CDP Institute

ZeroClick converts marketing content into units that are optimized for consumption by AI search engines, and charges clients to present those units to the engines when they are researching a response. In other words, it’s a way to inject paid ads into AI search results. They recently launched with $55 million in funding.

Consumers don’t necessarily trust AI search results: Invoca reports that 39% think AI is likely to provide misleading information and just 12% rely primarily on AI for product research. In fact, nearly as many are rarely satisfied with AI help (27%) as are usually satisfied (36%). It’s a good thing that AI engines don’t have feelings that can be hurt: respondents’ top suggestion for improving AI experiences was quicker access to a human.

One sure way to increase hostility to AI is to use it without telling people. YouTube has been doing just that in a particularly insidious fashion: applying automated “improvements” to creator videos without informing either the creators or their audiences. Of course, YouTube positions the “experiment” as a way to improve user experience.

It’s nearly three decades since Salesforce.com disrupted the CRM market by selling software-as-a-service. A new crop of CRM developers hope that AI will give them a similar opportunity (although Salesforce is working hard be the AI CRM leader). Attio just announced a $52 million Series B for its “AI-native CRM”. On the same day, Aurasell released “the first AI-native CRM platform”.

Will all those AI-powered systems take away jobs? Data collected by Stanford University scholars shows a 13% decline in employment among early-career workers in the most AI-exposed jobs. Of course, we live in a post-truth era, so data doesn’t carry as much weight as it once did.

Marketers are usually an upbeat bunch but just 20% of respondents to this Dotdigital survey believe their organization would never replace human employees with AI. More senior employees were more confident in their job security. CDP experts may be interested that 86% of respondents are experiencing issues with data.

AI-based ad generator Jivox has released “agentic shopping ads” to handle the seller side of the AI shopper agent-to-seller agent dialog. DaVinci Commerce generates personalized responses to either human or agentic visitors, including LLM prompts. Whether it’s “industry-first” is questionable; Dailymotion released EchoAI “conversational ads” last month.

AI search engines arguably make “advertising” obsolete. One issue this raises is how publishers will be compensated for creating that content that powers AI replies. Perplexity is taking a stab at a solution with a new program that gives publishers a share of the revenue generated by subscriptions to its (paid) Comet web browser.

Content creators argue that compensation for use of their materials should be legally required, not voluntary. Unfortunately for them, the judge in an author suit against Anthropic ruled that unpaid scanning of copyrighted materials is permitted as “fair use”. Anthropic and the authors have now avoided a trial by settling the case.

Service agent management platform Verint is being bought for $2 billion by private equity firm Thoma Bravo, which will merge it with competitor Calabrio. Thoma Bravo bought Calabrio is 2021. LinkedIn shows 4,294 employees at Verint vs 558 for Calabrio.

One of the trends we’re following is technology offerings by service vendors. Latest example is Shopify design agency Domaine, which just released an “AI Commerce Suite” that uses large language models to automate copy, imagery and video creation; real-time adaptive SEO and geo-targeting; and on-site search, recommendations, and dynamic content. That would have been impressive not so long ago; today, it’s almost commonplace.

A few weeks ago, Salesforce Research released a tool to test AI agent performance when using MCP servers. They’ve now published results of their MCP-Universe benchmark, which show that leading LLMs including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Grok and Claude all fail more than half the time at real-life tasks such as location navigation, browser automation, and web search. Reality can be so annoying.