Treasure AI CEO Kaz Ohta on keeping autonomous agents on-brand

Kaz Ohta, CEO and CMO of Treasure AI, helped pioneer the customer data platform category. Now he's betting that customer data matters less for what it stores than for what autonomous agents do with it. Recorded at Agentic World, he and Greg Kihlström get into what that shift asks of enterprise marketing leaders. The CDP label stopped describing the work. Why Treasure Data became Treasure AI, where the company's engineering investment moved, and how Ohta views warehouse-native players like Databricks moving into the category he helped create. Building the agentic layer creates ecosystem friction. The reasoning behind building Personalization Studio in-house rather than deepening partnerships with testing and personalization vendors, and how to handle the channel conflict that follows. Autonomy gets set decision by decision. Which decisions enterprise customers hand to agents outright, which still require human sign-off, and how measurement has to change once agents are doing the optimizing. About Kaz Ohta Kazuki Ohta is the co-founder and CEO of Treasure AI, an AI-native platform built to enable customer data and agentic experiences. He co-founded Treasure Data, now Treasure AI, in 2011 and served as its CTO during the company’s early development, helping scale the business to more than $100 million in annual recurring revenue. Kaz Ohta on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kazukiohta/ ---------- Resources ---------- Treasure AI: https://www.treasure.ai The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by TEKsystems. Learn more here: https://aglbrnd.co/r/2868abd8085a9703 The hardest part of martech right now is telling which tools are actually earning their keep. That's the question running through the MarTech Summit Boston agenda on October 27. We're attending MarTech Summit Boston on October 27 as a media partner. If you want to join, the code AGILE15 saves you 15%. https://aglbrnd.co/r/c70c250b8d52dff3 We’re proud to be a media partner for #MAICON26 - Oct. 13-15! Learn how AI can power your marketing and business and help you grow smarter. Use code AGILE150 to save! https://aglbrnd.co/r/7fe458ced0f04658 Need to evaluate martech, AI, or CX platforms and don't know where to start? The Agile Brand Guide List is now in beta. We're building the most useful, free-to-use, and up-to-date way to assess what truly matters when evaluating platforms. See more here: https://aglbrnd.co/r/f76be3a33cc491bb Reach your customers with Reddit. Spend $500 in ad spend, get $500 back in ad credit! Learn more: https://aglbrnd.co/r/491818c79fb1873f Chaser is the only Slack-native project management platform that helps teams turn messages into tracked tasks, automate follow-ups, and maintain team-wide visibility, without adopting another tool. Now integrated with Claude and other GenAI tools. Learn more at trychaser.com and use code AGILEBRAND for a 3-month free trial (normal trial is 14 days). Start building your own apps with Replit and get $20 off. Learn more: https://aglbrnd.co/r/93531742a7625a20 Enjoyed the show? Tell us more and give us a rating so others can find the show: https://aglbrnd.co/r/faaed112fc9887f3 Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstrom Don't miss a thing: get the latest episodes, sign up for our newsletter, and check out Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://aglbrnd.co/r/35ded3ccfb6716ba The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content: https://aglbrnd.co/r/f1782ab12211f765 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.