Beyond the Cowpath: How Agentic AI is Breaking Down Traditional Data Siloes

At the recent IAB Annual Leadership Meeting in Palm Springs, a surprising trend emerged. In a room full of ad tech titans and marketing executives, the one thing nobody wanted to talk about was advertising transactions.

Kana CEO Tom Chavez and CTO Vivek Vaidya sat down for a 40 minute discussion with Randall Rothenberg, former President and CEO of the IAB, to discuss the state of the industry. What they explored wasn’t a shift in media buying, but a fundamental rewriting of how businesses operate.

Here were some of the high points:

The Death of the Data Silo

For decades, the marketing world has been defined by silos. We have a team for call center data, a team for creative, and a team for data governance. According to Rothenberg, these divisions were never a strategic choice; they were "artifacts of old technology constraints."

“We didn't organize marketing into silos because that was the right structure,” Chavez notes. “We did it because the systems couldn't talk to each other.”

In the past, bridging those gaps required massive capital and a “busload of consultants” to build custom integrations. Most companies simply gave up, letting those technical gaps harden into the rigid org charts and job titles we see today.

The Agentic AI Shift

The conversation highlighted a massive paradigm shift: Agentic AI. Unlike traditional software that requires human-led "paving of the cowpath", i.e. automating existing, clunky workflows, Agentic AI eliminates the constraints entirely. These systems can reason across data, context, and action autonomously. For the new generation of Agentic AI-first developers, the dreaded task of getting your data house in order is becoming a thing of the past. The AI doesn’t need a perfectly cleaned warehouse; it needs access and the ability to reason.

Beware the Cowpath

Despite the breakthroughs, Tom and Randy have observed a lingering instinct among leaders: using this extraordinary new technology to preserve very ordinary, legacy behaviors, or as Tom has referred to it: "paving the cowpath."

“The future won’t be found in automating existing workflows,” Chavez warns, “but in reimagining the work altogether.” The key takeaway here is that the goal shouldn't be to make the old silos run faster; it should be to build a "freeway" that bypasses them entirely.

Watch Excerpts from the Conversation:

Explore excerpts from their conversation on our YouTube channel here.

Highlights from the Video Series:

• Agentic Marketing Isn’t Only About Efficiency
• Why You Need Enterprise Grade AI
• Agentic AI Is a Creativity Extender
• What Agentic AI Achieves Was Never Possible Before