Gravity4 calls itself “the world’s first A.I. big data marketing cloud”, which sounds suspiciously fluffy but is backed by some substance. They focus mostly on programmatic advertising but have “apps” that support other channels. Latest news is they’ve released a blockchain-based service for paid digital advertising. Bonus trivia: the product is called “Lydian” in honor of Lydia, the first civilization to use coins (not Lydia, the tattooed lady).

If anything is more credible than academic acceptance, it’s funding. So that AI-driven analytics vendor ThoughtSpot has raised more than $160 million speaks for itself. ThoughtSpot just announced SpotIQ, which automatically queries enterprise data sources and returns “deep and relevant insights for users that they may not have thought to look for on their own”. The company says that “SpotIQ accomplishes in a single click what could take 40,000 man hours.” It doesn’t say which men, doing what, or how long it would take a team of women.

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.