Almost 83% of consumers are interested in personalized discounts and promotions according to a survey of 2,500 U.S. consumers by commerce and payments platform PYMNTS. That’s the good news; the bad news is that only 44% said the offers were relevant to them. Data-driven personalization is particularly valued by millennials (90%) and Gen Z (85%).

If AI is the new Gold Rush, then supporting tech vendors are the merchants who get rich selling shovels to the prospectors. None is more foundational than Google Cloud, who have just expanded their Data Cloud with new data engineering agents, tools to integrate with external agents, and improvements to their data platforms. Most notably, they’ve announced a new Spanner columnar database engine for high-speed real-time queries, addressing one of the biggest weaknesses in cloud-stored data.