I can’t bring myself to lead with yet another generative AI story, so we’ll start instead with this Forrester report for Airtable, which found that organizations have lots of software applications. The average is 367 in use at large organizations, with teams using an average of 45 daily and individuals using an average of 52 weekly. No surprise here but a good reminder of why data integration is so important.
Yet another technology to know us better – very possibly better than most of us will want. Not content just checking our cardiovascular, respiratory, digestive and reproductive systems, Big Tech is rapidly developing brain-tracking devices to learn what we think, feel and remember, purportedly yes, to help with health diagnoses and management. It also crosses our last personal, private frontier.
Data integration is one of the more promising uses for generative AI, although it doesn’t get as a much attention as search or content creation. SnapLogic is staking its claim by opening a waitlist for SnapGPT, which will integrate and automate business processes using natural language prompts. Removing that bottleneck could all sorts of floodgates, including some that might best remain shut.
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.