The unsexy truth: your AI strategy is only as good as your data catalogue. Mar 27, 2026 By Asaf Reshef Every marketing team wants to run Next Best Action models or deliver truly 1:1 personalised recommendations at scale. But in most CDP deployments, these ambitions sit on a fragile foundation one that has nothing to do with the AI itself. The limiting factor is almost always the catalogue. Without a clean, structured index of events and attributes, predictive models are starved of the context they need. They cannot distinguish a high-value purchase from a low-intent browse, or understand the relationship between product categories. This is more common than most vendors admit. Across enterprise brands, product and event data is scattered across systems, formatted inconsistently across regions and channels, and rarely mapped to a shared schema. Solving it the traditional way, manual ingestion, custom pipelines, IT-led mapping exercises, is incredibly time-consuming. And because it demands significant technical resource, it reliably sits at the bottom of the backlog, quietly blocking many AI initiatives above it. The Catalogue Agent: removing the bottleneck. The problem isn't that brands lack data. It's that their data lacks structure. At Zeotap, Zeotap GmbH built its Catalogue Agent specifically to close that gap: reducing manual mapping time by up to 86% by working with the data that already exists. The agent scans live data streams, purchase events, web interactions, app logs, and extracts the structure already latent within them. It does this across three layers: * Autonomous Pattern Recognition: The agent parses unstructured event logs to surface key data points, whether that's product SKUs, loyalty tiers, or specific behavioural triggers, without needing a pre-defined schema. * Contextual Taxonomy: It doesn't just read strings of text; it understands the context. Events are categorised into a logical hierarchy, transactional versus browsing, category relationships, intent signals, automatically and without manual rules. * Conversational Mapping: For teams who need to steer the output, a chat-based interface lets you direct the agent: prioritise certain fields, interrogate source files, or refine how attributes are classified, building data literacy across the teams that know the business best. The result is a catalogue with the structure, context, and consistency that AI models genuinely require. One where your CDP becomes a reliable foundation for intelligent activation rather than a silent constraint on it Why this matters for AI readiness. The most sophisticated personalisation models are only as good as the data fed into them. A CDP that cannot read your catalogue cannot power your strategy, regardless of how advanced the AI layer above it is. Data readiness is not a one-time task. It requires consistent, repeatable execution every time new sources are introduced or catalogues evolve. This is precisely where agents add lasting value. By encoding your brand's own context and data logic, the Catalogue Agent ensures that mapping is performed reliably and uniformly, removing the dependency on specific individuals and keeping your data infrastructure continuously fit for AI.

Roqad has acquired Zeotap-Data, the third-party data division of Zeotap, to enhance its identity resolution business in Europe. The acquisition provides Roqad with access to extensive third-party audience segments and integrations with about 30 ad tech partners, including The Trade Desk, Adform, Google’s DV360, and Amazon DSP. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.