Salesforce kicked off its big Connections conference yesterday, and if you’re surprised the focus was on generative AI, you haven’t been paying attention. Still, the focus this time was on marketing applications that draw on Salesforce CDP data, so it’s right up our alley. They also announced direct access to Google BigQuery data, ticking the “zero-copy” box as well.
Even if you ignore the more apocalyptic warnings about AI, there are plenty of issues to consider and industry groups are stepping up. Publisher-backed trade group Digital Content Next just issued seven principles – more of a guideline, really – to help protect creators’ rights. Meanwhile, Publicis Group just became the first agency holding company to join the Coalition for Content Provenance Authenticity (C2PA), which is not to be confused with the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
Simon Data is a CDP that’s built on the Snowflake cloud database, which you might have thought they were in the “zero copy” camp already. You would have been wrong until yesterday, when they announced a “connected segmentation feature” that reads a Snowflake warehouse directly. It still requires mapping the Snowflake tables to a Simon schema and assumes the warehouse has tables coded with unique customer IDs, which most do not.
Nearly one-third of major news publishers have blocked generative AI tools from reading their content. But that’s a drastic measure which could also exclude their results from conventional search engines. Microsoft has just given publishers the option to block access by Bing Chat without also removing their content from search results. We’ll see if competitors do the same.