SAP Hybris has purchased customer identity management vendor Gigya. TechCrunch reported the price was $350 million. Gigya lets consumers register and then manage their information centrally. This becomes increasingly important as GDPR and similar regulations outside the U.S. give consumers more legal power over how their data is used. As our friends at Equifax have recently demonstrated, consumers within the U.S. have pretty much no data rights whatsoever.

Then again, why should creatives be the only people helped (or replaced) by robots? “Big data-as-a-service company” Qubole has created an autonomous data platform to do data extracts, loads, transformations, stream processing, machine learning, reporting, and ad hoc analysis. How you automate ad hoc is beyond me, but whatever. The core AI skills here are to automatically analyze data use, provide insights about it to human users, and create autonomous agents that take over routine activities.

Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.