CDP Algonomy announced a deal to buy Linear Squared, which offers AI-based retail demand planning and forecasting. It’s a good example of a vertical CDP expanding its industry-specific features. Algonomy is the renamed combination of campaign CDP Manthan and recommendation engine RichRelevance, who announced their combination in late 2019 and closed that deal in early 2021.
CDP BlueConic has sold a majority share to Vista Equity Partners, whose high-profile martech investments have included Drift, Gainsight, Marketo, and many more. No details were announced but the deal gives BlueConic resources to compete against increasingly well-funded industry leaders.
Merkle, which offers a slew of marketing services including CDP delivery, is moving deeper into operational territory with a pair of products to support contactless shopping. Scan & Go lets in-store shoppers make an online purchase via ecommerce platforms such as Shopify, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and Adobe Commerce. UnboxIt reads QR codes on boxes to connect shoppers with instructions, customer support, loyalty programs, or I suppose anything else. The big selling point is that shoppers don’t need to download a dedicated app.
Unauthorized training data isn’t an existential threat to generative AI but it’s certainly a headache for users and developers alike. Most developers are trying to exclude materials that creators have explicitly labeled as unauthorized and citing “fair use” as justification for copying everything else. Getty Images has taken an opposite approach, building its gen AI tool only on materials that are explicitly licensed. It’s possible that tracing the provenance of training data will become a standard, similar to how organic food producers trace the origins of their ingredients.