If you need an example of what happens when AI companies operate without supervision, this News/Media Alliance study shows that generative AI model builders have drawn heavily on copyright-protected materials from news, magazine and digital media publishers without consent or compensation.  The study specifically argues that “fair use” exceptions to copyright protections should not apply.

Social media influencers are the top Direct-to-Consumer marketing channel (71%), well ahead of streaming TV (59%), retail media (40%) and SMS (28%), according to this Klaviyo study.  As a result, third-party data (84%) vastly outranks first-party (15%) and second-party (0%) data for 2023, although 67% expect second-party to be important in 2024.  Lack of a single customer view is the top tech stack challenge (73%) even though (or maybe because) just 13% report having a CDP or CRM system in place.

Salesforce has announced a new solution, Unified Knowledge, that will pull data from third-party systems thus supplementing Salesforce Data Cloud with external information sources. Initially, this is mainly aimed at helping Service Cloud users in combination with Einstein for Service’s generative AI. It was developed through a strategic partnership with AI vendor Zoomin.