Ascend2 took a look at the state of marketing automation and found that just 20% of respondents feel they are using their system to its full potential.  Lack of training (39%), resources (32%) and budget (31%) were the most cited obstacles, ranking well ahead of poor integration (16%), missing features (14%) and decentralized data (14%).  This doesn’t mean integration is a solved problem: just 7% of respondents said their marketing automation is fully integrated with other systems and 29% said it’s mostly integrated.

This just in from Lake Wobegon: two-thirds (68%) of respondents to this Lucidpress survey said they’re confident that most of their company’s content is relevant, even though only 32% find other companies are sending relevant content to them. Possibly related: 27% consistently measure the ROI of the content they create. Just 32% say more than half their content is personalized.

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  According to the company, it replaces the “now-outdated copilots and chatbots” with agents “operating autonomously, retrieving the right data on demand, building action plans for any task, and executing these plans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