Almost all the 637 business leaders (96%) interviewed by Twilio for their new State of Customer Engagement report say they plan to develop their next customer experience tool in-house. We’re not sure quite what that means, since many more than that also plan to buy something — including 24% investing in a CDP. Lots more here about tech stacks, AI, customer attitudes, personalization, and trust.
The robots are (apparently) under control at commerce media platform Criteo, where they’re helping advertisers buy retail media ads programmatically, making it easier to run campaigns across multiple retail media channels. Auction-based buying will also help channels sell inventory not sold through traditional purchase methods. It’s a competitive challenge to similar features in Google’s Ad Manager and Ad Exchange.
Supermetrics, the marketing intelligence and analytics platform, has acquired the CDP Relay42, another example of an independent CDP being picked up by another kind of vendor although not this time a digital experience platform. The companies plan to connect Supermetrics’ insights into campaign performance with Relay42’s customer data and personalization technology.
The web search tool Perplexity looks like it’s taking on Google with its latest release, a web browser named Comet. Comet claims to move “from browsing to thinking,” surfacing information and search results in response to natural language queries. Comet is available immediately to Perplexity Max subscribers; others can join a wait list.