CDP Institute

Conversica, which creates automated “intelligent assistants” for online tasks such as qualifying leads and scheduling meetings, has raised a $31 million Series C, bringing total funding to $87 million. Conversica agents are more natural than your average chatbot.

IBM is buying open source technology vendor Red Hat in a deal valued around $34 billion. IBM’s announcement crows this “changes everything about the cloud market”. But it also says Red Hat will operate as a separate unit, so it’s not clear how. Probably more relevant: Red Hat is growing and IBM is not.

$100 million usually seems like a lot of money although maybe not today. In any case, it’s what automated machine learning vendor DataRobot raised in its Series D last week, bringing total funding to $225 million. The point being, marketers should realize there’s plenty of AI technology outside of their own little valley.

Let’s go in a different direction: this New York Times report that Internet-connected thermometer start-up Kinsa sold customer data to Clorox, which used it to target disinfectant advertising at areas with high fever rates. The data was aggregated to the Zip code level, so it’s hard to see this as a privacy violation. But it’s easy to see it as anti-tech sensationalism.

Should marketers be in charge of customer data? A study by Econsultancy for SAP suggests the answer is yes: companies doing the best job with their customer data are vastly more likely than others to say marketing owns the customer (66% vs 11%) and manages customer data operations (44% vs 25%). Leaders are better at lots of other things, too. Well worth a look.

Marketers themselves want to control their data, according to another survey by ad buying engine Sizmek. In particular, 88% want to own the data created by their campaigns, rather than ceding control to “walled gardens” like Facebook and Google.

And since we’re on the topic, marketers also feel they’re throwing away a good portion of the data they do collect, says geolocation data provider Digital Elements. More than half felt they could increase revenues if they could use an extra 25% of the data they currently throw away. Most of the study focuses on IP location data, which 71% said was very important but just 39% are using fully.

Interesting privacy news today, unless you consider that an oxymoron. Biggest event was Apple CEO Tim Cook’s address to European Union privacy regulators, in which he praised GDPR, called for similar legislation in the U.S., and argued that personal information “is being weaponized against us with military efficiency.”

On a more practical level, Google gave privacy-minded consumers the ability to view and delete their search activity from within the Google Search home page and to easily access other privacy settings. The new capabilities are available now on Search desktop and mobile Web, will be added to Android and iOS in a few weeks, and will be available in other Google products next year. You must be logged in to access them.

Lest you conclude the good guys have won, we have the 132-page IAPP-EY Annual Privacy Governance Report on what’s actually happening. Which is that 56% of companies still haven’t complied with GDPR and 19% say they don’t expect to, ever. Just 32% consider their privacy program mature and a minuscule 2% have fully automated response to data subject requests – a GDPR right that would quickly overwhelm manual processes if it widely exercised.

CDP vendor RedPoint Global has launched the next generation of its Customer Engagement Hub. Enhancements cover identity resolution, machine learning, and access to customer profiles by touchpoint systems. Most intriguing from a technical standpoint is the ability to use NoSQL databases including MongoDB and Cosmos as the primary data stores, avoiding SQL entirely if you’re so inclined. And who isn’t?

AI-driven customer insight platform People.ai has raised a $30 million Series B funding. People.ai ingests contact data from sales, marketing, and customer services systems, mines it for insights, and sends the results to CRM and other systems. The company says it can automate over 90% of CRM data entry.