Keeping AI Costs In Check; Selling Your Data To The Highest Bidder

The useful part

Roughly 60% of companies that use AI will incur unexpected charges and/or exceed their allocated budgets due to a lack of human oversight, according to a Gartner survey of 1,300 senior marketers. The survey also found that more than half (56%) of companies that use AI tools implemented them without clear policies. (So much for that whole "human in the loop" thing.) Rather than risk flushing more money down the toilet, media agencies are developing their own auditing tools to rein in AI token costs, Digiday reports.

How it works

• PMG, for example, built a tool that lets users limit AI token usage and, based on how often they enforce limits, offers certain recommendations.
• Rise still has to estimate the costs of its agentic testing itself, including how much of its campaign budgets went toward working media.
• Dangerous Data Deals Google has a new competitor in the bidding war for Spirit Airlines' treasure trove of data.
• Google similarly promises to strip out personal information tied to Spirit's customers.
• But, quibbles over who would be a better steward of the data aside, micro1 faces an uphill battle in getting Google's already-approved deal overturned.

What to take from it

Certain non-repetitive structures that are common in food, such as bubbles, seeds and thin noodles, are difficult for diffusion models to replicate, behavioral scientist Giovanbattista Califano tells The Verge. Which poses a problem for the exact kinds of small and local businesses being courted by the digital advertising industry. It looks like it'll take some more time before agencies feel they can fully entrust their operations to AI agents in the pursuit of efficiency.

Example or evidence

• which includes 500 million Microsoft Teams communications, 100 million emails and 16 million customer support chats.
• Publishers Chrome Has A New Way To Measure Ad Overload On The Web Chrome is introducing new metrics that give advertisers and publishers a more data-driven picture of what users actually experience on...
• The ID verification business has exploded as global regulators pass laws requiring age verification to access social media and adult content.
• But, as Gizmodo notes, the Nexus hack "shows the danger of creating honey pots of our most sensitive documents for malicious actors to exploit." No Such Thing -Generated Lunch Why does food tend to look so...

Details worth keeping

Token For A Ride AI can help cut costs, but only if it has a babysitter. Another example is Rise, a performance agency that's part of Quad. While the Spirit auction has raised new concerns over what happens to a company's data once it goes out of business, it's not the only recent example of the dangers of companies' hoards of personal data potentially falling into the wrong hands.

Related coverage

• Legaltechdaily: I keep hearing rumblings about AI pricing.
• Kalungi: Ask yourself one question before you build another workflow around a cheap AI tool: who's actually paying for how cheap it is?
• E27: The cost of AI is not only hidden in data centres.
• Legaltechmonitor: I keep hearing rumblings about AI pricing.
• Adexchanger: Look at ad tech's press releases this year.