Bored with agents? Looking for the Next Big Thing? This Winterberry Group reports says it’s “contextual commerce”, which “enables transactions directly within content, apps and platforms that users already engage with.” This (very long) David Raab blog post argues for something similar.
As Oprah never quite said, Everybody gets an agent! If you’re keeping score, the latest announcements we have include: Aprimo adding AI agent to its digital asset management and content operations platform; customer success platform Gainsight adding a new agent suite called Atlas, and Similarweb offering agents to help with search marketing and sales outreach.
The New York Times, a jealous guardian of its editorial content from poaching by LLMs (it sued OpenAI and Microsoft) has concluded a deal licensing content for use by Amazon. In the first deal of its kind for the Times, Amazon will be permitted to use Times content in its AI platforms. This “will bring Times editorial content to a variety of Amazon customer experiences,” the news organization has said, although it’s not clear whether users will know when that’s happening.
Disney has agreed to license more than 200 characters, costumes, and environments (but not voices or talent likenesses) to OpenAI for Sora, its gen AI video platform. This is highly unusual for Disney, which generally sues AI models for copyright infringement; in fact, it sued Google for that a day before announcing the OpenAI deal. Disney will also invest $1 billion in OpenAI, nicely illustrating how very eager they are to join the AI party.