Every martech and AI platform right now is pitching a proprietary “context layer”, a glorified system prompt and markdown file masquerading as “customer memory”. It promises to understand your customers better than you do, as long as you keep feeding its proprietary black box.

Robin Geier has spent the last few months inside the personalization stacks of major enterprise brands, including Rituals, auditing exactly where context actually lives versus where companies think it lives. The gap between the two is where personalization programmes quietly stall and where the budget gets burned rebuilding things that were never broken, just never owned.

What we’ll cover

• Where context really lives: what Robin finds when he audits a personalization stack from the inside, and who’s usually wrong about who owns what.
• Owned vs. rented, in practice: what “owning your context” actually means legally, technically and operationally, not just as a slogan.
• The vendor trap: why locking context into any SaaS vendor, including traditional CDPs, creates fragile architecture, and how to position your stack as execution arms around your own cloud data.
• What breaks next: what happens when your support bot, email agent, and web campaign run on isolated vendor context and start giving your customers conflicting messages.
• The one thing to fix first: concrete next steps for a marketing leader walking away from this conversation.