Here’s a surprise: this last newsletter of the year has some actual news. Acquia has replatformed its CDP to run exclusively on Snowflake. The change also let them give data scientists direct SQL access to the CDP data. It’s a fitting end to a year when Snowflake has gained so much attention in the CDP community.
Digital asset management vendor Bynder also swapped parents last month. Private equity investor Thomas H. Lee Partners bought a majority stake in the company, including the portion owned by Insight Partners. The deal is said to value Bynder at $600 million.
AI also got plenty of attention. No surprise that 95% of IT leaders told Forrester that AI-based decisions will be very important within three years. Less expected: 57% say the main use case is assisting human decision-makers, not replacing them, and 67% say decisions should be more widely distributed to key stakeholders. Personalized customer experience ranks sixth on their list of AI use cases.
Procrastinators of the world can throw a party whenever they get around to it: Google has once more pushed back complete third-party cookie deprecation. The new target is “early next year.” Reasons for the delay include concerns expressed by U.K. data regulator Information Commissioner’s Office, an ongoing inquiry by the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority, and widespread discontent in the advertising ecosystem.