CDP Institute

SAP has announced a Business Data Cloud that will embed Databricks solutions for data engineering, machine learning and AI workloads to unify SAP and third party data across the enterprise. It’s more than a CDP since it involves more than customer data.  The unified data layer will also support SAP’s Joule copilot AI agents.

Another day, another lawsuit claiming an AI firm stole publisher data.  The latest has Canadian gen AI firm Cohere being sued for breach of copyright by fourteen major publishers including The Guardian and Condé Nast. The complaint alleges that Cohere has used the publishers’ content to train its AI systems and then generate results that compete with the publishers’ own offerings.

The success of retail media has paved the way for the rise of commerce media, says a new report from eMarketer, sponsored by LiveRamp. Commerce media includes retail media and similar initiatives from non-retail vendors such as financial services, travel, and commerce intermediaries like Instacart and Uber Eats. Ad spend on financial media networks, for example, will reach $35 million in the U.S. this year, and more than quadruple by 2026.

Meta has moved to provide more support for ad placement controls and thus brand safety (presumably because there are many places you don’t want your brand to show up on Facebook). In particular, it has expanded its third-party “blocklist” program; brands can now work with IAS, DoubleVerify and Zefr to create blocklists across Meta’s platforms. Meta is also conducting limited tests with a tool to turn off comments on ads.

The saga continues with TikTok now available for download again in Google Play and the Apple App store in the U.S. Attorney-General Pam Bondi has provided Google and Apple with assurances that they will not face future penalties for making the app available. Oracle had continued (as cloud provider) to support the app for users who had already downloaded it to their devices.

The Anthropic Economic Index, just launched, is intended to track AI’s economic impact, for example its usage across Department of Labor job categories. The first results are based on a privacy-sensitive analysis of millions of conversations among Claude.ai users. Among the things they’re saying: 4% of professions are using AI for a remarkable 75% or more of their tasks.

Tofu has raised $12 million in Series A funding to support the ongoing development of its AI-powered unified marketing platform. Identifying worsening “martech bloat” as a problem for GTM teams, Tofu is proffering its platform as an integrated marketing solution with gen AI embedded. This intended to avoid the adoption of multiple AI-related tools with overlapping functionality.

CX platform Sprinklr has announced an integration with fledgling social media network Bluesky. Sprinklr customers can now use the platform to engage with Bluesky’s 30 million users. They will also be able to pull Bluesky data into Sprinklr’s social listening and analytics dashboards.

Following a 43% increase in revenue YoY in 2024, AppLovin will divest itself of its gaming apps business in Q1 2025 for an estimated $900 million. Going forward it will prioritize mobile ads, which have been driving revenue growth. Think they’ll change the name to AdLovin?

A district judge has ruled that, as a matter of law, Ross Intelligence’s use of Thompson Reuters’ Westlaw content to train its own legal research model is not “fair use” but copyright infringement. This is a revision of a 2023 ruling and leaves issues for a jury to decide. It might, however, shut down one line of defense when it comes to AI scraping of copyright material.

How bad is the problem of unreliable answers from gen AI systems?  A month-long study by the BBC using ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini and Perplexity determined that 51% of answers to queries had “significant issues of some form.” Almost 20% of answers based on BBC content had factual errors while 13% of quotes were altered or just didn’t exist.

Adoption of gen AI has slowed as marketers adjust to its limits, according to a study by Deloitte Digital.  Use of gen AI to create newsletter and advertisements, automate content creation and produce graphic content is down, while the number of respondents using gen AI to create short-form text or brainstorm content ideas is up YoY (7% and 19% respectively).