15 July 2025

Bots, primes, and personalisation: Key takeouts from July’s Data & Analytics Wednesday

In summary

• The July edition of Data & Analytics Wednesday served up a surprising mix, prime number records and real-world data risks from bots.
• As AI and automation accelerate, marketers and analysts must adapt to a digital landscape where non-human traffic outnumbers real users.
• From media measurement to customer journeys, businesses must rethink how they verify engagement, safeguard data quality, and future-proof their tech stack.

From prime numbers to prime threats

July’s Data & Analytics Wednesday event brought a full house to Braze’s Sydney HQ, thanks to generous support from Snowplow, In Marketing We Trust, Canva, and Braze. What began with prime numbers quickly evolved into an urgent conversation on bots, AI, and how human digital interactions are being crowded out.

Racing Bruce: The nerdy math talk we didn’t know we needed

Ex-Google software engineer Paul Dyson opened with an unexpectedly gripping deep-dive into his years-long competition with an online rival “Bruce G.”to discover new prime number sequences. Think distributed computing, GPU acceleration, and crowd-sourced mathematical breakthroughs, with a hint of YouTube-fuelled obsession.

While the talk may have seemed a world away from ad tech, Dyson’s story mirrored modern data strategy: scale beats intuition, speed wins records, and optimisation makes all the difference.

The crowd was right there with him, nerdy, sharp, and totally engaged. As one attendee put it: “It was super nerdy, but people loved it.” Dyson’s slides even included a coloured scoreboard tracking which sequences were claimed by him and which by “Bruce.” The kicker? Bruce had no idea he was in a race.

And yes, Dyson’s side hustle is now heating his house, literally. He joked that his GPU-powered prime-search project “keeps the place warm in winter” thanks to the number of computers he’s running at home.

Are there still humans on the internet?

That’s the question posed by Rob Tot in the headline panel discussion, one that hit home with insights from:

• Sam Redfern (Canva): Demonstrated how scraping bots that once needed whole engineering teams can now be spun up during a quick bike ride.
• Candice Driver (Louder): Highlighted how AI and bot traffic are blurring performance metrics, making marketing spend harder to trust.
• Freddy Chanut (In Marketing We Trust): Dropped the stat that rocked the room, 54% of travel industry traffic is bots, and TikTok now crawls 5–10x more aggressively than Google.

The panel didn’t just warn of bad bots. They asked marketers to face a new reality: the internet is now cohabited by agents, scrapers, click farms, and AI-driven tools, most of which never convert.

What made the panel truly stand out was how deep it went, “not surface-level”, as one attendee said. This wasn’t your usual “are bots replacing us?” fluff. The discussion pulled from real technical experience across data science, marketing, and platform operations. It was the kind of insight you’d normally only get from hands-on conversations at events like MeasureCamp or inside agency war rooms.

What you should do now

• Get smarter about bots. Not all bots are bad, but many are polluting your data. Invest in better bot detection, filtering, and segmentation. As Candice suggested: you might need a CRM for bots.
• Embrace agentic AI in your UX. Bots are becoming users. That means your site and APIs need to speak their language, structured data, fast load times, and easily parsed content.
• Reimagine media and measurement. Click rates and CPMs won’t cut it. Build metrics tied to real outcomes and audit your data sources with bot exposure in mind.
• Build AI fluency in pockets. Don’t force AI training on everyone, build champions inside teams who can experiment, share learnings, and drive adoption.
• Stay curious, stay playful. “Deliberate intentional play” with AI tools, one hour a day, is how Canva is future-proofing their team.

All up, the July edition of Data & Analytics Wednesday hit a nice balance of high IQ and high engagement. From Dyson’s prime-powered warm-up act to the bot debate that cut deeper than most keynotes, it felt like something special, and attendees noticed. With limited numbers and regular sellouts, it’s fast becoming a standout on Sydney’s data calendar.

Louder’s recommendation

• Investigate your marketing data to identify what proportion of your traffic is from bots.
• Filter out bot traffic to get more accurate attribution reports.
• Keep an eye out for opportunities to accommodate agents that are acting on behalf of your customers.

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• The transformation of bots into AI: friend or foe