We think that one reason industry growth has slowed is the near-total loss of early-stage venture funding. But we could be wrong: this Capchase analysis of 900 SaaS businesses finds that self-financed companies grow just as quickly as venture-backed firms. They also report that, whatever the gurus say, the best performing companies focus new customer acquisition not retention. Interesting.
Growth in the CDP industry slowed to a crawl in the first half of 2023, according to the CDP Institute’s latest Industry Update report. Net employment, funding, new vendors and growth among previously listed vendors all fell to record or near-record lows. Still, some firms are doing fine: 20% of the firms listed had an estimated employment increase of at least 10%.
No one ever said that AI is easy, although they sometimes leave that impression. This Altair survey sets the record straight: 55% of respondents report that at least one-third of their AI projects have failed to reach production in the past two years. Lots of interesting reasons (messy data is high on the list), and even more interesting regional differences. Perfect beach reading.
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.