CDP Institute

Microsoft is in the news today for a 10,000-person layoff, but we’re more interested in cool AI stuff, right?  They recently announced general availability of Azure OpenAI Service, which will make it easier for businesses to run all sorts of advanced machine learning models.  Well, not all sorts, since ChatGPT is notably excluded.  But they promise to add it soon.

There’s more to AI than ChatGPT.  Horizon Media has just launched an AI-based media optimization platform for ecommerce marketers who advertise through other retailers.  The new system, Neon, uses historical and real-time sales and campaign data to develop media plans, fine-tune spending in real time, and send the best product display page to each visitor.  The company promises a 20% or better revenue gain vs manual approaches.

Your own media plans may be above average, Dear Reader, but this CMO Council report finds two-thirds of marketers are less than very confident their current media strategy will produce the desired results.  Also: privacy ranks last on the list of obstacles to marketing results, while budget and talent are on top.  And: 20% have a data clean room and 24% plan to add one.

Optimove has been steadily expanding the message delivery services available within its product. Its latest addition is SMS, which joins existing options for email, website, mobile push, in-app messages, and digital ads. No word on when they’ll add digital out-of-home.

Google’s proposed Topics API targeting mechanism – which tagged users with a few interests based on recent site visits – always seemed questionable from a privacy standpoint. Sure enough, the technical standards arm of web governing body World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has rejected it. Coffin, meet nail.

TikTok has been under fire for sharing private information with Chinese government agencies. The company is reportedly attempting to appease lawmakers with a $1.5 billion ”transparency plan” for independent review of its code and video selection algorithms. The politics here probably matter more than any technical details, but it’s worth a try.

Netherlands-based CDP Invenna is merging with Human Inference, which offers data quality and identity resolution technology.  Both firms are owned by The Data Agency, which owns a number of customer data-related businesses.  Human Inference will be offered as a separate product and as a module within Invenna.

Data quality and master data management has remained the top priority for data users worldwide for six years running, according to this BARC survey.  Data culture, governance, visualization, and self-service analytics round out the top five.  Lots of interesting detail here by application, region, industry, best-in-class, company size, and user type.

I know you know that data is just one leg of the data, technology, and people tripod supporting business growth.  But if you need to convince a friend, this Accenture CEO study shows that focusing on data and technology alone yields a 4% productivity premium while focusing on all three yields an 11% premium.  Data, tech, and AI are tied with talent management as top growth drivers.

Google Cloud is expanding its AI-based tools for retailers. The most intriguing new offering is pre-trained on billions of product images to visually check inventory levels on retailer shelves. You’ll recall that training data is the biggest bottleneck for many AI projects. Google also announced new storefront personalization and browsing features, plus optimized repurchase recommendations.

Don’t take my word about the problem of training data. This Immuta report confirms that data security (44%) and data access (40%) head the list of obstacles to AI and machine learning projects. A whopping 89% say they’ve missed some type of business opportunity due to data access problems.

Coho AI combines AI with product-led growth – selling through freemiums, free trials, and similar test-it-yourself options. Specifically, their AI analyzes how customers are using a product and recommends interventions that will lead to further growth. They just raised an $8.5 million seed round.