Today’s newsletter is brought to you by the letter V. We’ll start with VTEX, an integrated commerce platform that just raised $140 million in what’s apparently its first investment round. The 20-year-old vendor supports more than 2,500 online stores in 28 countries. It’s a helpful reminder that not every major system is owned by one of the giant software vendors.

Chatbot vendor Intercom found that sales bots now outnumber customer service bots, a switch from earlier days when service bots were more common. Both types of bots speed response and save money but 87% of consumers still prefer humans for quick interactions. Fun fact: there are more than 2,000 chatbot vendors.

Salesforce kicked off its big Connections conference yesterday, and if you’re surprised the focus was on generative AI, you haven’t been paying attention.  Still, the focus this time was on marketing applications that draw on Salesforce CDP data, so it’s right up our alley.  They also announced direct access to Google BigQuery data, ticking the “zero-copy” box as well.