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Tealium Co-Founder Ali Behnam explains why real-time orchestration, smarter governance, and CDPs as AI guardrails are key to turning insights into impact.
In 2025, businesses aren’t struggling with building AI models—they’re struggling with making AI useful. Too often, advanced predictive engines sit idle, producing insights that never reach the customer in time to make an impact.
According to Ali Behnam, Co-Founder of Tealium, the missing piece is activation: connecting AI outputs to real-time customer experience channels. Without that, he warns, AI risks becoming “an expensive science project.”
In this episode of our exclusive video series In Conversation with Technology Leaders, we spoke to Ali about how CDPs are poised to play a pivotal role as AI execution becomes increasingly autonomous.
According to him, CDPs won’t just aggregate data. They’ll enforce consent, context, and compliance while ensuring AI outcomes don’t drift into hallucinations or bias, essentially becoming the “traffic cop” of enterprise AI systems.
More Insights from Ali:
- Companies often train and fine-tune models but fail to connect outputs back into CX channels quickly enough. Without real-time activation, predictive insights like churn risk lose their value.
- The “collect everything” big data mindset failed, and AI will too if it follows the same path. Success starts with a clear problem to solve, which defines what data is relevant, timely, consented, and contextual.
- Beyond technology, internal governance slows AI’s impact. Many firms still require human approval loops even when AI can act instantly. Automating governance through agentic AI could unlock faster execution.
Watch the full interview here.
