B2C marketing cloud company Emarsys has launched a “hype-free and tangible” set of artificial-intelligence-powered services including predictive product recommendations, individually-tailored incentive recommendations, and send time optimization. Its goal is to automatically tailor customer treatments to the individual, freeing up marketers for more fun stuff. The new features are fruits of the $33 million investment Emarsys accepted in September 2015, the first outside funding since it started in 2000. Emarsys supports email, mobile, push, social, Web advertising and Web site personalization.

Digital marketing agency Stirista has introduced StiristaLINK, a service to enrich B2B and B2C profiles with business, consumer, and social data including contact information. B2B profiles are linked to consumer information using proprietary geo-coding methodology. Just in case you didn’t have enough data sources to consider.

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.