Customer engagement platform Braze avoids the CDP label but its year-old Data Platform ticks all the boxes: it ingests data, builds and stores unified customer profiles, and shares the results with other systems. They’ve just announced plans for further enhancements, such as CSV data imports for custom events, as well a Model Context Profile (MCP) server that lets user query Braze data with genAI prompts.
We reported last week that IT staff are very pleased with how well they’re preparing customer data. Data consumers are less satisfied: this Ascend2 report for data governance vendor Collibra finds that 40% of data governance, risk and compliance professionals don’t trust their data and 62% say data quality is the top area needing improvement. When it comes to building AI models, data reliability is the top challenge (53%), outweighing compliance (45%) and risk (41%).
MCP servers are clearly a fashion must. Customer data tool vendor Aqfer just added one of their own. In their case, MCP provides AI systems with access to enterprise data that remains in cloud data stores. Aqfer’s contribution is structuring, governing and contextualizing the cloud data to serve marketing use cases.
Instacart and TikTok have announced an integration for ad targeting to reach specific groups of Instacart shoppers. Advertisers will be able to use Instacart data and access their product catalog from within TikTok’s Ad Manager. It’s another example of retailers monetizing their data outside of their own platforms.