CDP Institute

I have no idea what either of these companies does but the headline was irresistible.

I’m not sure launching an artificial intelligence-based service counts as news. But Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference kicks off today so I’ll mention that they’ve announced “myEinstein” AI services that let non-developers create predictive models and chatbots. General release is due next summer. I’ll let you decide whether it’s a good idea for thousands (millions?) of Salesforce users to deploy automated systems with little oversight. But I’m certain that Salesforce’s apparent decision to refer to all its users as “Trailblazers” is just plain silly.

Naïve users might blindly trust an artificial intelligence system, but their more knowledgeable co-workers are often frustrated by AI’s inability to explain its decisions. Albert, an AI-based marketing platform, has addressed this with features that help users understand what the system is up to. It’s a collection of reporting features, not a single explanation of why the system took a particular action. A chatbot to answer that question is definitely one I’d like.

Speaking of inexplicable, here’s a study from Infographic World that finds infographics are effective. What’s inexplicable isn’t the conclusion but that the report isn’t accompanied by an infographic. Perhaps someone was being deliberately ironic. If so, they definitely get style points.

Berlin-based Customer Data Platform CrossEngage has raised €5 million ($5.8 million) to expand its growth. The company was founded in 2015 and so far has sold to clients in Europe. It does cross channel campaigns in addition to building a unified customer database. Here’s a review.

Adobe announced closer integration of its content management system, Experience Manager, with Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM. It follows other integrations announced over the past year. I wouldn’t even mention this except that everybody got all excited when Marketo announced it was using Microsoft Azure as its host. This is what a real partnership looks like, folks.

And since we’re talking about alliances, let’s note that Dun & Bradstreet announced its company data will now be available to Salesforce.com users via a Lightning Data app on the AppExchange. Users get real time data cleansing and enrichment. To put things in perspective, there are five other Lightning Data integrations including DataFox, HGData, Clearbit, Bombora, and MCH healthcare data.

The Marketing Technology Industry Council is a group of marketing executives from 27 B2B companies, united in their quest to solve top marketing challenges through “meticulous research and in-depth, expert studies”.

Don’t get me wrong: I think research can be great.

Of course, few pieces of research are more fascinating than what your competitors are up to. Market intelligence aggregator Crayon scans the Web for news, marketing campaigns, Web site changes, customer reviews and support requests, and such, and then shares the bits that seem important. They’ve just launched a free tool that gives daily digests of competitors’ marketing efforts.

Location data reveals more than where you are. Factual, which has a proprietary dataset of more than 130 million businesses and points of interest around the world, has released a mobile SDK that looks at things like business operating hours, speed and direction of travel, and device usage patterns to infer the situation of each user. The SDK lets mobile apps use the information to tailor their offers or other actions.

One major use for location data is measuring the impact of online advertising by connecting it with subsequent retail store visits.