Marketing Operating System (MOS)

The client's marketing organization operated across multiple disconnected systems — campaign orchestration in Emarsys, event streaming on Kafka, downstream activation in a patchwork of point solutions. Each required its own configuration, sequencing, and human coordination per campaign.

A typical cross-system campaign required two-to-three days of human coordination across teams just to define the workflow before any creative or audience work began. A vendor proposal on the table would have replaced the existing SAP-based stack at a multi-million-dollar migration cost, betting that consolidation alone would solve the coordination problem.

The client needed a faster, more reversible path: something that could declaratively describe a campaign workflow across the existing systems without forcing a platform-replacement decision.

A senior applied-AI engineer designed and prototyped a Marketing Operating System — a declarative orchestration layer that sits on top of the client's existing stack.

We defined campaign workflows in a YAML domain-specific language. A marketer or operator specifies the audience trigger, the touchpoint sequence, and the activation channels; the MOS handles the cross-system orchestration. The workflow engine runs on Temporal, so campaign executions are durable, observable, and retryable across system boundaries. The event spine is the client's existing Kafka — no new data plane introduced.

We exposed the campaign primitives through Model Context Protocol (MCP), so AI agents and human operators can reason about and trigger campaign actions in the same declarative grammar. And we used the working prototype to make the case that the proposed SAP-replacement migration could be deferred (and possibly avoided entirely) by orchestrating on top of the client's existing investment rather than replacing it.