Retail theft by shoplifters and organized crime has captured headlines recently, such as news that Target is closing nine stores due to the problem. But the surge may be more of a ripple: the National Retail Federation found losses grew only as fast as retail sales in the past year. Could it be that the press has sensationalized the issue or that managers are using it to distract from other problems?
Fraud accounts for 22% of online ad spend, according to this Juniper Research study, even higher than the 15% the ANA estimated is spent on “made for advertising” websites (bear in mind the two figures are measuring different things). Also bear in mind that ad buyers don’t really seem to care: Ascend2 found ad fraud ranked dead last in their list of concerns, cited by 16%. The top two concerns were finding the right audience (41%) and measuring ROI (38%).
Conversational engagement platform Gupshup launched ACE LLM, large language models (LLMs) built upon foundation models such as Meta’s Llama 2, OpenAI GPT-3.5 Turbo, Mosaic MPT, Flan T-5, and others, and adapted for specific industries and functions. domain-specific LLMs are specialized for functions such as marketing, commerce, retail.
If you still think that MCP stands for Male Chauvinist Pig, well, the 1970’s want their disco ball back. Today’s hep cats know that MCP stands for Model Context Protocol, a new-but-widely supported standard that lets large language models access structured data as context for their prompts. Early adopters include Salesforce and Adobe, and search platform Algolia is now using it to feed their data to customer-facing real-time AI agents.