How are businesses using customer data in 2025? Our latest Customer Data Platform report explores the increasing adoption of AI, personalization, and why CDPs are more essential than ever. Explore the key findings in our latest blog.
In 2002, Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report imagined a world where ads recognized you on sight and personalized messaging was instantaneous. Two decades later, we’re living in a version of that future—except instead of retina scans, it’s first-party data, predictive AI, and real-time analytics driving the next wave of personalization.
But the rules of engagement are changing. Privacy regulations are tightening, third-party cookies are vanishing, and AI is reshaping how businesses act on customer data. That’s why we put together the Customer Data Platform Report 2025, a deep dive into how companies are adapting. This year’s findings reveal a 57% surge in predictive traits, the growing dominance of CDP-warehouse integrations, and why businesses are rethinking their martech stacks to stay competitive.
Here’s what’s shaping the future of customer data—and what it means for you.
Here’s a glimpse into the biggest insights from this year’s report:
1. Interoperability is the Key to Martech Success
Businesses are moving away from rigid, monolithic platforms in favor of composable stacks—integrated ecosystems where best-in-class tools work together seamlessly. This flexibility fosters innovation and allows businesses to adapt quickly to changing needs.
2. Data Warehouses and CDPs Are Better Together
Over the past year, Twilio customers synced nearly 10 trillion rows of data to cloud data warehouses like Snowflake and BigQuery. While warehouses provide scalable data storage, their real power is unlocked when integrated with a CDP, enabling businesses to blend historical data with real-time insights for more personalized customer experiences.
3. Analytics Remains a Powerhouse
Analytics tools are the most connected category on the Twilio platform, reflecting their critical role in understanding customer behavior. Businesses that integrate analytics with a CDP are making smarter, real-time decisions that drive deeper engagement.
4. The Growth of Predictive AI
Last year, Twilio launched Predictive Traits, allowing businesses to anticipate customer behavior using machine learning. The adoption of this feature surged 57% year-over-year, signaling a shift from predictive AI being a cutting-edge advantage to an essential driver of smarter, more personalized customer engagement.
The report also explores which tools businesses are prioritizing in their customer data strategies. The most connected categories on the Twilio platform include:
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These categories highlight how businesses are orchestrating customer data across multiple platforms to create seamless, data-driven experiences.
The explosion of MarTech tools over the past decade has created a paradox: while there is a push toward consolidation, the reality is that businesses are using more tools than ever to meet specific, critical needs. Integration has become the connective tissue that holds these stacks together, enabling businesses to leverage specialized tools while maintaining a seamless flow of data.
MarTech is a vast and growing industry with thousands of players, and some level of consolidation is always in the air. Now, a recent string of mergers and acquisitions has everyone’s antennae up. Uniphore acquired ActionIQ, Contentstack acquired Lytics, and Rokt revealed their merger with mParticle—all deals announced within weeks of each other, all centering around the acquisition of a customer data platform.
These moves signal a growing recognition that customer data is at the core of modern marketing technology. But, consolidation alone doesn’t solve the complexity businesses face in managing their stacks.
What these recent acquisitions have really done is just create new point solutions, tying the CDP to a specific application or channel, which is limiting by definition.
Instead, a customer data platform should be part of an open architecture, seamlessly integrating communications channels, data sources, and AI capabilities, with the flexibility to add on custom solutions. This is how you create seamless, unified customer experiences at every touchpoint.
Twilio’s recent membership in the MACH Alliance underscores its commitment to enabling composable, open, and future-proof architectures. The MACH (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless) framework represents a best-in-class standard for building modular tech stacks. By joining the alliance, Twilio signals its alignment with principles of flexibility and interoperability—values that are critical as businesses seek to adapt to the evolving customer data landscape.
However, not all integrations are created equal. Many large suites promise interoperability, but fall short due to fragmented data models and limited documentation, leaving businesses to rely on expensive custom integrations. By contrast, Twilio’s platform is designed with openness at its core, ensuring that businesses can connect tools without friction and unlock the full potential of their data.
Ready to see the full findings? Download The CDP Report 2025 now to explore the latest trends, benchmarks, and strategies shaping the future of customer engagement.
Our annual look at how attitudes, preferences, and experiences with personalization have evolved over the past year.
