Regulators are increasingly hostile to app store owners who require apps to funnel payments through the store owner’s payment system and pay a hefty commission for the privilege. Apple has received most of the unwanted attention, but Google is in regulators’ sights as well. Google has responded with a pilot program to allow third-party billing in Android apps. It just expanded the pilot to include the U.S., European Union, and other regions.
Sprinklr, which collects and classifies customer comments from social media, review sites, chat apps, and other external systems, has expanded its partnership with Salesforce to make it easier to load that data into the Salesforce CDP. They also announced an agreement to work with Accenture to make it happen. Sprinklr has already has partnerships with other CDP vendors including Adobe and SAP.
Google is also trying to keep regulators at bay when it comes to privacy and ad sales. Its bird-named plans to replace third-party cookies with visitor clustering methods haven’t taken off but it’s still trying with Topics API, which classifies users based the sites they visit. Criteo just issued test results that find Topics API is considerably less effective than Criteo’s own competing system. They have an obvious axe to grind but the analysis is still worth a look.
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.