One of the trends we’re following is technology offerings by service vendors. Latest example is Shopify design agency Domaine, which just released an “AI Commerce Suite” that uses large language models to automate copy, imagery and video creation; real-time adaptive SEO and geo-targeting; and on-site search, recommendations, and dynamic content. That would have been impressive not so long ago; today, it’s almost commonplace.
Service agent management platform Verint is being bought for $2 billion by private equity firm Thoma Bravo, which will merge it with competitor Calabrio. Thoma Bravo bought Calabrio is 2021. LinkedIn shows 4,294 employees at Verint vs 558 for Calabrio.
A few weeks ago, Salesforce Research released a tool to test AI agent performance when using MCP servers. They’ve now published results of their MCP-Universe benchmark, which show that leading LLMs including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Grok and Claude all fail more than half the time at real-life tasks such as location navigation, browser automation, and web search. Reality can be so annoying.
CDP Zeta Global has unveiled Athena, a “superintelligent” voice-activated interface that delivers instant answers, smarter decisions, and agentic actions throughout the Zeta platform. It activates a suite of agentic apps that can adapt to each user’s specific goals and styles. Early access will begin later this year, with a suite of agentic apps to follow in the first half of next year.