CDP Amperity has purchased Custora, a retail predictive analytics and campaign management system. Custora also assembles customer profiles so it might have qualified as a CDP by itself. It’s a rare acquisition by a CDP vendor and extends Amperity’s scope into “campaign CDP” territory.
Lots of personalization industry news today, Dear Reader. Retail-oriented analytical CDP Manthan and recommendation engine RichRelevance have announced a “path to consolidating” pending regulatory approvals. The firms will start joint sales and marketing right away. If this sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because analytical CDP Amperity bought recommendation engine Custora just yesterday.
You’ve surely heard already that Google’s parent company Alphabet is buying Fitbit for $2.1 billion, and don’t need me to point out that this is about collecting data, not selling wearable devices. So let’s instead report that panel-based customer research company UserTesting has acquired fabulously-named Truthlab, which uses AI to find highlights in video feeds. As with Fitbit, the goal is to extract useful information from people’s behaviors. It’s Zuboffian!
Unauthorized training data isn’t an existential threat to generative AI but it’s certainly a headache for users and developers alike. Most developers are trying to exclude materials that creators have explicitly labeled as unauthorized and citing “fair use” as justification for copying everything else. Getty Images has taken an opposite approach, building its gen AI tool only on materials that are explicitly licensed. It’s possible that tracing the provenance of training data will become a standard, similar to how organic food producers trace the origins of their ingredients.