However you feel about Tuesday’s U.S. election results, here’s some news we can all agree is bad: Salesforce has laid off “hundreds” of employees.  It’s another strong hint that the layoffs hitting other tech sectors will apply to martech too.  On the bright side: the figure is a tiny fraction of Salesforce’s 70,000+ employees.  Compare it to Meta laying off 11,000 people or 13% of its workforce.

You might wonder why Capital One would invest $96 million investment in travel app Hopper, let alone why it’s relevant to this newsletter.  I’ll argue the deal is about Capital One gaining access to Hopper’s first-party data, which makes it a media play.  Hopper describes its goal as building a travel super-app with strong social commerce capabilities.

Unauthorized training data isn’t an existential threat to generative AI but it’s certainly a headache for users and developers alike.  Most developers are trying to exclude materials that creators have explicitly labeled as unauthorized and citing “fair use” as justification for copying everything else.  Getty Images has taken an opposite approach, building its gen AI tool only on materials that are explicitly licensed.  It’s possible that tracing the provenance of training data will become a standard, similar to how organic food producers trace the origins of their ingredients.