Twilio is kicking off its SIGNALS conference, which means we get a bouquet of product announcements. Most relevant here is their hop onto the external data access bandwagon, with Zero Copy Architecture enabling direct access to data warehouse contents. Other new features include generative AI-built customer journeys and support for new entities such as business accounts, subscriptions, and products.
There are plenty of reports on the growth or shrinkage of different ad channels, but I don’t usually bother to share them with you, Dear Reader. Still, news that summertime viewing of live broadcast TV fell 25% since last year seems shocking enough to mention. Viewing will probably increase in the fall with the return of football and basketball, but it’s still a huge shift.
I originally wasn’t going to mention YouTube’s announcement of a new framework to govern use of music with AI systems, jointly developed with Universal Music Group, because the principles themselves are so vague. But this Verge piece clarifies the importance: basically, Google is recognizing music owners’ rights while avoiding other constraints on how it scrapes data from the web. It’s one more skirmish in the ongoing, and critically important, battle over how use of intellectual property will be compensated.
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 According to the company, it replaces the “now-outdated copilots and chatbots” with agents “operating autonomously, retrieving the right data on demand, building action plans for any task, and executing these plans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.”