A group of U.S. senators including Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) released a proposed roadmap for AI policy yesterday. The senators, perhaps unaware of the jaw-dropping amount of private sector money going into AI, recommended raising federal spending for nondefense AI innovation to at least $32 billion annually.
The group, which calls itself “The Senate AI Gang” (Is there a secret handshake?), compiled the list of policy suggestions after a year of holding forums privately and publicly with a range of technology companies and other stakeholders, including X owner and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
It may not be surprising to learn that tech industry groups are largely supportive of the roadmap, while those focused on things other than profit margins largely aren’t.
“This road map leads to a dead end,” Evan Greer, the director of Fight for the Future, an advocacy group, said in a statement, and calling the plan “pathetic.”
Alondra Nelson, former acting director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, participated in one of the forums. She said in a statement that she was dismayed to see “the civil society organizations and academic researchers … outnumbered by industry executives.”
Nelson, now a professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies, called the roadmap “too flimsy to protect our values” and lacking “urgency and seriousness.”
“It is, in fact, striking for its lack of vision,” Nelson wrote. “The Senate roadmap doesn’t point us toward a future in which patients, workers, and communities are protected from the current and future excesses of the use of AI tools and systems. What it does point to is government spending, not on accountability, but on relieving the private sector of their burdens of accountability.”
This recalls a point made by Adam Smith, the father of capitalism, in “The Wealth of Nations”:
“Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen, its counselors are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favor of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favor of the masters.”
Now here are this week’s AI-powered martech features, launches and releases.
- Button’s Conversion Tuning technology optimizes the monetization of existing affiliate traffic from Amazon through AI, intentional and explicit routing, and deep-linking techniques. Button’s Publisher Link Optimization solution helps increase buyer conversions by optimizing end-user experience and click-to-purchases.
- Trustpilot added features to its online review platform. AI-Assisted Review Responses help businesses respond to high volumes of reviews while maintaining tone of voice. TrustScore Forecast uses customer-driven data to support and predict growth trajectory and business goals. Market Insights compares similar businesses for benchmarking performance. Review Spotlight identifies key themes, sees trends throughout reviews, and uncovers potential issues.
- Amplify10 is an SaaS AI-powered sales execution solution. Formerly known as Featurewave, Amplify10 provides AI-driven contextual guidance throughout the entire sales cycle, addressing the evolving needs of both buyers and sellers.
- Cordial added AI-powered enhancements to its enterprise marketing message automation platform. Message Analysis provides AI-powered insights into messages through automated modeling and labeling. Natural Language Audience Builder lets users create precise audience segments with conversational language queries. Category Propensity predicts customers’ favored product categories to fuel targeted recommendations and offerings.
- Zinklar’s AI Thematic solution, crafted specifically for marketers working with market research, provides concise summaries of open-ended answers, highlighting sentiments, common themes, and sub-themes; and, filters allowing specific analysis on a response-by-response basis.
- Wix.com added three new AI-powered image enhancement and creation tools to its SaaS website builder. AI Image Creator, powered by Stability.ai, is a text-to-image generator. Object Eraser erases unwanted objects in images easily, without using a prompt. AI Image Editor uses prompts to add/or replace an image, or a portion of it.
- Givex’ GivexEngageAI enhances customer relationships through data-driven profiles and highly targeted engagement campaigns. It builds detailed, 360-degree customer profiles based on guests’ interactions with a business, such as loyalty accounts, average purchase amounts, transactional information, and more.
- TapClicks’ TapClicks Media Planner uses AI to build and deliver dynamic, omnichannel client proposals. It automates client proposals, tracks their status, and executes digital media campaigns. It features a built-in proposal generator, editable by the user, supporting custom branding.
- Pendo’s Pendo Listen centralizes customer feedback from disparate sources, applies AI to extract patterns and insights from the feedback, and enables product teams to set product strategies and communicate their plans to customers.
- Hi Auto’s Voice AI Marketer Toolkit is a comprehensive set of tools for quick-service restaurants. The tools include menu optimization, A/B or multivariate testing, and customized natural voices for direct conversations with customers.
