Finally, Thales Group offers a study with the delightfully obvious conclusions that companies do a poor job of protecting sensitive data and that remote work makes things even worse. The problem is certainly obvious to corporate leaders: 28% said they wouldn’t trust their own personal data to their organization. Hey, they may be inept but they’re not stupid.
Next, we have an academic study with the obvious finding that Facebook’s interest category targeting is often wrong. Among other things, Facebook doesn’t differentiate positive from negative sentiment when inferring interest. Speaking of Facebook, there are reports that they paid a right-wing lobbying agency to plant negative stories about TikTok. Not exactly obvious, but not surprising, either.
This Ascend2 survey for Oracle has lots of interesting information, but also some puzzles. For example: CDPs rank first on the list of planned martech investments (37%) but data silos data and poor integration fall last on the list of challenges. Or consider this: 82% say they want to change some stack components to improve performance while 88% say they already have access to appropriate data for marketing decisions.
Salesforce is buying Airkit.ai, which builds low-code, AI-powered e-commerce customer service agents. You might have thought Salesforce could already do that, but presumably Airkit does it better. It doesn’t hurt that the company founders sold a previous business to Salesforce, the company was partly funded by Salesforce Ventures, and the product is already listed on AppExchange. Price was not announced.