The Customer Data Platform (CDP) industry is experiencing an identity crisis as companies consolidate and acquire CDPs to enhance personalization, real-time data orchestration, or AI investments. The role of CDPs extends beyond marketing use cases, providing a centralized data infrastructure that powers every customer interaction, fostering cross-functional collaboration, and enabling businesses to analyze end-to-end customer journeys. With the modern data architecture, companies need to evaluate CDPs with a forward-thinking perspective, considering AI readiness, privacy compliance, and data orchestration across every channel. A CDP should be flexible and extensible, connecting multiple systems, processing data in different formats and structures, and evolving with changing regulatory requirements. Additionally, CDPs can help manage key aspects of privacy compliance, adapt to the new era of privacy-informed personalization, and support AI readiness by protecting data quality at scale and offering real-time data processing. Ultimately, CDPs are crucial for businesses to deliver excellent customer experiences, train AI models, and even for high-level business processes like supply chain management or resource planning.