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On top of their already burdened workloads, CMOs in 2024 hustled to decipher fact from fiction in the endless barrage of generative AI (genAI)-related headlines that saturated the marketing trades. But as marketing rings in yet another new year, 2025 will be one that’s less sensationalized and more operationalized. Martech consolidation, consumer privacy laws, data hygiene, and, yes, AI automation will tip CMOs to tidy up their marketing functions. As a result, we expect marketing operations to take center stage. But to ensure that CMOs don’t lose sight of opportunistic growth drivers in 2025, they’ll rely more on their trusted direct reports for the day-to-day management of the marketing function. This will allow CMOs to step up and into the broader business to lead amid a heightened confluence of operation and opportunity — to reduce redundancy, increase effectiveness, and cultivate creativity. As for genAI? It gets real in 2025: CMOs will begin to demonstrate tangible efficiencies but not enough to affect marketing headcount (just yet). As we look ahead to the B2C marketing landscape in 2025, Forrester predicts that: GenAI will push one in four CMOs to codify their marketing operations function. The hyped-up potential of genAI in creative development and marketing insights will be a catalyst in 2025 to force marketing ops’ evolution beyond a stopgap to mask poor planning, resource misalignment, and inefficient processes. To get there, marketing teams will need to proactively identify stakeholders, define process interlocks, formalize responsibilities, and measure success across six B2C marketing ops disciplines. In 2024, marketers focused on genAI as an efficiency play, but in 2025, mature marketing ops functions will add marketing effectiveness to their genAI playbook. Investment to unify data for the loyalty and marketing tech stacks will triple. Factors including economic pressure to increase efficiency and consumers’ demand for continuity across customer experiences will converge in 2025 — pushing loyalty and martech together. While eliminating redundant channel execution across marketing and loyalty is low-hanging fruit, the most impactful and pragmatic opportunity lies with synchronizing data. The data gap between marketing and loyalty practices is wide today: Eight in 10 US B2C marketing executives utilize separate data assets for loyalty and martech. 2025 calls for a unified data strategy that delivers consistent and expanded data access. First-time enforcement of new privacy laws will fracture marketing-legal relationships. By the end of 2024, eight new US state laws and regulations in Quebec (Canada), Indonesia, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere will be in effect. As countries around the world enforce these new privacy laws for the first time in 2025, CMOs will get mired in navigating different requirements and jurisdictions. In the US, frustrated companies will push for progress on a federal privacy law to simplify when, where, and how they can process customer data. In the meantime, marketers should brace themselves for complicated (and, in some cases, conflicting) directions on how to comply with new laws. As you turn the page into the new year, be sure to read our full report, Predictions 2025: B2C Marketing (client access only). There, you will see all five of our predictions, as well as more details behind each of them. Forrester clients can also attend our live webinar on Wednesday, November 13, then chat more about it via a Forrester guidance session. If you aren’t yet a client, you can download our complimentary Predictions guide for B2C marketing, customer experience, and digital leaders, which covers more of our top predictions for 2025. Find additional complimentary resources, including webinars, on the Predictions 2025 hub. source

The European Investment Bank (EIB) is considering new measures to help close the funding gap for European startups and prevent them from relocating across the Atlantic. During a meeting with EU finance ministers yesterday in Luxembourg, the EIB proposed its “Action Plan” that aims to boost Europe’s capital markets, investments, and competitiveness. A key pillar of the plan is to increase support for the EU’s venture capital and private equity markets to enable the scaling up of innovative startups and unicorns. This includes three different measures, starting with the extension of the European Tech Champions Initiative (ETCI). Launched in 2023, the ETCI is a fund of funds that provides late-stage capital to European companies. By February 2024, it had closed €1bn of investments. Calling all Scaleup founders! Join the Soonicorn Summit on November 28 in Amsterdam. Meet with the leaders of Picnic, Miro, Carbon Equity and more during this exclusive event dedicated to Scaleup Founders! The EIB also plans to boost equity and venture debt investments for scaleups and it will work towards the creation of a new exit platform to facilitate acquisitions and public listings for tech startups. “The Action Plan discussed with ministers will help European innovators scale up their business and contribute to channel savings into productive investments,” EIB Group President Nadia Calviño said in a statement. Calviño added that the measures will foster innovation and job creation, ultimately “ensuring that European companies born in Europe, stay in Europe.” Europe’s innovation gap EIB’s proposed plan comes a month after Mario Draghi sounded the alarm about the EU’s inability to commercialise innovations. In a report commissioned by EU chief Ursula von der Leyen, Draghi warned that the bloc is significantly falling behind competitors such as the US. “The problem is not that Europe lacks ideas or ambition,” the Italian former premier said. “But innovation is blocked at the next stage: we are failing to translate innovation into commercialisation.” According to the report, only four European companies rank among the world’s top 50 tech giants. Furthermore, no EU-based tech company has achieved a market capitalisation exceeding €100 billion in the past half-century. This starkly contrasts with the US, which boasts six such companies valued at over €1 trillion. To further illustrate the EU’s challenges, the report also showed that, between 2008 and 2021, nearly one third of European unicorns relocated abroad, with the majority moving to the US. source

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Qualcomm unveiled its Snapdragon Elite platforms for automotive applications at its Snapdragon Summit event today. Powered by Qualcomm Oryon — the company’s fastest central processing unit (CPU) — these new platforms are the latest additions to the Snapdragon Digital Chassis (first introduced in 2022) portfolio. They’re designed to bring intelligence to next-generation vehicles. Automakers have the option toutilize Snapdragon Cockpit Elite to power advanced digital experiences and Snapdragon RideElite to power automated driving capabilities. Through its unique flexible architecture, automakers will also have an option to seamlessly combine both digital cockpit and automated driving functionalities on the same SoC – an innovative capability available on Snapdragon Digital Chassis solutions. “Qualcomm Technologies remains at the forefront of innovation with platforms like Snapdragon Cockpit Elite and Ride Elite, as the automotive industry evolves towards centralized computing, Qualcomm software defined vehicles and AI-driven architectures,” said Nakul Duggal, group manager, automotive, industrial, and cloud at Qualcomm, in a statement. “With our strongest performing compute, graphics and AI capabilities, coupled with industry leading power efficiency and cutting-edge software enablement for digital cockpits and automated driving, these new Elite Snapdragon automotive platforms address the industry’s needs for higher compute levels, empowering automakers to redefine automotive experiences for their customers.” Ana Arnold, who works in product and technology marketing at Qualcomm, said in a product briefing that software-defined technology and AI are driving rapid change in cars. She noted hundreds of millions of vehicles already use Qualcomm tech on the road. The new platforms deliver versatility for both autonomous driving and in-cabin car systems — or both through platforms that combine the different chips, Arnold said. Unified architecture with higher AI performance Performance details on Snapdragon Cockpit Elite and Snapdragon Ride Elite. The dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU), designed for multimodal AI, offers a 12-times performance boost over previous cockpit platforms, enabling real-time external environment and cabin data processing. This advance facilitates live decision-making, adaptive responses, and proactive assistance, ensuring personalized in-cabin car experiences. Mark Granger, senior director of product management, said in a press briefing that the Snapdragon Cockpit Elite is focused on the interior cabin space, like the dashboard. The Snapdragon Ride Elite, meanwhile, is focused on ADAS, or Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, and autonomous vehicles. “We see the advent of large language models and multimodal models that are adept at running on the edge,” Granger said. “So we’re very excited with what we see as a huge leap in performance and capability.” To date, LLMs have had real challenges understanding and responding to to Chinese and Japanese speakers. The new tech can now address this. Granger said the company is not yet disclosing the exact amount of TOPS performance when it comes to AI processing. Equipped with transformer accelerators and vector engines, along with mixed precision support, the NPU in Snapdragon Ride Elite is designed to deliver low-latency, highly accurate, and efficient end-to-end transformers, maintaining optimal power and performance. The heterogeneous platform seamlessly runs multiple applications without performance loss, offering exceptional concurrency and multitasking for numerous cameras, sensors, rich user experiences and advanced AI-enabled audio with virtualization. Automakers can create configurable software-defined vehicles (SDVs) for all tiers, providing flexibility and scalability while simplifying vehicle architecture. This architecture results in accelerated deployment schedules, ensuring customers can enjoy the latest innovations and features more quickly than before. Qualcomm said the new chips are engineered to deliver exceptional performance while minimizing energy consumption. That helps ensure that vehicles operate smarter and longer. The solution is a combination of intelligent power management hardware and software that balances core utilization and application runtime. The chips are also designed for context-aware applications. This platform is designed to enable hands-free, unsupervised automated driving that anticipates needs, along with real-time driver monitoring and enhanced object detection for a smoother, more confident ride. Its improved Adreno GPU targeting to deliver a three-times performance boost with advanced rendering capabilities, meeting demands for gaming, multimedia, and dynamic driver information. The platforms are also designed to meet automotive safety standards for ASIL-D systems with a dedicated safety island controller and robust hardware architecture for isolation and interference-free operation, helping to ensure reliable quality-of-service for specific ADAS functions, as well as comfort and confidence from drivers and passengers. Purpose-built for the industry’s shift to SDVs, the elite-tier platform is designed to take an end-to-end approach for enhanced safety, security, and upgradeability through the unified software framework that emphasizes software reuse; designed to help automakers accelerate feature development via a cloud-based workbench, streamlining software development for continuous improvement and reducing time to market for new features and services. The automotive platforms also feature a powerful, efficient camera system with an advanced Image Signal Processor (ISP) for clear, responsive visuals in extreme driving conditions. They support over 40 multimodal sensors, including up to 20 high-resolution cameras for 360-degree coverage and in-cabin monitoring, Arnold said. She noted in-cabin sensors are now important inside the cabin to detect whether a driver is sleepy or not and the car needs to do something about that, like sending an audio alert. Compatible with the latest and upcoming automotive sensors and formats, our platforms use AI-enhanced imaging tools to deliver optimized image quality for both enhanced in-cabin experiences and advanced safety features. Qualcomm unveiled its Snapdragon platforms for automotive apps. The automotive platforms will use Qualcomm’s software stack, supporting multiple operating systems. The Snapdragon Ride Elite platform is an end-to-end automated driving system with advanced features like vision perception, sensor fusion, path planning, localization, and complete vehicle control. Snapdragon Cockpit Elite offers support for rich multimedia features, on-device AI with fully integrated edge orchestrator, optimized gaming and advanced 3D graphics for rich user experiences, and comes with safety, security and long-term support (API compatibility) features built into the design. The Snapdragon Cockpit Elite and Snapdragon Ride Elite will be available for sampling in 2025. As for the average cycle time on design cycles for

By Nadia Dreid ( October 25, 2024, 9:06 PM EDT) — Congress could have designed the E-rate program to be distributed by the government using its own money, but it didn’t, and that’s why reimbursements under the program don’t qualify as claims under the False Claims Act, an AT&T subsidiary has told the U.S. Supreme Court…. Law360 is on it, so you are, too. A Law360 subscription puts you at the center of fast-moving legal issues, trends and developments so you can act with speed and confidence. Over 200 articles are published daily across more than 60 topics, industries, practice areas and jurisdictions. A Law360 subscription includes features such as Daily newsletters Expert analysis Mobile app Advanced search Judge information Real-time alerts 450K+ searchable archived articles And more! Experience Law360 today with a free 7-day trial. source

“Cabinet-Integrated Liquid Cooling Supports Rising Power Density and Maximum Sustainability for High-Performance Computing Data Center Environments“ Revolutionizing Data Center Efficiency with Integrated Liquid Cooling Solutions The white paper titled “Cabinet Integrated Liquid Cooling” by Chatsworth Products addresses the increasing demand for efficient cooling solutions in data centers. It explores the advantages of integrating liquid cooling directly into server cabinets to enhance thermal management. The paper highlights how this approach improves cooling efficiency, reduces energy consumption, and supports higher-density computing environments. It also covers the design considerations, implementation strategies, and real-world benefits of adopting cabinet-integrated liquid cooling. By leveraging this technology, data centers can achieve superior performance, cost savings, and sustainability, meeting the challenges of modern high-performance computing demands. Download this whitepaper to learn more. Offered Free by: Chatsworth Products, Inc. See All Resources from: Chatsworth Products, Inc. Thank you This download should complete shortly. If the resource doesn’t automatically download, please, click here. Thank you This download should complete shortly. If the resource doesn’t automatically download, please, click here. Thank you This download should complete shortly. If the resource doesn’t automatically download, please, click here. source

OpenAI is opening new offices in Paris and Brussels as the ChatGPT maker accelerates its global expansion plans. The new sites increase the company’s European presence to four offices. They join London, which began OpenAI’s international expansion in 2023, and Dublin, which became the firm’s first EU base a few months later. Alongside the European hubs, OpenAI is also launching new offices in New York City, Seattle, Paris, Brussels, and Singapore. Job openings at all the sites will be listed here. For OpenAI, the European locations offer diverse attractions. Calling all Scaleup founders! Join the Soonicorn Summit on November 28 in Amsterdam. Meet with the leaders of Picnic, Miro, Carbon Equity and more during this exclusive event dedicated to Scaleup Founders! The company has praised London for its “vibrant technology ecosystem” and “exceptional talent.” Announcing the Dublin office, the AI giant pointed to Ireland’s regulatory and business development landscape, but denied that its famous tax regime had motivated the move. For the new European additions, OpenAI is yet to explain their lures, but we can hazard a few guesses. In the case of Paris, the city is emerging as a hotbed for artificial intelligence. The French capital’s blend of  tech talent, government support, and new investment streams has created fertile ground for startups in the field. Brussels, meanwhile, is the de facto capital of the EU — a global leader in AI regulation. OpenAI could benefit from close proximity to the corridors of power. AI will take centre stage at next year’s TNW Conference. Early birds can now buy 2-for-1 tickets for the June event.  source

By Jeff Montgomery and Ryan Davis ( October 25, 2024, 5:47 PM EDT) — Healthcare tech company Masimo Corp. was found to have infringed two of Apple Inc.’s patents Friday at the close of a five-day U.S. District Court jury trial in Delaware that put more future tech prospects than current cash on the line…. Law360 is on it, so you are, too. A Law360 subscription puts you at the center of fast-moving legal issues, trends and developments so you can act with speed and confidence. Over 200 articles are published daily across more than 60 topics, industries, practice areas and jurisdictions. A Law360 subscription includes features such as Daily newsletters Expert analysis Mobile app Advanced search Judge information Real-time alerts 450K+ searchable archived articles And more! Experience Law360 today with a free 7-day trial. source

Consumer and business buyers globally are more comfortable in the digital realm than ever before. They’re increasingly exposed to cutting-edge tech and accustomed to interacting digitally with brands and suppliers. They’re having what once were considered deeply “nerdy” AI-focused discussions with colleagues — and they’re using digital touchpoints in commerce for work and at home. Indications are that they’re ready to go even more digital — but they may have to wait. Forrester’s digital commerce predictions for 2025 anticipate a disconnect between what shoppers and business buyers want and are willing to do — and how digital businesses will respond. Among our predictions for the coming year, we expect that: Very few major retailers in NA and EMEA will evolve store experiences to bring them closer to digital. Some retailers will “omni-fy” their store systems, but one-third of global digital business strategy decision-makers in retail and wholesale tell us that they are focused on small tech changes as a top priority for customer-facing tech. Because of financial pressures and lower consumer sentiment, we predict that just 10% of major North American and EMEA retailers in 2025 will commit to broader overhauls that tie their store systems more closely to digital. Although shoppers are more willing to engage in conversational commerce, most brands just won’t bite. Per Forrester’s Consumer Benchmark Survey, 2024, over one-third of online adults in France, Germany, the UK, and the US — and over two-thirds in metro China and metro India — already use instant message, chat, or direct message monthly or more often to communicate with companies or brands when they research products or services to purchase. These consumers are also interested in using brand and retailer websites and apps that let them type questions or speak conversationally via chat or verbal prompts. We anticipate that fewer than one-fifth of global brands will add this type of functionality in 2025, however. Digital leaders want to feel confident that they can add successful, stable interfaces that generate trustworthy and reliable content for customers. Digital talent will shop themselves around, but few will find the “greener grass” employment they want. The job market is facing waning comforts for workers — think the “EX winter.” The US is at a five-year low for rates of white-collar promotions, and tussles over return-to-office policies wear on. Fully 15% of global information workers in retail, wholesale, and financial services tell us that they’d most appreciate not returning to the office, per Forrester’s Digital Workplace And Employee Technology Survey, 2024. We expect enough improvement to the employee experience in 2025 — and enough competition for the most desirable positions — that some employees will find new opportunities, but most digital workers will stay put. 2025 is the year that we project digital commerce to be mired in disconnects. Avoid these pitfalls by adopting an agile mindset that encourages constant review of initiatives to ensure that they continue to align with market expectations. As always, we will watch the market and help our clients navigate the year to find the equilibrium they need to operate their business effectively — and meet their customers’ needs. Read our full Predictions 2025: Digital Commerce report to get more detail about each of these predictions. Want to discuss our predictions for digital commerce in more depth? Book a Forrester guidance session or inquiry with me or my team. If you aren’t yet a client, you can download our complimentary Predictions guidemore of our top predictions for 2025. Get additional complimentary resources, including webinars, on the Predictions 2025 hub. source