Jan 13, 2025

We’re right in the middle of NRF 2025 at New York’s Javits Center. They like to call it “Retail’s Big Show” and, as you’d expect, that means martech vendors showcasing new products aimed at retailers. SAP kicked things off with a new enterprise loyalty management solution and retail ERP. Salesforce followed up with Agentforce for Retailers and a new Retail Cloud.

Maybe you’re in retail marketing, maybe not, but I submit that one thing to notice in the Salesforce news is further reinforcement of a prediction I made in last Monday’s newsletter. Namely, that genAI for content creation is attention-getting and popular, but genAI that interacts conversationally with users and can help perform a huge range of specific tasks (with no coding, of course) could be what really impacts all of us this year.

Kim Davis
Editor-at-large

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Email marketing

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What they're saying

“The most benign, transparent and honest subject lines won’t help you if customers open your emails only to find something entirely different from what they expect. Customer trust is hard to win and easy to lose.” Kath Pay in Are these email subject lines deceptive, clever copywriting or bad data at work?
“My conclusion is yes, [AI] can be over- and under-hyped. But I reached this conclusion based on a related insight: Our view of AI will be greatly shaped by if or when we’re able to invest the time for do-it-yourself (DIY) AI training and experimentation.” Milton Hwang in Why DIY experimentation is critical to AI success.