Marketing automation and CRM vendor HubSpot acquired Kemvi, which uses machine learning to scan online content for insights about sales prospects. Since pretty much every vendor now uses AI in some way, what’s interesting here is seeing HubSpot double down on its efforts to support sales rather than marketing users.

Did you also know that “ChannelTech” is the latest industry mashword?  Not really, since I just made it up.  I also made up “mashword”, which sounds less pretentious than “portmanteau”.  The non-fake news is that Zift Solutions and Relayware, which both help companies market through channel partners, have just announced a merger.  ChannelTech is interesting because it’s a parallel universe to martech that’s unfamiliar to most direct-to-customer marketers.  Parallel universes are interesting because they often contain ideas worth borrowing.  Feel free to call them “borrideas”.  You’re welcome.

Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.