Alan Chatfield

This week, I've had two separate people (both developers) say they wanted SaaS app UIs to be replaced with chatbots. I'm fine with chat-based interfaces, but they're bad for power users and for discoverability. Chat UIs have a future, but not as a replacement for a traditional nav. Apps need both.

Beyond Offers: Content in an AI Age A new AI powered marketing playbook is emerging. B2B marketers should be wary of the limitations to personalisation approaches pioneered in B2C.

The divide between B2B and B2C marketing is often exaggerated, but sometimes it does make a difference. The role of content marketing in the buyer journey is one example that has profound implications for how B2B marketers can best integrate AI into personalised campaigns.

Unsurprisingly, Microsoft's customer conference is all about AI Agents. It's not just iterative improvements to the AI within Office and Azure. There's also a heavy focus on governance and security, something which is notably absent from competing AI pitches. At least someone is thinking about it.

Microsoft have finally released native support for password managers in Windows, starting with 1Password and Bitwarden. That's a massive step forward, and could really drive the adoption of passkeys within enterprise.

Microsoft built a fake marketplace to test AI agents — they failed in surprising ways | TechCrunch The research raises new questions about how well AI agents will perform when working unsupervised — and how quickly AI companies can make good on promises of an agentic future.

Microsoft's turn to publish the weekly reminder that AI Agents need constant supervision and detailed instructions. They built a theoretical marketplace to test agent-to-agent interaction. Turns out agents struggled under anything other than ideal conditions.

Source: techcrunch.com/2025/11/05/m...

Spent the week at a marketing operations conference. AI governance was a major talking point. Far less AI for the sake of it than in recent years. Still lots of talk about AI but mostly all very practical. Definitely feels like ops teams have figured out GenAI. Just need to educate the c-suite now.

Did Microsoft learn nothing from Clippy? Few people want their enterprise software to have warmth and personality. They just want it to get out of the way of their work.

At least Mico only appears in voice mode for now. There is an argument that voice AIs should have a persona. Siri often does.

Bad week for Apple in the UK. Yesterday, they and Google were placed under competition scrutiny after being declared gatekeepers for mobile devices. Now they've lost a court case around app store commissions. As a result, they're liable for £1.5bn in damages. That's the risk with a closed platform.

On Friday, Google finally deprecated privacy sandbox - their aborted attempt to replace third party cookies with something worse for everyone. The only collateral damage is Chrome's IP protection feature.

Still, privacy sandbox does have a useful legacy. It introduced cookie isolation to Chrome.

It's Dreamforce this week, which means yet more Agentforce hype. Better contextual grounding and an improved agent builder are helpful. The most interesting announcement is Agent Script. Developing a scripting language to integrate if/then logic in agents sounds absurd, but is genuinely useful.

The UK's equivalent to the DMA is rolling out. Google have been given strategic market status for search and search advertising, which allows the CMA to make the type of interventions that we've seen elsewhere. The CMA are taking this slowly, so it will take time before we see any real consequences.

A Dutch court has ruled that Meta must allow their users to bypass the algorithmic feed and select the 'Following' feed as the default. Good news, but I'm sure Meta will workaround the ruling to somehow degrade Instagram even more.

96% of companies don’t see ROI on AI according to a new Atlassian report. It does improve the productivity of individual workers but not by much.

That's because AI is more about breaking down information silos and improving output quality (especially for non-SMEs). Productivity is a distraction.

Microsoft are considering setting up a 'Publisher Content Marketplace' which allows them to pay royalties to publishers whose content is used in Copilot responses. It's good to see one big tech firm making the first move in this area. It sets a precedent that other AI vendors will hopefully follow.

Unified data governance across platforms is a security necessity. Standardising APIs and metadata across apps makes integration much easier. As such, it's good to see Snowflake and Salesforce taking steps to make their platforms interoperable with the Open Semantic Interchange initiative.

Why Process leads to Reporting Effective reporting is essential for marketing success. Yet, missing performance data is commonplace. Fill the gaps by fixing production processes.

Process is the backbone of marketing operations. Structured business workflows aren't just about efficiency - they also lead to better reporting, fewer errors, and smarter decisions.

My latest Marketing via Technology newsletter shows there are no shortcuts to clean data or accurate reporting.

Good to see the likes of Reddit and Medium doing something useful for once. RSL is a useful first step in the battle against AI content scrapers. Adding licensing terms to robots.txt is a no brainier. The real challenge is still in enforcing these terms when AI firms aren't interested.

Just what is a 'Qualified Competitor'? The outcome of the Google antitrust deal will hinge on that definition. Forcing Google to license their index to competitors is essential, because that boosts AI search engines. Google has viable competitors now, but we still need to end their data advantage.

Anthropic have settled the copyright lawsuit brought by a group of authors. Not sure they had much choice. They won the fair use argument at trial. They were never going to win the piracy argument. Guess their VC backers have realised this and are prepared to fund a settlement.

Generative AI does nothing for 95 percent of companies : MIT NANDA study finds only 5 percent of organizations using AI tools in production at scale

Interesting report. Gen AI has only had real world impact in two industries: tech and media. Otherwise, it mostly impacts jobs that are outsourced anyway. I see that in marketing, which is getting 50% of AI budgets but using it on the wrong things.

Source: www.theregister.com/2025/08/18/g...

In case you didn't have enough information silos in your life, Adobe have announced another one just for PDFs. The new version of Acrobat introduces PDF Spaces, a way to organise PDF files and ask AI questions about them. Nevermind that Gemini or CoPIlot can do the same thing for all your files.

Revolution When: AI and the Open Web Marketers and publishers have long benefited from search engines. Today, search threatens the web. A new deal is needed before AI bankrupts itself.

Website owners have long benefitted from search referrals. Now, search traffic is in decline as Google redirects traffic to AI services. Publishers aren't sure how to respond.

My latest Marketing via Technology newsletter looks at the relationship between marketers, publishers and search engines.

A new Register article claims the new Trello redesign may be the worst in tech history. They obviously haven't used Jira. Although based on recent releases, Atlassian haven't either.

Atlassian clearly want to push non-technical teams onto Jira. Yet, recent updates have broken the UX for them.

Perplexity are clearly rattled by their dispute with Cloudflare. Their explanation for ignoring bot restrictions is absurd.

An AI Assistant fetching content on behalf of the user is still a bot. If they want to bypass robots txt, they need to display the actual page content not just summarise it.

Measuring the Value of Marketing Operations Marketing Operations is more than just a cost centre. It's a strategic multiplier that enhances the value of campaigns. How do you prove that to a CMO?

Effective marketing starts with a strong marketing operations function. Yet, when budgets are tight, ops is the first thing to be cut. Proving the ROI of ops is the only way to fight this.

My latest Marketing via Technology newsletter looks at the best ways to measure the value of marketing ops.

Why I'm Betting Against AI Agents in 2025 (Despite Building Them) I've built 12+ production AI agent systems across development, DevOps, and data operations. Here's why the current hype around autonomous agents is mathematically impossible and what actually works…

If you only read one blog post about AI agents, make it this one. When it comes to AI, there is a trade-off between size and accuracy.

Design agents that do one thing well, then chain them together with human checks in between. Most AI projects fail because they do too much.

If OpenAI want to study the new economic impact of ChatGPT on the economy, they need to do much better. The analysis they released yesterday is little more than a PR piece that selectively picks a few positive studies to suggest that ChatGPT is boosting productivity. There's no real analysis.

Revolution When: The Waiting Game Like all cutting edge technologies, Generative AI attracts excessive hype and uncertain ROI. Amid a trough of disillusionment, its time will come.

Businesses are beginning to understand where AI can help with automation and where human intervention will be needed. That doesn't mean it's ready for production. Generative AI is still a very immature technology.

The latest Marketing via Technology newsletter looks at corporate attitudes to GenAI

IT leaders don’t trust AI agents yet – and they’re missing out on huge financial gains While AI agents offer big financial incentives, most enterprises want to maintain strict human supervision

Businesses trust AI agents much less than 12 months ago, according to a new CapGemini report. That's not just due to safety or accuracy concerns. Businesses don't think their data is ready for AI. Only 17% of firms have the data foundations needed to make AI a success.

Websites aren't publishing content for free. They want to earn money through ads or purchases. Both publishers and customers benefited from Google. They don't benefit from rogue AI scraper bots. Putting up a toll booth for bots is a great idea. Well done to Cloudflare for possibly making it happen.