We have no real news today, Dear Reader, unless you care that Dropbox is buying file sharing service DocSend for $165 million. So let’s look at surveys instead. Validity reports that 33% of UK marketers store their email data in a CDP, which is impressive but still behind CRM (53%) and email systems (50%). Only 58% collect customer names in addition to email, and even fewer collect phone number, location, postal address, product interests, or preferred contact channel.

One reason for the growth of no-code is failure of corporate IT groups to meet user needs.  In fact, 62% of C-suite executives in this Experian study said a non-agile data processes hindered their response to the pandemic.  No-code fans will be pleased that user friendly tools were their top solution (35%), although they were followed closely by more conventional approaches including agile development (32%), hiring more staff (32%), and data ops (27%).

If robots wrote the news, would they write about other robots?  I ask because there’s been a suspicious burst of items about AI-powered writing tools, just when live journalists might have set things on autopilot so they could sneak out early for the holiday.  Top of the list: writing-suggestion platform Grammarly just raised $200 million at a $13 billion valuation, doubling total funding to $400 million.