Still dark and closer to home for marketers, IBM looked at AI bias in programmatic advertising. Working with industry groups, they’ve released an open source toolkit AI Fairness 360 that can detect it. They concluded potentially harmful bias does exist but were optimistic that technical cures could be found, although ad efficiency might suffer.
Meanwhile, this DataRobot study takes a darker view, reporting that 54% of tech leaders are concerned about AI bias, up from 42% in 2019. A surprising (to me) 81% think government regulation would be helpful even though 45% also worry regulations would make adoption more difficult. In a classic “not my problem” result, 90% are at least somewhat moderately confident that their own organization can identify AI bias.
And then there were none: experience analytics vendor Medallia is buying Thunderhead, the last major independent journey orchestration platform. Previous acquisitions in the field have included: Pointillist bought by Genesys in October 2021; Kitewheel acquired by CSG in July 2021; and Usermind acquired by Qualtrics, also in July 2021.
Salesforce kicked off its big Connections conference yesterday, and if you’re surprised the focus was on generative AI, you haven’t been paying attention. Still, the focus this time was on marketing applications that draw on Salesforce CDP data, so it’s right up our alley. They also announced direct access to Google BigQuery data, ticking the “zero-copy” box as well.