The News Gods have apparently adopted summer hours, since nothing of interest happened on Friday. That lets us catch up on some Artificial Intelligence items that we didn’t get to earlier in the week. We’ll start with LogMeIn, which is expanding beyond remote access software to offer an AI-powered Bold360 customer engagement suite. It will deliver customer support, advisory, and shopping bots and bot-powered advice to customer-facing employees.
Spent yesterday binge-watching Battlestar Galactica again? We won’t judge. We will let you know that Salesforce announced a $15.7 billion stock deal to buy data visualization platform Tableau. The goal is less to improve analytics within Salesforce than to drive continued revenue growth by tapping into the general ‘digital transformation’ market. Tableau will continue to operate as an independent company.
A few CDP users really care where their system is hosted. The rest are more likely to be interested that Criteo lists a dozen CDP vendors as partners in its Global Audience program. The new program will make it easier for marketers to match their customers against Criteo’s audiences, which can then be used to target ads at the customers across digital ad channels.
Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.