Yesterday was Data Privacy Day. I hope you have a great party but will understand if you don’t post pictures. Meanwhile, Cisco last week reported that 65% of companies have seen a delayed sale due to privacy concerns, with an average delay of nearly two months. Companies with more mature privacy processes reported shorter delays. They were also less likely to have suffered a privacy breach. In other words, strong privacy is good business.

Here’s an item that’s more related to the previous one than you might think: a study from Salesforce finds that email marketing and display advertising teams collaborate on technology purchases at 74% of U.S. companies today and plan to collaborate at another 20%. The driver behind this lions-with-lambs comity is use of email addresses to feed advertising audiences to, you guessed it, Facebook. Lots of other interesting information here, including usage of data types, technology, metrics, and new ad channels such as voice devices and wearables.

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  According to the company, it replaces the “now-outdated copilots and chatbots” with agents “operating autonomously, retrieving the right data on demand, building action plans for any task, and executing these plans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.”