CDP Institute

If you spent yesterday trapped under a rock (bad) with a dead cellphone (worse), you might not have heard that Google announced all sorts of AI-related things at its I/0 conference.  We didn’t cover it because everyone else did. But lest we be totally left out, here’s news that they just launched ML Hub, a free destination to help users at all levels take advantage of machine learning models – which includes more than just generative AI.

Excitement about ChatGPT and friends is already being replaced by doubts it can live up to the hype.  (Here’s a Gartner take, for example.)  What’s good about that is vendors are already building tools to address those concerns.  For example, Credo AI, an AI governance software vendor (yes, it’s a category), just released GenAI Guardrails, which helps companies minimize the risks of AI misuse and build the most valuable applications first.

Persado was using AI to create marketing content when ChatGPT was still learning to sing Daisy. They haven’t had much attention recently but did just release this interesting study that found senior marketers do no better than chance at picking the winner among three possible email subject lines. The key is less that AI generates better content than that Persado tests many alternatives to find which performs best.

Retailers continue to struggle for access for complete customer data.  A CommerceNext survey of ecommerce managers found that only web analytics (95%), behavior (89%) and email/SMS interactions (83%) are used by more than half the respondents.  Underused sources include loyalty data (47%), point of sale purchases (44%), and customer service interactions (42%). An impressive 64% said they do incrementality testing but many fewer capture customer IDs (46%), do predictive scoring (25%) or attempt ID resolution (22%).

Only half the CIOs who have adopted citizen development say it’s worked (14% of 27%), but nearly all the rest (70%) plan to adopt it, according to this Webcon survey.  The study throws fuel on the build vs buy fire by reporting that low-code development is not only faster, cheaper and more flexible than custom development but also than buying packaged (“commercial off-the-shelf”) software.  Or maybe not: the actual questions compare apps built with low-code platforms to “applications built with commercial-off-the-shelf products”, so respondents might have been thinking about packaged... Read More >

Imagine an isolated, childless world whose inhabitants aimlessly amuse themselves as they slowly age into oblivion.  I’m talking about the movie Zardoz, although it could also be Facebook.  Their latest nonsense is to claim that Canadian news “isn’t particularly valuable to us” yet fight fiercely to avoid sharing the revenue it generates.