Are you a marketing exec looking to stay on top of trends? If so, it may be hard to keep track of the various reports, statistics and surveys that emerge each day. This roundup combines all of the top new insights for CMOs and other industry professional -- all in one place. Below are six of the most recent findings indicating the latest trends in CX and other marketing areas. Forrester predicts that 35% of CMOs in B2C companies will be responsible for CX, a figure that's grown from 28% last year, 26% in 2020 and 24% in 2019.

The ability to deploy data as a competitive business asset is what has distinguished a set of well-established, data-rich companies who have reigned as market leaders over the course of the past several decades. However, business conditions evolve, and today, these companies face a new set of challenges that threaten their hard-won leadership positions. How do these well-established data leaders transform from excellence in traditional data and analytics -- of the kind that they have deployed in recent decades -- to leadership in a new era of Big Data, AI, and machine learning driven decision-making? What do companies that have excelled at disciplines like database marketing, CRM, one-to-one marketing, and advanced analytics need to do to continue to stay on top? Data and technology are driving business change.

As technology becomes the catalyst for business strategy and transformation, the lines between business and technology functions are blurring and the expectations of IT are shifting, leading many organizations to reimagine the role of technology and rethink traditional operating models and organizational structures. This CIO Insider presents a new way for unifying business and technology objectives to help enable business and technology functions to more effectively collaborate, innovate, and cocreate new sources of value. As the pace, scale, and impact of technological innovation and disruption have exponentially escalated, technology has become a primary influence on business strategy, strategic choices, and value-creation models. Harnessing and managing these five forces--one of today's most pressing business issues--can be incompatible with IT's traditional role of ensuring operational excellence and executing technology-enabled business objectives. Historically, business and technology functions were separate, which often reduced cross-functional collaboration and led to siloed execution, delayed projects, and inflexible processes. Businesses often defined strategic objectives and developed separate supporting technology strategies.

Now the company is stepping up its use of automation. The company is installing 26 more piece-picking robots at its main U.S. distribution centers, making it the latest company to deepen its logistics technology investments as the coronavirus pandemic upends sales channels and supply chains. The kiosk-size units from robotics provider Kindred Systems Inc. use mechanical arms, computer vision and artificial intelligence to sort through piles of apparel. They provide steady labor to help workers organize orders and reduce crowding on the warehouse floor, where the company said one human can manage multiple robots instead of standing next to other associates. "During non-Covid times, if demand grew by 50% I would go hire 300 more people," said Shekar Natarajan, senior vice president of global inventory and supply chain logistics for American Eagle Outfitters, which said e-commerce sales for its American Eagle and Aerie brands shot up after stores closed in March.

A math expert who studied number theory at the University of Tokyo's graduate school, he made an impression earlier in his career by heading the bank's launch of bond options trading. Digitalization is key to streamlining operations, especially in domestic retail banking, he said. While MUFG and others saw a surge in branch traffic despite a stay-at-home plea by the government in April, Kamezawa said the bank is now seeing a jump in the use of online banking services. His two predecessors, Kanetsugu Mike and Nobuyuki Hirano, were known for their overseas backgrounds. Under them, MUFG spent about $15 billion to acquire PT Bank Danamon Indonesia and Thailand's Bank of Ayudhya, and to obtain stakes in Vietnam's Vietinbank and Security Bank Corp. of the Philippines. Asked whether the acquisition of commercial banks in the region was over, Kamezawa said: "I think so." "We have succeeded in making up for declining domestic profit through our push overseas," he said, adding that the priority now was to control steadily rising costs. MUFG's costs as a percentage of revenue remain high, standing at 70.2 percent for the year ended March, compared with 62.8 percent for rival Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group Inc. "We will recalibrate our global strategy, review growth areas and allocate resources accordingly," Kamezawa said. Since the early stages of the COVID-19 crisis, The Japan Times has been providing free access to crucial news on the impact of the novel coronavirus as well as practical information about how to cope with the pandemic. Please consider subscribing today so we can continue offering you up-to-date, in-depth news about Japan.

Can human ingenuity assisted by new and emerging technologies overpower Covid-19? Will faster processing of more--and more relevant--data, analyzed with the right models, yield better insights into mitigating the spread of future pandemics, designing effective treatments, and developing successful vaccines? A number of promising initiatives were announced in recent weeks aiming to enlist data, AI algorithms, supercomputers, and human expertise in the fight with our global predicament. Supercomputers and quantum computers crunching lots of data are at the core of recent initiatives to ... [ ] fight the Coronavirus The Digital Transformation Institute, a new research consortium established by C3.ai, Microsoft, a number of leading universities, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), announced its first call for proposals for "AI techniques to mitigate pandemics." In addition to a total of $5.8 million in cash awards, recipients will be provided by Microsoft and C3.ai with significant cloud computing, supercomputing, data access, and AI software resources and technical support.

Accenture today opened a new Innovation Hub in Hyderabad, where clients can co-innovate with Accenture by ideating, rapidly prototyping and then scaling disruptive products and services for the digital economy. The latest addition to Accenture's global innovation network, the Hyderabad Innovation Hub is spread over 300,000 square feet where clients can co-innovate and co-create solutions with more than 2,000 Accenture professionals with expertise across multiple industries and advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, security, extended reality, automation and blockchain. "Our research shows that organizations are struggling to achieve their innovation goals, due to the lack of an enterprise-wide strategy for technology investments and adoption," said Bhaskar Ghosh, group chief executive, Accenture Technology Services. "Through our leading advanced technology capabilities, we help clients scale their technology investments and bridge the innovation achievement gap. Our Innovation Hub in Hyderabad has the pieces our clients require to accelerate value creation through enterprise-wide, game-changing innovation."

You may want to look beyond technology investments and programs and turn that gaze inward at the culture of your organization. A new survey concludes that although executives remain excited about the promise of these new technologies that have already consumed so much investment, their organizations have been slow in changing to accommodate this new tech. "Organizations are not becoming data-driven and do not build data-focused cultures," said a new report from New Vantage Partners, created from the organization's 8th annual survey of senior executives about data and extracting value from data. But focusing on your organizational culture may be the New Year's resolution you need to set if you want to really start getting the value out of your data and AI technology investments, according to industry experts and report authors Randy Bean and Tom Davenport. Bean is founder and CEO of New Vantage Partners, a consulting firm focused on helping organizations harvest the value from data, analytics and AI.

The Big Four accounting firms, through an unprecedented investment of billions into technology, are transforming not just how they operate, but also their very identities. The tech crusade goes far beyond automating standard auditing and accounting work. Through a focus on artificial intelligence, data analytics, and massive tech training throughout their organizations, the biggest players in accounting are making tech part of their DNA. "We haven't become a pure technology firm," Christian Rast, KPMG LLP's global head of technology & knowledge said in a recent phone interview. "We are a professional services firm, but technology is core to our future."

Much has been said about data being the new oil that will fuel businesses in the future. But the reality is that it's not about the amount of data that organizations have access to, but how effective their decisions are based on that data. Therefore, data alone will not be the new oil, rather intelligence will fuel the digital economy, and organizations that can create intelligent business processes to deliver contextualized and consent-based experiences will win in this new data-driven world. As intelligence (and technology in general) increasingly underpins future business models, there is a big question around the role of IT moving forward. The CIO needs to be part of boardroom discussions driving decision-making around the broader business (and digital) strategy.