Summer Thompson on Real-Time Personalization

1. What does your approach to real-time personalization different from other CDPs or journey orchestration platforms?

Most CDPs and journey orchestration platforms limit how much data can be used for real-time personalization, often restricting brands to a narrow set of behavior signals and limited customer history. Hightouch removes those limits. Our approach is built around full data access and flexibility, enabling marketers to combine real-time behavioral signals with the complete depth of customer history from the data warehouse. With our new take on same-session personalization, we made it possible, for the first time, to react to in-session activity using the entire customer profile. Whether you're delivering an experience in under a second or orchestrating it over minutes, our real-time product suite is designed to meet the full range of real-time needs with no trade-offs between speed and data richness.

2. Same-Session Personalization is a bold claim. What was the core challenge in marketing that this feature is solving?

The core challenge is relevance in the moment. Without understanding current customer behavior, personalization efforts can create a disconnect between user intent and brand response. Same-session personalization solves this by allowing marketers to react to in-session signals, like product views, cart behavior, or site search, in less than a second. That means offers, messaging, and experiences can adapt as the customer is browsing, not after they've bounced. Our approach to same-session personalization goes one step further, and makes it possible to combine behavior signals with complete customer history in under a second. Brands can interact with their customers as a person, not just a set of digital behaviors.

3. Many CDPs force marketers to choose between speed or historical depth. How do you remove that trade-off?

Hightouch is uniquely positioned as a Composable CDP, which means we use the data warehouse as the source of truth for rich customer profiles, while also integrating real-time event streams. This approach means marketers don’t have to sacrifice depth for speed. You get the historical context of warehouse data and the in-the-moment context of behavioral events. It’s not about choosing between the past or the present. With Hightouch, you get both.

4. How do you handle identity resolution in same-session scenarios where the user might not yet be logged in?

We can use anonymous identifiers to stitch session activity to a profile. Whenever an anonymous user authenticates or provides identifying information, we can retroactively connect their session data to their historical profile in the warehouse, and be ready to address that user’s anonymous identifiers in the future as well. This enables persistent, privacy-safe personalization that respects user consent, while still delivering highly relevant experiences in the moment.

5. What’s your take on how AI and decisioning engines are collapsing the gap between insight and action?

AI is transforming marketing from reactive to predictive. With tools like Hightouch’s AI Decisioning, we’re enabling marketers to operationalize insights the moment they emerge. Rather than waiting for analysts to surface trends or build segments, AI models can evaluate user behavior and context in real-time. AI Decisioning constantly experiments and continuously improves delivery based on the results of each experiment. The result is personalization that’s not just fast, but smart—driven by data, governed by logic, and scaled through automation. Even with this rapid iteration, it’s also really important to surface key insights back to marketers, so they can improve their overall strategies and create more effective content and campaigns.

6. How do you envision yourself evolving to support marketers as zero-party and consent-driven data become the new norm?

Hightouch is built on privacy-first principles. As the industry shifts toward zero-party and consented data, our composable architecture gives brands full control over what data is collected, how it’s used, and where it’s activated. We’re also investing in features that help marketers surface and act on self-reported preferences in real time, whether that’s through consent banners, preference centers, or in-product feedback. The purpose of personalization is to create connections with people, and that starts with trust. With Hightouch, security, privacy, and trust are not an afterthought; they are core components of our architecture and company culture.

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