I vaguely feel we should note that Elon Musk has changed Twitter’s name to X, although you’ve surely heard about it elsewhere. So I’ll instead offer this Retail TouchPoints survey with lots of information on personalization data, applications, and value. CDPs head the list of tools used to support personalization, at 64%, while assembling data is the biggest personalization challenge.
Messaging platform Customer.io has added a data pipeline that lets it collect data from multiple sources and send it to a data warehouse, and also moves data from a warehouse to other destinations. While this doesn’t make them a CDP, the company also has product called Journeys that builds proper customer profiles and would tick the CDP boxes.
This very interesting Salesforce survey of IT leaders reports that just 22% deploy purchased applications without customization, compared with 65% who customize apps before deployment and 49% who develop apps internally. Other tidbits: the average number of apps in an enterprise grew from 843 in 2021 to 1,061 in 2023, a 25% increase; during that period, the percentage of integrated apps has remained steady at 29%; and 46% of enterprises have a composable design strategy and 43% plan to add one in the next 18 months.
Salesforce is buying Airkit.ai, which builds low-code, AI-powered e-commerce customer service agents. You might have thought Salesforce could already do that, but presumably Airkit does it better. It doesn’t hurt that the company founders sold a previous business to Salesforce, the company was partly funded by Salesforce Ventures, and the product is already listed on AppExchange. Price was not announced.