It goes without saying that building customer trust is essential for any company doing business online. Alas, it also often goes without doing. Email analytics vendor 250ok found that almost 90% of major online retailers don’t take basic steps to protect their customers from phishing attacks (where someone else sends an email claiming to be from the vendor to trick them into revealing personal information). Yikes!

Closer to home for customer data specialists: personal data discovery vendor BigID has raised a $14 million Series A, bringing total funding to $16.1 million. BigID finds personal information in corporate systems and maps items related to the same individual without copying the data into a central database. This helps to comply with privacy regulations such as GDPR but it doesn’t create a unified profile for marketing or other uses.

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  According to the company, it replaces the “now-outdated copilots and chatbots” with agents “operating autonomously, retrieving the right data on demand, building action plans for any task, and executing these plans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