CDP Institute

Salesforce is about to release Marketing Cloud Next, available to Marketing Cloud customers for an additional license (cost not yet known). It features improved access to Salesforce’s AI agents, including some that can converse with customers until it’s time to pass them to marketing or sales humans. There will also be a tighter integration with Commerce Cloud.

CDP Lemnisk is also throwing its hat into the crowded AI ring. They’ve just released a “revolutionary set of industry-first AI Innovations” that include real-time, event-driven predictive scoring; entity-level identity resolution; and auto-transcription, sentiment extraction, and topic insights from audio recordings. Plus: MCP (Model Control Protocol) and API access to Lemnisk’s real-time profile store, so external models can feast on their data goodness.

If you’ve been eager to see ads in Meta-owned WhatsApp, your day has come. The ads will be available in Status, where people share photos, videos, voice notes and text with their mutual contacts, and in Channels. Personal Messages remain ad-free, but there’s always tomorrow.

Meta has paid $14.3 billionen for 49% stake in Scale AI, which prepares training data for AI systems, and recruited its founder, Alexander Wang, to work on Meta’s own AI program. Scale AI will continue as an independent vendor, now valued at $29 billion. Scale’s clients include nearly all genAI vendors.

The Trade Desk now has a Connector App, the first it has natively built on an independent data platform — in this case, Snowflake. It will allow brands to share SKU-level sales and conversion data with The Trade Desk clients “in a way that makes sure that data stays with the advertiser and respects user agreements and privacy,” said CEO Jeff Green. Along similar lines, The Trade Desk also recently announced a deal to give advertisers access to product-level data from Instacart and Ocado.

“Hyper-personalized commerce journeys” sound great until you think how much work it is to create them. Commerce platform FERMÀT doesn’t generate all that content in real time, but offers the next best thing: agents that can generate thousands (or is it millions?) of variations in advance and then match those to the right customers in real time. The company just raised a $45 million Series B funding to move things along.

Composable CDP Hightouch is introducing same-session personalization, providing the ability to combine warehouse data and real-time signals during real-time interactions. It requires caching audience data outside of the data warehouse, bending the company’s “no copy” rule. This blog post explains how they do it.

In another example of a global advertising agency bringing tech inhouse, PMG has acquired retail media platform Momentum Commerce. Integrating Momentum with PMG’s Alli platform (AI-powered analytics) will allow signals from the 37 million products and 880,000 brands tracked by Momentum to be translated into media and creative outcomes. The acquisition follows a long history of partnership between the two entities.

Sending loud signals that its ambitions exceed delivering your dinner, DoorDash has spent $175 million to buy retail media platform Symbiosys to boost its off-site advertising capabilities. Advertisers, from enterprise CPG leaders to local restaurants, utilize DoorDash in an attempt to reach high intent customers. That reach will now be expanded across search, social, and off-site display.

There’s no shortage of lawsuits by publishers against genAI platforms for copyright infringement; now major studios are getting with the program. Walt Disney and Comcast’s Universal are accusing Midjourney of using some of their best known characters (think Darth Vader and the Minions) in its AI image generator — a “bottomless pit of plagiarism,” they say. No response yet from Midjourney.

The Minions are great, but when it comes to truly valuable data, nothing beats live humans. Salesforce-owned Slack is reinforcing the point by blocking other firms from searching or storing Slack messages. The company cites customer privacy, although some observers suspect the real purpose is denying data to AI rivals.

Email deliverability specialist mailX has purchased mailbox warm-up vendor mailwarm. The firm hopes to build “the world’s #1 email deliverability ecosystem,” which seems charmingly modest compared with most AI vendors’ goal of world domination.