No one ever said that AI is easy, although they sometimes leave that impression. This Altair survey sets the record straight: 55% of respondents report that at least one-third of their AI projects have failed to reach production in the past two years. Lots of interesting reasons (messy data is high on the list), and even more interesting regional differences. Perfect beach reading.
We think that one reason industry growth has slowed is the near-total loss of early-stage venture funding. But we could be wrong: this Capchase analysis of 900 SaaS businesses finds that self-financed companies grow just as quickly as venture-backed firms. They also report that, whatever the gurus say, the best performing companies focus new customer acquisition not retention. Interesting.
We haven’t written much about retail media recently, Dear Reader, and I’m sure you miss it. So I’ll share that IPG Mediabrands has launched a “unique tech platform” that brings together retail media audience, measurement, optimization and intelligence to give brands a unified picture of how all their retail media investments are performing. Are you quivering with delight or is the air conditioning too high?
Salesforce announced three enhancements to Salesforce Data Cloud at Dreamforce this week. There is an expansion of unstructured data types it can address including audio and video; there will be a sub-second “real time” layer for data from ingestion to activation; and the connector eco-system has been expanded. Salesforce also emphasized close collaboration between Data Cloud and its new Agentforce AI bots.