Ankur Jain, Chief Cloud and Data Modernization Officer at Acxiom, argues that data modernization must precede agentic AI adoption — not run in parallel. After migrating from on-premises Hadoop to Databricks, Acxiom achieved 80-90% faster pipeline runtimes, reducing workloads from days to hours. The company is now building agentic marketing workflows that automate audience planning, media buying, and campaign activation using proprietary customer data. Key principles include embedding AI natively into client environments, maintaining human-in-the-loop governance for PII and regulated content, and shifting from file-based data delivery to native agentic integrations including clean room solutions. The core message: organizations that skip the data foundation step will eventually discover it was never optional.
