NetBase announced a new Customer Experience Analytics solution which ingests customer feedback from social media, digital, surveys, customer care and other sources and uses natural language processing to find actionable insights. It’s working with aggregate data, not tracking individual customers.
BloomReach, a machine learning-based e-commerce recommendation platform, announced it has purchased Hippo, a personalized Web content management system. Clearly they complement each other. But in a world where everything is supposed to plug into everything else via APIs, it’s interesting to see what looks suspiciously like old-school product integration. Are they telling us that API integrations aren’t quite as smooth as promised?
The Weather Company launched Watson Ads today, the first-ever consumer use of IBM Watson technology for advertising purposes. Watson Ads let consumers interact with a brand via IBM Watson, by allowing them to ask questions via voice or text and receive highly personalized information about the brand’s advertised product or offering.
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.