B2C marketing automation is an established category but new entrants can still find a place if they offer something different.  Cordial eliminates conventional email and mobile campaigns by automatically picking the best time to contact each customer and running self-optimizing content tests to pick the best content.  It builds a unified customer database and reacts to new events in real time. The company just raised $6 million, bringing their total funding to $8 million.

A survey by personalization vendor Monetate found that just 6% of respondents have deployed advanced personalization, compared with 56% who are working on it, 28% who are just starting out, and 10% who aren’t doing anything.

If you still think that MCP stands for Male Chauvinist Pig, well, the 1970’s want their disco ball back. Today’s hep cats know that MCP stands for Model Context Protocol, a new-but-widely supported standard that lets large language models access structured data as context for their prompts. Early adopters include Salesforce and Adobe, and search platform Algolia is now using it to feed their data to customer-facing real-time AI agents.