Personalization and experimentation vendor AB Tasty is also claiming a first: it just acquired site search and recommendation vendor Epoq, which it says makes it the “first in our class to offer the market a consolidated approach to delivering relevant and consistent digital customer experiences.” The main story here is bundling of experiment-based optimization, recommendations, and search.
Those nice people at Optimizely are terribly excited about Real-Time Segmentation, their “new, first-of-its-kind offering that allows marketers to segment customers in the moment of engagement to deliver highly relevant, personalized digital experiences.” Exactly what’s different from other real-time personalization products isn’t clear, and you’ll have to wait to judge for yourself: it’s available only in beta to select customers.
Persado goes beyond “first” to call itself the “only” company to generate personalized marketing messages with a “transformer model fully connected and pre-trained on behavioral data.” They say this “selects the words that will drive action” in ways that other systems do not, and who am I to argue? (Learn about transformer models.) What’s new today is they’ve added an API to embed this magic in other vendors’ systems.
Twilio is adding ‘contextual awareness’ to its Segment CDP, which in plainer English means data stored in Segment will be available when creating event-triggered, real-time messages. This and a redesigned journey architecture are part of Twilio’s “next generation” customer engagement platform, which also includes natural voice AI agents, voice and text analytics, and RCS and WhatsApp messaging. Twilio separately announced a multi-year partnership with Microsoft to speed the adoption of conversational AI for customer engagement.