May 2025 Summaries

Databricks Data Intelligence for Marketing has been launched alongside Census AI Columns for Databricks, offering a solution to transform data lake capabilities without complex ETL processes or custom code. This new feature helps data teams enrich, categorize, and transform data before it reaches business users, enabling them to apply LLM-based transformations directly to their Databricks tables and views. With the ability to power AI Columns using ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, teams can enhance data quality, extract insights at scale, and create structured insights from unstructured data, enrich customer data for marketing personalization, automate data classification for segmentation, and clean and normalize data without complex transformations. The solution provides a range of templates to get started with AI Columns, including customer lifecycle stage classification, product feature recommendations, customer feedback summarization, marketing campaign personalization, and lead scoring enhancement.

Customer engagement platforms like Braze are critical in today's marketing stack, enabling brands to engage with customers uniquely without being too salesy. With the new release of GPT columns in Census, Braze can be made even more powerful by bringing in external API data for complete control. Enriching customer profiles with AI enhancements allows for more segmentation criteria, such as assigning personas based on job titles or triggering cross-channel messaging to increase activation and subscription rates. Personalized nurture emails can drive conversion and retention by analyzing user interactions and suggesting content they may be interested in. Highly-targeted messaging can expand accounts by surfacing items customers will most likely purchase based on their behavior, and ultimately, Braze becomes a customer engagement powerhouse when connected to first-party data and enriched with GPT.

Census has signed an agreement to be acquired by Fivetran, marking a significant milestone in the history of both companies. The acquisition completes a feedback loop that Census and Fivetran have been working on for years, enabling data teams to move trusted, modeled data out to all business functions with ease. This integration will give customers a single, simple path from raw events to action, revolutionizing the way businesses use data. With this acquisition, Census will continue to operate as a standalone product and API, with the same SLAs and team behind the screen, while Fivetran's scale will accelerate the roadmap for Census. The combined company aims to deliver a Universal Data Platform that unifies and activates data, creating an infrastructure for turning data into decisions at scale. This marks an exciting new chapter for both companies and their customers, who can expect improved integrations, deeper governance, and an even larger connector catalog.