Google Cloud has launched a public beta for Recommendations AI, an ecommerce recommendation engine offered as a managed service. It scales to millions of catalog items and can be retrained daily. But if it’s really so clever, why is Google is offering everyone the same $600 credit to try it?

You’re probably not surprised that better data leads to better business results, but would you have guessed that better privacy practices correlate with fewer data breaches? Our friends at privacy tech vendor Osano rated 11,000 Web sites and found sites with the weakest privacy were twice as likely to be breached and lost seven times as many records when they were. Something to bear in mind when you’re deciding which companies can be trusted with your data.

Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.