CDP Institute

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  According to the company, it replaces the “now-outdated copilots and chatbots” with agents “operating autonomously, retrieving the right data on demand, building action plans for any task, and executing these plans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

Does all this talk about autonomous AI agents make you just a tiny bit nervous?  With good reason, it seems: OpenAI’s latest o1-preview model “has the basic capabilities needed to do simple in-context scheming,” according to a scorecard prepared for OpenAI by Apollo Research.  Echoing any number of science fiction nightmares, OpenAI reports that new model’s “reasoning skills contributed to a higher occurrence of ‘reward hacking,’” which means pursuing goals in an unintended—and undesirable — way.

Oracle Unity CDP also has new AI-based features, including best offer recommendations, buying group and opportunity scoring, native Analytics Cloud integration, and industry-specific onboarding accelerators.  No mention of agents, although they’re probably lurking in the background.  To be clear: while Oracle abandoned its advertising business recently, its Oracle Customer Experience suite, which includes the Unity CDP, is going strong.

It’s all surveys today, Dear Reader.  Marigold reports that consumers are eager for personalized content, with 79% saying they’re likely to engage with a personalized email tailored to their interests.  Sadly, 33% feel their needs are unmet by current brand messages.  Discounts and coupons (95%) top the list of what they want in exchange for personal data, followed closely by loyalty rewards at 94%.  Content is last at 61%.

This Incisiv survey looks beyond personalized marketing to the full customer experience.  It finds that 73% of shoppers expect interactions to be integrated across all channels and 54% are willing to spend more when their experience is tailored to their preferences.  But retailers are failing to meet expectations: just 29% offer personalized product recommendations.

B2B buyers also want an omni-channel experience.  Digital Commerce 360 finds that B2B buyers now use ten or more channels, double the number five years ago.  Two-thirds of the B2B buying process is now done digitally and 75% of buyers prefer a rep-free sales experience.

Amazon rolled out its genAI-powered shopping assistant Rufus to all U.S. customers in July. It’s now embedding paid advertising into Rufus results.  That didn’t take long, did it?