CDP Institute

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer seems to be theory at Shopify, which has just reversed its position and will now allow Shopify merchants to add a Buy with (Amazon) Prime option to their checkout.  The deal is carefully crafted: merchants can use Amazon’s fulfillment capabilities but payments and customer data remain within the Shopify system.  How, or whether, they’ll prevent Amazon from capturing information used to fulfill the purchases is unclear.

There’s nothing shocking in the sixth edition of Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer report, but it does confirm what we already knew: customers expect personalized treatment, care about deals more than anything else, and feel they work too hard to resolve service issues.  Just 47% of consumers say they generally trust companies, with the most doubts about ethical use of AI and acting with society’s best interest in mind.  Openness to using AI to improve customer experience has fallen, though, from 65% of consumers in 2022 to 51% in... Read More >

The Marketing AI Institute also has a new AI survey, this one focusing on marketers’ attitudes.  Again, no huge surprises: more marketers think AI is important for success than last year (64% vs 51%).  The main use seems to be personal productivity: 29% say they’ve already infused AI into their daily work while just 7% say their company is scaling its AI deployments.  A frightening 78% say their company has no internal AI education or training.

Google Cloud has a blizzard of announcements from its Google Cloud Next ’23 event.  Much focus was on generative AI, including optimized infrastructure, model building tools, and end-user assistants such as writing helpers.  They’re also offering access to third-party large language models including Meta’s Llama2, Antropic’s Claude 2, and Technology Innovative Institute’s Falcon LLM.