Musing on AI, Consumer Data and Privacy

As the holiday shopping season approaches, understanding the complexities of toy pricing—one of the most active categories—becomes increasingly important. During events like Black Friday, retailers must anticipate competitor strategies and consumer behaviors to secure a successful season.

By harnessing the retail dataset from AnthologyAI, we're uncovering valuable consumer insights from Amazon, Walmart, and Target. Explore the top five most purchased items at each leading retailer during Black Friday.

In October 2024, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced a groundbreaking Data Privacy Ruling designed to enhance transparency, fairness, and consumer autonomy in the digital economy. This regulation represents a shift toward a new era of data stewardship that places consumers firmly in control of their personal information. We believe this is a crucial turning point that aligns closely with our commitment to ethical data practices.

Recent reports suggest that Uber is considering a bid for Expedia. We leveraged our travel dataset to examine how income levels impact travel transaction behaviors on these two major platforms. By analyzing these dynamics, travel companies can enhance their strategies to adapt to shifts in consumer engagement.

AnthologyAI looked at 39+ million consumer transactions and 120+ million watch actions across US consumers. Here’s what we found.

Gone are the days when simple demographic information was enough to understand and target customers. Enter multidimensional consumer data – deep, powerful consumer data that's helping businesses better understand consumer behaviors and more effectively connect with their customers.

FIA has selected AnthologyAI to exhibit at the FIA Expo Innovators Pavilion—a showcase for startup companies providing forward-thinking solutions for the global futures, options and swaps markets.

This article is designed for ML practitioners who are ready to deploy models or want to better understand the steps involved in model deployment on Databricks. Written by Awnish Choudhary, Senior Machine Learning Engineer at AnthologyAI.

AnthologyAI’s cutting-edge data provides media companies with multidimensional insights into the consumption habits and spending preferences of US consumers. By harnessing this data, companies can anticipate emerging trends, understand subscription behaviors, and optimize the user experience to drive engagement, boost loyalty, and reduce churn across digital platforms, streaming services, and news media.

In today's rapidly evolving business landscape, the ability to turn vast amounts of data into actionable insights is not just advantageous—it's essential. Enterprises are inundated with consumer data, yet transforming this data into meaningful strategies often remains elusive. That’s where AnthologyAI steps in, pioneering a new era of consumer intelligence that promises to reshape how businesses understand and engage with their audience.

Since its U.S. debut in September 2023, TikTok Shop has transformed online shopping into a social and interactive experience, encouraging new ways for consumers to engage with brands and products. Understanding how TikTok Shop’s strategies influence purchasing decisions is crucial for staying competitive in this rapidly evolving market.

As economic pressures continue to mount, understanding the pricing strategies employed by Walmart and Target is more critical than ever for both consumers and industry leaders.

When staple item prices shift, it impacts household budgets and has broader implications for market stability. For professionals, tracking these changes is crucial for predicting future economic conditions and advising business strategies. Understanding why prices shift and stabilize can help refine economic forecasts and consumer behavior models.

Political donations play a critical role in shaping the landscape of electoral campaigns in the United States. These contributions not only provide essential funding for campaign activities but also reflect the engagement and priorities of different groups of Americans. Using data from AnthologyAI, we explored the nuances of political donations to uncover patterns and strategic insights that could enhance campaign fundraising efforts.

‍Political campaigns increasingly depend on Artificial Intelligence (AI) to understand and engage voters effectively. The transition from traditional strategies to more precise, data-driven approaches marks a significant evolution in campaigning. These advanced tools are not only helping to identify voter bases more accurately but are also engaging them more effectively at scale.

Uber ride data provides valuable insights into consumer behavior, urban economic health, emerging trends, and much more. Utilizing AnthologyAI's Transportation dataset, we unpack the substantial impact of location, seasonality, and economic factors on Uber fares.

AnthologyAI transforms economic insights with an alternative CPI methodology, offering businesses an accurate digital view of consumer activities. We illustrate this with a case study on milk, a staple commodity that affects a broad consumer base, and compare our approach to traditional benchmarks.

Introducing AnthologyAI. Our CEO, John Roa, unveils a new brand AnthologyAI, the single most efficient, accurate, and actionable source of consumer intelligence ever built. We monitor global consumer trends 24/7 without compromising privacy through PII, identity resolution, or other invasive methods. Read his note below.

Coffee is your morning pick-me-up and daily ritual. But what does it say about you or your lifestyle? We've analyzed over 75,000 Walmart coffee transactions to discover what your coffee choices say about you. When evaluating Walmart's top-purchased coffee brands (Starbucks, Dunkin’, Folgers, Pete’s Coffee, and more), we looked for patterns that intertwine consumer behavior, brand preference, and broader societal trends. So, what did we find?

AnthologyAI (parent company of the Caden consumer app) looked into our knowledge graph of 67 million Netflix watch actions for consumers across the US to uncover what’s trending. Spoiler alert: It’s a mix of the strange, dark, and satirical. 

Neudata, a leading data-scouting FinTech firm dedicated to finding alternative data for leading global organizations, recently held a Shark Tank competition at its New York Data Summit. Four companies competed for the top spot, with Caden emerging victorious. The competition was judged by Beth Pollack from Decision Science Advisors, Adam Brown from Morgan Stanley, and Jason DeRise from Liberty Mutual Investments.

Within the data economy, an aggregation of complex cryptographic concepts have been lumped together into a catchy acronym that follows the blueprint of the latter: PETs, or Privacy Enhancing Technologies.

Sometimes, the names we give technologies reveal much more about our intentions and desires than they do about the ostensible features they provide. As an intellectual exercise, let’s zoom in on one of the buzziest such names in marketing today—the “Clean Room.”

In our previous blog, we laid out how we’re at a point of precipitous “signal loss” of good-quality data, the struggles of improving this quality, and the dangers of relying on poor-quality data. With more than 50% of marketers relying on (AI) for data-driven personalization at scale, having reliable good quality data is of utmost importance. However, to put it bluntly, in the words of Michael Stonebraker, “without clean data, or clean enough data, your data science is worthless.” And this will persist until we, as data practitioners, fix our existing “data supply chain” to ensure better quality data throughout.

The lie we’ve told ourselves as data practitioners - and the one we continue to tell ourselves - is that the headwinds we face from regulation and the demand for informed consent are suppressants and not accelerants.