CDP Institute

Amazon would prefer that you buy everything through them, but if you insist on using another merchant, they’re still willing to handle the shipping and fulfillment. They’ve just made their Multi-Channel Fulfillment (MCF) service available to Walmart merchants and will soon add Shopify and Shein options. MCF clients place their inventory in Amazon-run warehouses, where Amazon will pick, pack, and shop customer orders.

Google continues to expand use of its Gemini AI agent within the Chrome browser. Starting now, Mac and Windows desktop users will be able to ask Gemini to analyze pages they are viewing. In a few months, AI agents will handle tasks such as ordering groceries or booking a haircut.

Not sure you trust AI to work on your behalf? OpenAI researchers offered new reasons to worry, reporting that “AI scheming–pretending to be aligned while secretly pursuing some other agenda–is a significant risk that we’ve been studying” although it’s “not an imminent behavior in our currently deployed systems.” Note that the quote contains emdashes without surrounding spaces, hints that the study report may have been written by an AI with good reason to downplay its true scheming abilities. Just saying.

Tools to help brands measure and optimize their AI search results are now too common to mention. But it’s still unusual for a CDP vendor to provide one. So let’s note that CDP Zeta Global is adding a Generative Engine Optimization solution to its AI Marketing Cloud.

Captify Technologies captures results of conventional search interactions – up to one billion per day, in fact. They use this behavior to build programmatic ad audiences without tracking consumer identities. It’s an appealing enough capability that Captify was just purchased by ad tech vendor Verve.

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is everyone’s favorite technology right now because it promises to eliminate integration bottlenecks, especially for AI systems. But unless you just fell off the turnip truck, you’ve probably suspected it wouldn’t deliver everything that’s expected. Sure enough, Microsoft researchers have just found there are significant limits to what MCP can do when multiple agents and MCP servers are involved in the same process.

Let’s look today at some of the more innovative applications of AI in martech. We’ll start with an alliance between digital experience platform Viafoura and audience engagement reporter Futuri. Their combined system monitors more than 250,000 web sources to find trends, understand what audiences care about, and generate content that audiences will find appealing.

Markup AI (formerly Acrolinx) checks that content meets brand standards and can re-write it if necessary. This addresses a key roadblock to deploying AI-created content at scale. They just launched with $27.5 million in new financing.

Later also helps companies to maintain brand standards. It’s has just launched Brand Suitability Insights, which assesses creators for both content fit and likely return on investment. The new feature is part of Later’s integrated platform to manage everything from creator discovery to content scheduling to ROI measurement.

Snowflake-oriented CDP Simon Data was warehouse-centric before “composable CDP” became a thing. They’ve now continued at the cutting edge of the industry by renaming themselves Simon AI and adding a slew of AI features for personalization and agent-based workflows.

Nothing says “cutting edge” right now as much letting agents buy things on behalf of customers. Google just announced a new specification to support this, in collaboration with 60 industry partners including merchants and financial institutions. In a less savory illustration of market power, they also just set a default value of $220 per visit for Return on Ad Spend and automated ad spend optimization, regardless of an advertiser’s actual business results.

Data breaches are unfortunately so common that they rarely qualify as news. But when the FBI singles out one product as particularly at risk, it’s worth noting. Salesforce has just achieved that sad distinction due to a flaw in Salesloft Drift that opened a pathway to Salesforce data.