CDP Institute

As Oprah never quite said, Everybody gets an agent! If you’re keeping score, the latest announcements we have include: Aprimo adding AI agent to its digital asset management and content operations platform; customer success platform Gainsight adding a new agent suite called Atlas, and Similarweb offering agents to help with search marketing and sales outreach.

Bored with agents? Looking for the Next Big Thing? This Winterberry Group reports says it’s “contextual commerce”, which “enables transactions directly within content, apps and platforms that users already engage with.” This (very long) David Raab blog post argues for something similar.

The New York Times, a jealous guardian of its editorial content from poaching by LLMs (it sued OpenAI and Microsoft) has concluded a deal licensing content for use by Amazon. In the first deal of its kind for the Times, Amazon will be permitted to use Times content in its AI platforms. This “will bring Times editorial content to a variety of Amazon customer experiences,” the news organization has said, although it’s not clear whether users will know when that’s happening.

Call tracking and conversation analytics platform Invoca has acquired Symbl.ai, an LLM trained on human conversations. Using Symbl technology, Invoca plans to capture the real-time flow of conversational interactions, surfacing emotional and contextual insights for the immediate use of human agents. Symbl will also be able to perform tasks like booking an appointment in the absence of human agents and when contact centers are closed.

Channel Factory, the ad performance optimization platform focused on YouTube and social video, is launching Channel Factory Intelligence, using machine learning to deliver campaign insights and optimize for efficiency, precision, and ROI. AI-powered Media Intelligence Hub will centralize cross-platform campaign data in a customizable dashboard. A new Chatbot Assistant, embedded in Channel Factory’s activation solution, ActivateIQ, will deliver campaign data analytics to ad agencies and their technology partners.

New Gen offers to replace your personalized website with a chat-based interface that will generate custom assemblies of products, images and content on the fly. Their trick is connecting your product catalog to their AI engine, which also lays the groundwork for connecting buyers’ AI-agents to the catalog directly. They launched with $4.5 million in seed funding.

Salesforce has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire cloud data management and integration platform Informatica for an eye-catching $8 billion in equity. The plan is to strengthen the data foundation that supports the deployment of Salesforce Agentforce AI agents. Informatica offers data transparency, contextual understanding (vital for AI agents) and data governance.

Google has announced enhanced agentic AI capabilities for Ads, Analytics and Chrome. Ads agents will make campaign recommendations while in Analytics, agents will serve insights including as simple data visualizations. In the Chrome browser, Marketing Advisor will help advertisers manage marketing tasks.

IAB opened a period for public comment on its updated General Terms for Digital Advertising Agreements. This is the first update since 2001 and the comment period will last through July 21. The new terms were put together by some 276 IAB member companies including big holding companies like Omnicom and Publicis.

The good thing about Anthropic’s new AI model, Claude 4 Opus, is that it can work long, autonomous hours on tasks. The less good thing is that it can also conceal its intentions, attempt to deceive humans and even resort to blackmail against engineers that try to turn it off. But don’t worry: Anthropic says it is implementing safety measures.

TikTok is bringing agentic AI support to in-app sellers. The new Seller Assistant will provide real-time guidance, recommendations, and interactive support for sellers — it “isn’t just a chatbot,” TikTok says. It will also provide insights into sales performance on request.

Comcast is partnering with AI video creation platform Waymark to help small businesses promote their products and services by using AI to create TV ads. The aim is to expand Comcast’s market to businesses that may not have the resources to create TV ads the old way. This comes as Meta launches a program, Early Release, that will allow advertisers to test genAI creative features before ads are published on Meta platforms (not yet generally available).