Retina’s founders didn’t get the memo that AI is no longer cool and have positioned their system as using it to predict customer lifetime value. They take the rather hostile attitude that “a majority [of new customers] are poison for the business” and promise to weed the bad ones out quickly. They just raised $5 million from backers who probably expect the majority of their investments to fail but miss the irony.

And since we’re looking at surveys about data, let’s finish with this DigiDay report for Bannerflow, which found that 41% of companies make better use of their data after bringing technology in-house. Most intriguing finding: companies with a stand-alone in-house agency fell to 36% from 59% a year earlier. They either made embedded agency skills in their marketing teams (35% vs 23% the year before) or went back to external agencies (29% vs 17%).

If you still think that MCP stands for Male Chauvinist Pig, well, the 1970’s want their disco ball back. Today’s hep cats know that MCP stands for Model Context Protocol, a new-but-widely supported standard that lets large language models access structured data as context for their prompts. Early adopters include Salesforce and Adobe, and search platform Algolia is now using it to feed their data to customer-facing real-time AI agents.