IAB report found that seamless omnichannel shopping experiences will present the biggest opportunity for brands this year as shoppers return instore. Retail marketers must assess their marketing strategies to ensure they can adjust activities to respond to economic changes, navigate the continuing influence of covid, optimise shoppers omnichannel experiences and bolster confidence among hesitant shoppers.
Outbound marketing platform Iterable has launched a new AI Optimization Suite, whose main features are letting non-technical users create custom predictive models and see which inputs drive those models. This sort of thing isn’t quite table stakes but it’s becoming more common. Iterable collects and activates unified customer data in ways that seem CDP-ish, although we haven’t classified them as one…yet.
Metigy was a platform based in AI, offering machine-led marketing solutions for small businesses. Metigy has gone into voluntary administration, leaving Metigy’s 75 employees shocked, given that the Australian Financial Review recently reported the company had grown more than 300 per cent in 2020 and 2021, and was planning on raising money with a valuation of $1 billion.
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.