A survey of 2,000 CEOs by IBM finds 37% saying it’s better to be “fast and wrong” than “right and slow” when adopting technology in general. Specifically on AI, a striking 64% admitted adoption was prompted by the “risk” of falling behind rather than clear understanding of what it would bring to the business. But CEOs look on the sunny side, with 85% expecting positive ROI on AI by, oh, 2027.
MasterCard, PayPal and Visa may be ahead of the curve in believing that shoppers will allow AI agents to make purchases on their behalf, but a gentle wind of change is blowing. Salesforce’s latest Connected Shoppers report shows that “purchase recommended products on your behalf” is the least trusted action an AI agent can perform. Nevertheless, 19% of those surveyed are “very interested” in the possibility and 28% “somewhat interested” — that’s almost 50% leaning in that direction.
If you still think that MCP stands for Male Chauvinist Pig, well, the 1970’s want their disco ball back. Today’s hep cats know that MCP stands for Model Context Protocol, a new-but-widely supported standard that lets large language models access structured data as context for their prompts. Early adopters include Salesforce and Adobe, and search platform Algolia is now using it to feed their data to customer-facing real-time AI agents.
It barely feels like news when industry giants add AI features, since that’s what they’re expected to do. But lots of people use their products, so their announcements are probably of higher interest than most. With that in mind, let’s note that Adobe has just announced general availability of agents for audience creation, journey orchestration, experimentation, journey insights, website optimization and agent support.