Remote access – excuse me, “digital workspace” – tech vendor Citrix was just bought by Vista Equity Partners and friends for $16.5 billion. That’s only sort of interesting, but Vista announced they plan to combine Citrix with data analytics vendor TIBCO, a bauble they’ve owned since 2014. And data analytics is something we care about, right?
There’s not much novelty left in artificial intelligence or no-code tech, and even the combination is a bit of a yawn. Still CausaLens gets a second look because their $45 million Series A will go to AI using “cause and effect” logic instead of basic correlations and pattern recognition. In case you do want more AI information, here’s a Persado study that finds 54% of companies are already using it to create personalized experiences and all but 7% plan to join them.
Did someone mention data analytics? Oh, it was me. Now that I mention it, here’s a study from Sisense that reports 96% of digital product managers think their customers want them to embed personalized, AI-driven insights into their products, and most think the customers would pay to get it. Is that an itch you’ve been eager to scratch, Dear Reader?
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.