Retail marketing platform (and CDP) Ometria has raised a $40 million Series C, bringing total funding to $72 million.  Ometria assembles customer data and then uses artificial intelligence to suggest customer segments, identify campaign opportunities, and predict results.  Marketers still design their campaigns and messages, which can be delivered across email, mobile, websites, social, direct mail, and “more”.

Here’s a cheerful McKinsey report that finds 71% of consumers expect personalized interactions and 76% are frustrated when they don’t happen.  On the other hand, Digital Commerce 360 found that more shopper wanted the ability to opt out of personalization (52%) than wanted personalized product recommendations (32%) or web pages and search results (11%).

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.