And then there’s first-party data, everybody’s favorite crush. This Dun & Bradstreet report that finds it’s the top go-to-market priority (40%) among a cross-section of B2B sales, marketing, and data leaders, even ranking ahead of new customer acquisition (34%). Data accuracy is their top obstacle to data-driven success.
AI also got plenty of attention. No surprise that 95% of IT leaders told Forrester that AI-based decisions will be very important within three years. Less expected: 57% say the main use case is assisting human decision-makers, not replacing them, and 67% say decisions should be more widely distributed to key stakeholders. Personalized customer experience ranks sixth on their list of AI use cases.
If we seem more philosophical than usual this week, it’s not the result of some Scrooge-like holiday transformation (sorry, Jamie), but because hard news is scarce. Still, it’s a welcome opportunity to talk about long-term trends, like this Axios piece that quotes Insider Intelligence as finding the Google/Meta share of U.S. digital ad revenue will fall below 50% this year. It’s no surprise – the share peaked back in 2017 – but a good reminder that duopoly power is less secure than it seems.
Salesforce is buying Airkit.ai, which builds low-code, AI-powered e-commerce customer service agents. You might have thought Salesforce could already do that, but presumably Airkit does it better. It doesn’t hurt that the company founders sold a previous business to Salesforce, the company was partly funded by Salesforce Ventures, and the product is already listed on AppExchange. Price was not announced.