CDP Institute

Google is facing another antitrust lawsuit, this time in Canada, specifically focusing on anti-competitive practices in online advertising. The Competition Tribunal has been asked to order Google to sell two of its ad tech tools, prohibit future anti-competitive practices and fine the company billions of dollars. In response, Google points to a highly competitive market offering plenty of alternatives.

Back in October, the world was briefly fascinated at the ability of Google NotebookLM to create human-sounding podcasts.  The excitement has died down but here’s news that NotebookLM is being used by Spotify Wrapped to generate a personalized podcast summary of each user’s music consumption over the previous year. The new experience will dive deep into listening history, even looking at the inspirations behind users’ favorite tracks.

An upbeat report from Dataiku and Databricks has more than half of respondents boasting a dedicated AI team while 65% say they are seeing positive ROI on genAI. The epic “Martech for 2025” (Brinker and Riemersma) details the big impact AI will have on the martech stack, not least because AI agents will join developers in creating new tools. CapitalOne says that, while 87% of a sample including business leaders are confident in their company’s AI capabilities, only a third of tech people thought the company had the needed skills.

Amperity has launched its Customer Data Cloud, a solution designed to support the transformation of raw data in a warehouse or lake into usable business assets. New capabilities include real-time reaction to streaming customer data and no-copy access to customer data in Snowflake and AWS.

Amazon is said to be considering partnerships with news organizations to license their content for use in the new iteration of voice assistant Alexa, according to Axios. The aim is to enable this smarter Alexa to answer real-time news queries. Answers will be attributed to the publishing partners who will also, of course, be compensated.

Surprising no one, OpenAI is said (Axios again) to be open to monetizing chatbots by serving ads. OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar has said the company is weighing the inclusion of ad but wants to be “thoughtful” about it. Speaking of chatbot commerce: Perplexity recently added a shopping capability.

CDP Twilio Segment has added an Amazon Redshift connector (in public beta) to Linked Audiences.  This enables Segment queries to integrate data residing in Redshift without importing it.  Similar connectors are already available for Snowflake and Databricks.

Speaking of AWS, Amazon Connect, its cloud-based contact center, is to be enhanced with generative AI features. This is expected not only to increase efficiency but enable proactive outreach across communication channels. Amazon Connect supports contact center interactions for tens of thousands of AWS customers.

Although consumers mention price, product quality and selection as key factors in loyalty to a brand, 80% feel more loyal to brands when they offer better experiences than their competitors; 70% feel more loyal to brands with lower prices. One great experience is enough to drive repeat purchases. Medallia surveyed around 2,000 mostly U.S. consumers.