Douwe Bergsma, CMO of Georgia-Pacific, walked into our meeting with a question that stopped me cold.
"You may be wondering why a company that sells toilet paper, paper towels, and napkins needs a data management platform." He paused, just long enough to let the absurdity land. "We thought perhaps you could tell us."
I've been in a lot of conference rooms over the past twenty years—pitching DMPs, then CDPs, now agentic AI—and Douwe's question captures something I've never quite been able to shake. The most important transformations in business are, on paper, spectacularly boring. Data management platforms. Identity resolution. Journey orchestration. Try explaining any of that at a dinner party.
And yet I've watched billion-dollar decisions stall because the people who needed to make them couldn't connect the technical capability to the business outcome. The technology matters. The architecture matters. But none of it moves without a story that makes someone feel why it matters.
That's what this essay is about: ten stories from three books and nearly a decade of trying to make the technical human.
The Oldest Technology
Before I get to the stories, a confession: I think about Joseph Campbell more than any marketing executive probably should.
Campbell spent his life studying the monomyth—the Hero's Journey—and what he found was that the same narrative structure appears independently across every culture on earth. A hero is called to adventure, crosses into the unknown, faces trials, meets mentors, confronts death, returns transformed.
My co-author Martin Kihn wrote about narrative weaponization in House of Lies, exploring how consultants use story to sell ideas that spreadsheets alone could never move. The insight wasn't cynical—it was honest. Humans don't process data the way we process stories. Data informs. Stories transform.
The Stories
1. The $5 Chip
In 2015, Mike Cunningham—Chief Digital Officer at Keurig Green Mountain—had a vision: put a data collection chip in every coffee maker. Keurig decided not to build it. But here's the thing: if Mike asked me today, I'd give him completely different advice. "You don't need the chip. The customer's agent already knows all of that."
2. Casey's Pizza
Casey's General Stores put a picture of the customer's usual order in re-engagement emails. 300% lift in conversion. No AI. No billion-dollar infrastructure. But that personalized pizza picture was optimized for human psychology. An AI agent doesn't feel nostalgia.
3. The Toilet Paper Question
Georgia-Pacific didn't have CRM records for the millions of people buying Brawny at Walmart. The challenge in 2017 was figuring out how to capture data about customers you never directly touch. The challenge in 2026 is different: how do you make your products machine-readable when the customer's agent is doing the shopping?
4. Campbell's Weather
Campbell's Soup Company has been using weather data to direct marketing budgets since the 1950s. Seventy years of institutional knowledge. But the agent doesn't care about your institutional knowledge. It cares about structured data, real-time availability, and competitive pricing—right now.
5. Pandora's Playlist
Pandora discovered that your playlist reveals almost everything about you. This is Principle #2 from Data Driven: you have more data than you think. It's also one of the only principles that translates cleanly into the agentic era—because an agent can do the same inference, just faster.
6. The Porsche on the Tarmac
My family was about to miss a connection in Atlanta. I tweeted @Delta. They met us at the gate and whisked us between concourses in a Porsche Macan. What was that worth? I may never book another airline again. This is what unified customer data actually feels like.
Let me skip ahead to the three stories that keep me up at night—the ones that suggest the rules might be changing faster than most companies realize.
7. The Inverted Bullseye
Ronald den Elzen—CEO of Heineken USA—drew a bullseye: 320 million Americans → 18-20 million Heineken lovers. "Can you help me find these people?" Now imagine the bullseye inverted. A customer's agent broadcasting out. Ronald's question becomes: "Can you help me be found?"
8. Apex Home Goods
They built everything my books prescribed. Eight figures invested. Level 4 maturity. Then in 2025, the metrics plateaued—because their customers had delegated to AI agents. The beautiful customer experience? The agent couldn't see it. Doing everything right for the last paradigm doesn't protect you from the next one.
9. Joe Then and Now
In 2018, Joe's car-buying journey touched dozens of systems. Chaos. In 2026, Joe's agent queried twelve manufacturers in seconds, negotiated with dealers, and Joe walked into one dealership already approved. The question isn't "how do we track the journey?" anymore. There's no journey to track.
10. Father Schmitt's Mainframe
In 1961, Father Theodore Schmitt computerized his donor records on an IBM 650 mainframe. His mainframe processed dozens of records per hour. An AI agent evaluates dozens of brands per second. Six orders of magnitude faster. But the logic didn't change at all. The technology changes; the principles compound.
The agentic revolution will transform commerce—I believe it's the most significant shift in our lifetimes—but agents don't set preferences. Humans do. The customer who tells their agent "I only buy from sustainable brands" got that value somewhere. Brand story influences how humans configure their agents. The story happens before the agent gets involved.
The companies that win won't just have the best APIs. They'll have the clearest stories about why their transformation matters—stories that move executives to invest, employees to execute, and humans to tell their agents which brands to trust.
Data advantage is temporary. Story advantage compounds.
Father Schmitt understood that in 1961. Douwe Bergsma understood it when he walked into that conference room with his impossible question about toilet paper. The agents don't care about stories—but the people programming the agents still do.
That's why stories still win.