Nearly all business leaders (96%) say data and analytics improves decision-making but fewer than half of marketers (45%) are completely confident in their data accuracy, Salesforce reports.  Technical leaders are more optimistic: 57% of data and analytics and 53% of IT leaders report complete confidence.  Alignment is certainly an issue: employee productivity (47%) is the top metric tracked by technical leaders, while ROI of data initiatives (32%) and speed to insight (28%) are near the bottom.

Here’s a new buzzword for your Bingo card: “agentic AI”, which describes systems that act by themselves rather than in response to a prompt.  Salesforce was all over the concept last week, announcing its Agentforce collection.  According to the company, it replaces the “now-outdated copilots and chatbots” with agents “operating autonomously, retrieving the right data on demand, building action plans for any task, and executing these plans without requiring human intervention.”