Center of Gravity

The axis. Where does the canonical customer record live?

Packaged end. AEP's Data Lake and Profile Store. Identity stitching, audience evaluation, and activation-eligible data are all inside AEP. Other systems read from AEP via governed channels (source.packaged-vs-composable-md).

Composable end. The cloud data warehouse (Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery). Identity resolution, feature engineering, and audience composition happen inside the CDW. CDPs become activation-side consumers of CDW state.

What it determines. Center of gravity dictates which tools are first-class and which are downstream. It cascades into integration philosophy, cost predictability, and governance.

Neither end is universally better. Centralizing in a packaged CDP simplifies governance for organizations without strong data-engineering staff. Centralizing in a CDW maximizes flexibility for organizations with mature data teams. The question the agent must elicit: "Where do you want the source of truth, and do you have the staff to operate it there?"