Microsoft Azure has released a tool to discover and map data residing in all systems, within and outside of Azure itself. Azure Purview scans metadata and adds data sensitivity levels that help enforce limits based on privacy or other considerations. Data discovery is a key challenge for both Customer Data Platform implementations and privacy management.
Media spend will rise by 6% next year, according to this IAB survey. Growth will be entirely concentrated in digital budgets, which will rise 14% to reach 71% of total spend while traditional media falls by 5%. Privacy regulations top the list of buyer concerns, cited by 41%, and are closely followed by the need for more first party data (37%).
On safer turf, CRM platform LeadSquared raised a $32 million Series B. They offer a combined sales, service, and marketing platform for companies that sell products like education, healthcare, and financial services. We also have a $160 million raise for spa and salon software platform Zenoti, putting its total at $251 million and $1 billion valuation.
Here’s a new buzzword for your Bingo card: “agentic AI”, which describes systems that act by themselves rather than in response to a prompt. Salesforce was all over the concept last week, announcing its Agentforce collection. According to the company, it replaces the “now-outdated copilots and chatbots” with agents “operating autonomously, retrieving the right data on demand, building action plans for any task, and executing these plans without requiring human intervention.”