You do love Adobe headlines, Dear Reader. So although I’m not entirely impressed that Adobe Audience Manager has added an ability to predict which segment a new Web site visitor will eventually join, I’ll mention it. For good measure, I’ll throw in a separate Adobe announcement from earlier this week, that they are adding AI-based predictive model scores and multi-touch attribution to Adobe Experience Platform.
Yesterday was the second anniversary of the go-live date for the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), so it’s fitting that we have privacy news. First is a $16 million raise by Evervault, which promises to keep personal date safely encrypted and only allow API calls to process it within “privacy cages” that do not expose the unencrypted contents. Companies would not store any sensitive data and thus avoid most burdens of GDPR compliance, the company says.
AI-powered recommendations are great but racial, gender, and other biases are a known problem. Customer engagement vendor Pega has added Ethical Bias Check, which simulates the results of an AI-driven strategy and checks if results skew towards or away from a particular group. We don’t know how well it works but give them credit for trying.
With CDP vendors increasing their workforces by 3.4% in six months, compared with an average of 0.2% each six months over the prior two years, the sector seems to be growing again, according to our own semi-annual industry update. There is much talk of composable CDPs but they still employ no more than 5% of the sector workforce. What is a clear trend is the acquisition of independent CDPs by vendors interested in adding a CDP to a larger system (usually an activation system).