CDP Institute

Meta’s Business AI agents will act as the “voice” of brands, answering questions about products, remembering customer preferences and even offering discounts. Meta has extended an open invitation for businesses to join the beta waitlist for Business AI. With over 600 million conversations occurring daily between consumers and brands on Meta platforms, this is aimed at saving brands valuable time.

B2B go-to-market platform Demandbase is launching Agentbase, a system of AI agents designed to accelerate B2B pipeline growth. The first two agents are Campaign Outcomes Agent, to optimize bidding strategies, and Account Engagement Agent, to summarize engagement activity. More agents will be announced in the coming months.

A survey of more than 500 business leaders conducted by the Harvard Business Review for Amplitude showed almost three quarters of respondents that consider themselves DX “leaders” leveraging AI to support digital experience maturity. More than 50% of “leaders” confirmed access to high quality customer data (compared with 34% of “followers” and 20% of “laggards.” Of all respondents, 83% believe building engaging digital experiences as “very important.”

Google is no fan of ad blockers, but it might just be a coincidence that the latest version of its Manifest extension platform deprecates ad blocker uBlock Origin for collecting too much sensitive data.  uBlock Origin Lite, which collected less data, will continue to function.

Performance marketing platform Imaginuity is bringing its AdScience DP to multiple franchise restaurant chains. AdScience ingests data from multiple sources including point of sale, online ordering and media campaigns. Imaginuity has been focused on franchise and multi-location businesses, currently serving over 3,000 client locations.

Ahead of the February elections in Germany, recommendation algorithms on TikTok and X showed far-right bias, according to campaigning organization Global Witness. For example, on TikTok, 78% of the political content that was algorithmically recommended came from accounts supportive of the AfD party. This follows a study that found Meta and X accepted ads submitted that called for the gassing of immigrants in concentration camps and the burning of synagogues ahead of the same elections.  (The ads were placed by researchers, who withdrew them before they ran.)

Meta is planning to launch a new standalone Meta AI app in Q2, apparently in competition with the likes of ChatGPT. Meta AI is not itself new but is currently only available to users via a website or company apps such as Facebook and WhatsApp. Meta plans to test a paid subscription model.

Marketing solutions company Quad is partnering with advertising analytics provider Adalytics to combat fraud and improve evaluation and optimization of campaigns. Quad’s media agency Rise will use Adalytics’ capabilities to reduce ad deliveries to obvious non-human traffic. Adalytics will also supply impression-level transparency tools.

Unpaid traffic (more likely to convert) is down 5.7% YoY according to a Contentsquare review of customer data while paid traffic is up 0.4%. This means the cost of a visit is up 9% with people turning to ChatGPT-style AI search rather than traditional search. Ironically this leads to the recommendation that marketers make more use of AI-powered insights into the customer journey.

CDP Optimove has purchased gamification marketing platform Adact and will make its capabilities available throughout Optimove’s “positionless” customer journeys.   Adact lets marketers create interactive experiences such as quizzes, mini-games, and lotteries without any coding. It’s Optimove’s fourth acquisition but their first since 2022.

Cloud-based customer service platform Zendesk has acquired Local Measure, an AWS partner and provider of AI-powered voice and Contact-Center-as-a-Service solutions. This will bring Zendesk into closer integration with Amazon Connect’s contact center capabilities. It will also enhance Zendesk’s ability to offer customers AI-powered voice engagement.

Some shoppers are open to AI agents’ purchase recommendations (38%) and believe the agents speed up the shopping process (31%), but most (66%) don’t want AI making purchases for them even if the deals are better. This shows good sense given research that shows AI trying to fool human evaluators and jailbreak test environments.  Of course, businesses will push ahead with AI regardless, suggesting this is a bad time to reduce government oversight.