The fix isn't more rules. It's letting the signal draw the lines.
Read →Notes in your inbox, when they ship.
No cadence games. Just new thinking on agentic personalization.