CDP Institute

Customer experience vendor NiCE has signed a definitive agreement to acquire the agentic and conversational AI platform Cognigy for a reported $955 million. Cognigy empowers leading brands like Mercedes-Benz, Nestlé, and Lufthansa Group to deliver AI-powered customer support. Cognigy will integrate with NiCE’s CXone contact center capabilities.

Meta is shutting down advertising related to political, electoral and social issues in the E.U. given what it calls the “unworkable requirements and legal uncertainties” related to the Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising regulation. Burdens include restrictions on ad targeting and delivery which would limit political and social issue advertisers in reaching their audiences. Non-ad debate and discussion, says Meta, can continue to flourish.

One stat that jumps out from Amperity’s new report on AI in retail is that retailers with CDPs in place were twice as likely to use AI daily or several times a week as other retailers. They were also more than twice as likely to have full AI adoption across multiple business units. The report doesn’t mention it, but we assume that CDP users are also taller and better looking.

Composable CDP GrowthLoop is introducing a real-time messaging feature, partly to combat the idea that relying on warehouse-stored data compromises response speed to customer signals. The feature uses event streaming solutions such as Kafka and Pub/Sub to avoid reliance on batch data processing. Marketers can combine the real-time event data with information stored in a cloud database.

As AI Overviews replace traditional web search results, marketers need new tools to assess how their brands are being presented. Marketing intelligence platform Similarweb is on the case with an AI Intelligence Toolkit that shows brands which topics are most associated with them as well as the top cited sources within AI answers. The toolkit will also benchmark brand performance against competitors.

Further blurring the line between web browsers and search engines, Google is adding store reviews to its Chrome browser. Users who click on an icon next to a store web address will see AI-generated assessment based on information from partners like Bazaarvoice, Bizrate Insights and Reputation.com. The reviews will let customers know about a web store’s customer service, product quality, shipping, pricing and returns.

Bloomreach, the AI-based omnichannel marketing platform, has announced a new partnership with Snowflake AI Data Cloud to connect customer data stored in Snowflake with Bloomreach’s personalization capabilities. A native integration will sync customer attributes and event data from Snowflake into Bloomreach for activation. It will also be possible to automate campaign triggers in Bloomreach using Snowflake events.

Not content with regular agentic AI, Walmart is placing its bets on four so-called “super agents” designed for shoppers, store employees, suppliers and developers. Sparky, already available to shoppers on the Walmart app, is a genAI tool ready with product recommendations and answers to questions. Associate will give employees a unified channel to interact with the company; Marty will onboard suppliers and manage the order process; Developer will be where future AI tools are built.

Google is all set to help you shop too, as its “try on” tool, debuted as an experiment in April, becomes generally available in the U.S. It allows shoppers to upload a selfie and try on the latest fashions without going near a store. Among other innovations, Google is also rolling out price alerts so that you can track when that hat, coat or scarf falls within your budget.

Google’s recent earnings report is not only bullish about AI Overviews, which boast two billion monthly users; it also says the new feature has not reduced traditional search. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said AI Overviews, if anything, encourage more searching. This is at loggerheads with a recent report from Pew Research that says users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results.

European customer engagement platform SALESmanago has acquired Thulium, an AI-powered, ecommerce-focused customer service solution. Thulium will add omnichannel customer support capabilities to SALESmanago’s B2B and B2C marketing automation offering. The acquisition should also almost double the size of SALESmanago’s customer base.

Ninety-seven percent of respondents to a survey by SocialTrait say AI-generated content should be labeled. Only 1% called for no such disclosure, so that’s not exactly close. Three percent of all respondents said they felt fully prepared to navigate the AI media world (of course, baby boomers are three times less confident than GenZ).