CDP Institute

He wasn’t wearing fur handcuffs, but it still seemed slightly kinky when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman begged the government to regulate him during Tuesday’s Senate hearing.  Charmed observers seem to have forgotten that most regulators are quickly captured by the industry they govern, and licensing requirements protect industry leaders from competition.  If you were in Altman’s shoes, you’d ask to be regulated, too.

Customer engagement platform Braze may qualify as a CDP but their focus is message delivery.  They’ve just reinforced that with new features to sync audiences with TickTok, Snapchat, and Pinterest, to simplify consent collection, and to streamline collaboration among marketing teams.  They can also push messages to your iPhone lock screen, which straddles the line between cool and creepy.

Data collection tool Snowflake has launched an attribution modeling solution to measure ad campaign results.  Wait, you say: attribution calculations are complicated and data collection is just the first step.  True enough.  Snowflake’s contribution is to put the data in a suitable format and push it into Snowflake, where the analytical work will take place.

It was entirely predictable that Amazon would add a ChatGPT-style search function to its online marketplace.  In fact, this blog post discussed it just last week.  But, as with other chat-based search alternatives, there are questions of how Amazon avoids losing revenue from conventional search ads and whether consumers can trust the chat results are not merely based on who is paying for them.

Data integration is another predictable use for generative AI.  We covered SnapLogic’s offering in March and have surely missed plenty of others.  So I’d question whether Boomi’s new tool is really “a first-of-its-kind”, although it does offer extend beyond integration to operations optimization and experience orchestration.  Since I’m shamelessly touting blog posts today, see this one for thoughts on where that might lead.

Not every data integration story involves AI.  Here’s the more straightforward news that data integration and analytics platform Qlik has closed its acquisition of data quality vendor Talend.  Both firms are owned by private equity investor Thoma Bravo.  The deal is apparently part of Qlik’s plan for an IPO, which was quietly revealed in January.

European regulators started worrying about AI well before ChatGPT burst on the scene. Their head start let a key committee in the European Parliament pass a well-considered draft AI Act this week.  The law would segment AI applications into four risk levels and set different requirements for each.

This Sitecore survey of U.S. digital marketers found that 84% felt AI should be regulated, although only just 22% want the federal government to do the job.  Four out of five (80%) respondents have experimented with generative AI and a charmingly optimistic 82% think AI will lead to more jobs.  In other news, 85% plan to add composable software to their martech stack.

You may recall we reported last week that half of CIOs said their “citizen development” programs had failed, despite (or maybe because of) using low-code technology.  This Jitterbit survey shows something similar: 51% of IT respondents were very or extremely comfortable with non-IT employees using low-code app building tools.  You won’t be surprised that many more marketers (72%) of marketers felt it was just fine.

It’s a rare day that we can say something nice about Meta. But we seem to mention every other company’s generative AI offerings, so it’s only fair to report that they’ve set up an “AI Sandbox” to test new advertiser tools, and have pre-announced several that will make it easier to create different versions of ad materials. Features include text variations, text-to-image background generation, and image cropping. General availability is targeted towards the end of this year.

Adobe’s generative AI product, Firefly, is still in beta, but that hasn’t prevented Google from agreeing to integrate it with its Bard chatbot. Firefly offers text-to-image, vector re-coloring and text effect capabilities. Adobe has also expanded its Content Authenticity Initiative, which offers credentials to verify the origins of AI-generated or manipulated art.

Of all the problems facing advertising, you might think that its carbon footprint would be pretty far down the list. But at least some people are paying attention, and some of those rely on Scope3 to estimate the carbon footprint of the programmatic supply chain and block high-emissions ad inventory. They just expanded their service to cover open programmatic as well as private marketplaces.