Medallia, the customer and employee experience platform, has launched four new AI tools. These include Ask Athena, a chatbot trained on an organization’s experience and other data, and Intelligent Summaries, producing AI-generated briefs on interactions, customer profiles and issue resolution. Medallia has also established an internal AI Moderation Council to support ethical, responsible, and inclusive use of AI.
Marketers are famous for complaining about data silos, but data professionals also cite the number of silos more often (61%) than any other challenge. Self-service data prep remains rare (10%) although 22% plan to add it. Mature data governance is in place at just 8% of the survey group.
CG companies are focused on increasing margins with 90% expecting profitable growth over the next two years, says Salesforce in its “Consumer Goods Industry Insight” report. They are also investing in digital marketing, with social media being the number one channel, as well as digital service and D2C sales. The industry is effective at collecting data (the number of sources has almost doubled since 2021), but less effective at activating it.
CDP mParticle is being acquired by ecommerce platform Rokt for a price of $300 million. It’s the third acquisition of a leading independent CDP in a little over one month, following Uniphore’s purchase of ActionIQ and Contentstack’s purchase of Lytics. All three buyers offer some type of customer-facing technology; apparently they’ve decided that adding real-time profiles from CDP will give them a competitive edge. (See this blog post for more analysis.)