More than half (53%) of companies have no strategy to optimize their martech stack, according to this Ascend2 survey for consultancy DemandLab. Ease of use is the capability they most want to improve while insights is the most important feature they seek. Speaking of marketing stacks: here’s a game where you compete to build your own. http://customerexperiencematrix.blogspot.com/2020/04/heres-game-about-building-your-martech.html

Meanwhile, customer/employee/B2B experience platform Medallia just made their seventh purchase in the past months, scooping up speech-to-text platform Voci Technologies. Price was $59 million.

It’s deal-making time for generative AI model builders and publishers who can provide them with quality data.  Germany publishing giant Axel Springer is trading access to its data for Microsoft adtech, AI, and Azure hosting solutions.  Meanwhile, The Financial Times has struck a deal with OpenAI to license its content with attribution of summaries and quotes.