Customer Data Platform vendor Segment has been integrated with Swrve, a digital customer interaction engine. Lots of jargon in that sentence. In plainer English: Segment will make data from all sources available to Swrve, which will use it in marketing campaigns (mostly mobile, which is Swrve’s strength). Does that help?

Finally, we have views on “big data” from senior data and analytics executives polled by NewVantage Partners. Their top objective for big data and AI investments was analytics – no surprise given the audience – although customer experience did rank second, ahead of lower costs, innovation, and speed to market. More important: by far the biggest challenges to being data-driven were people (49%) and process (32%). Just 19% cited technology. Most surveys give a similar answer but it’s still easy to forget.

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.