Originally posted on Forbes.
Fragmentation is the fundamental constraint of modern marketing.
Consider a typical consumer journey. A customer searching online for a pair of boots browses for the product on her phone. She finds some enticing options, but then abandons, and forgets about, her cart.
Cut to a couple of days later, when, browsing on her desktop, she receives a generic welcome email from the retailer instead of a reminder about the boot-filled shopping cart awaiting her final click. She buys her boots elsewhere and in the mean time receives an offer for the same boots from a competitor. She’s wasted her time — and the merchant has lost a sale.
This is the consumer impact of disconnected data — email addresses, loyalty numbers and other identifiers, siloed in their own channels. It’s a turn-off for customers and a liability for businesses: nearly 30 percent of businesses point to fragmented systems as one of their top three operational challenges, the industry publication CMSWire found in a survey last year.
According to Jarrod Martin, CEO of identity solutions provider Acxiom, what’s at stake for brands is trust.
“Brands can build and or lose trust with consumers in each interaction. Personalization goes a long way to build trust with customers when you can recognize them across touchpoints, reach them in their preferred channel, and recognize their relationship with your brand.” he said.
What brands and advertisers need, then, is not only a full view of the consumer from any point in time, but a “current and accurate view of the consumer based on where they are today,” Martin continued.
Stitching It All Together
Identity fragmentation is not new, but the explosive growth of digital culture has raised the stakes. Consumers now expect frictionless digital experiences across every channel, while Gen Z, in Martin’s words, expects “brands to adapt to their needs.”
As that generation, the largest in the U.S. at 86 million, matures, the pressure is only intensifying. Loss of signal due to a number of factors — including evolving privacy frameworks and regulation, siloed data, walled off activation channels, and the deprecation of third-party cookies — has upped the urgency further, exerting downward pressure on recognition rates.
Furthermore, the digital savviness of Gen Z means brands need to work particularly hard to provide them with seamless customer experiences, especially on mobile. According to a 2025 Acxiom report on how marketers can better understand Gen Z, the generation is nearly twice as likely as their parents to own an iPhone.
Enter identity resolution technology, which determines which disparate digital and offline data points belong to the same individual and assembles them into a holistic consumer view. Leading solutions like Acxiom’s Real ID use both deterministic and probabilistic methods to build a single customer identity that works with all identifiers enabling brands to own their own identity graph across the ecosystem — without requiring the movement of personally identifiable information, strengthening security.
Driven by AI, next-gen identity solutions pack a startling power. A decade ago, the process was batch-based, involving “a lot of different datasets being moved into centralized data processing” over the course of days or in some cases weeks, said Keith Camoosa, Acxiom’s chief product and technology innovation officer. A lot of “expensive tuning” was also necessary.
Today, Identity solutions like Acxiom’s Real ID are integrated directly into client-side enterprise marketing technologies and enablement pipelines resolving, creating, and unifying customer and business intelligence – turning data into actionable intelligence – in near real time as part of an end-to-end data intelligence and activation system. Identity-resolved and connected data intelligence generates superior results, vs disconnected data, when activated in conversational AI, customer service, personalized digital or retail experiences, agentic marketing, and ad-tech ecosystems.
“When someone visits a website, brands can recognize who they are and distinguish if they’re a customer or if they’re a prospect in real time,” Camoosa explained. “By leveraging agentic decisioning and workflows, content messaging and offers can be assembled close to real time, giving that person the best possible experience.”
Heathrow Connections
International travelers are likely experiencing Acxiom’s solutions without knowing it: Since 2022, Heathrow – the UK’s largest airport has been consolidating data from over 30 sources — including Wi‑Fi, retail, bookings, parking and Heathrow Rewards — into what Martin calls “centralized intelligence,” a unified customer data environment that drives personalization and engagement.
Before working with Acxiom on the Salesforce Data 360 migration, Heathrow had no way of knowing that its frequent business traveler — logging Heathrow Rewards points twice a month — was the same person who passed through every August with his family, connecting his kids to Wi-Fi while browsing in the duty-free. With its newly unified view, the airport can send personalized communications suited to his full identity: for example, premium parking services such as “meet and greet” to ensure a seamless experience for his family.
The results of Heathrow’s digital transformation have been striking. The marketable database has grown 155% and 75% are engaging with email, all resulting in a 15% increase in Average Transaction Value (ATV). The airport has seen a 34 percent increase in loyalty members.
A Question Of Trust
This story is about more than just marketing. It’s also about good strategic sense. The shift to distributed, cloud-based environments is becoming key to growth with 60% of executives in the Forbes Research 2025 CxO Growth Survey saying that scalable cloud and IT infrastructure is critical to growth, and 64% of chief information officers reporting that heavy AI investment is critical. Under such conditions, identity must persist across platforms, applications and touchpoints. High-confidence data assets, such as identity assets, improve ROI, reduce waste and support growth decisions.
At the same time, new identity capabilities suggest fascinating possibilities for a more consumer-centered digital future. Martin hopes that today’s innovations lead to a world where consumers control their own data via centralized repositories — environments where they can add, delete or modify what they share, and stipulate with whom they’re sharing it.
“Imagine a master control panel where you can indicate your up-to-date details on what you’re willing to disclose or not disclose to a wide range of brands,” he said.
Identity resolution also stands to improve AI, which tends to struggle making sense of the siloed data that still plagues so many organizations.
“AI works best when it has unified data that’s been structured and has longitudinal history attached to it,” Martin noted. “Because brands need to build trust with their consumers, they need to have a trusted data foundation – it’s the infrastructure of the AI age. We bring a glass box, not a black box, approach to our client partnerships, focused on transparent, interoperable solutions.”
In the future, algorithms will increasingly “do the thinking” for us and AI-curated experiences will burgeon. Think of seamless AI-powered conversational interfaces and the 60% of brands, according to a new Acxiom report on customer experience, already testing AI-powered agents in real customer journeys. Or imagine newly relevant AI-driven guidance or recommendations, in such areas as security and product support; or emotionally intelligent AI, which 81 percent of brands, according to the report, believe will lead to stronger consumer trust and loyalty.
In this AI-mediated environment, as AI agents buy and sell on our behalf with minimal human intervention, trust — foundational and fundamental, in Martin’s words — becomes the load-bearing element of the entire ecosystem. Trusted identity technology, in this light, isn’t just a sales tool. It’s the foundation on which to build an AI-powered economy that wins the confidence across all stakeholders that it will need in order to thrive.