Adverx has just raised $14.5 million for “Customer Relationship Advertising,” which certainly sounds intriguing.  What they do is to generats personalized ads for individuals targeted by business-to-business sales teams, and then maks those ads “passively ‘follow’ each salesperson’s current clients and prospects (pulled from the CRM) as they browse the web and social media”.  Annoying and creepy and it probably works.

Do you miss those innocent days when every product announcement breathlessly reported the new system or feature was “AI-based”? If so, here’s a whiff of remembrance from AI infrastructure provider SambaNova Systems, who found that 78% of large companies rate AI and Machine Learning as important revenue drivers. Yet even they have a curiously mixed attitude, citing (in their press release) a NewVantage Partners study that found only a quarter of top companies have scaled AI/ML across their organization.