CDP Institute

Identity intelligence expert Forter is aiming for a piece of the AI shopper bot action. They’ve just added services to identify AI agents when they visit ecommerce websites, detect potential agentic fraud, and report on trends in agent behavior.

Two revenue orchestration leaders, Clari (839 employees per LinkedIn) and Salesloft (1,198 employees), announced a merger yesterday. Clari provides a massive database of business information while Salesloft helps salespeople optimize their activities. The deal is expected to close before the end of this year.

Digital experience platform (and CDP) Contentstack announced that its EDGE platform is now available in the AWS Marketplace. EDGE, launched in February, combines Contentstack’s headless content management system, personalization, AI, customer data management, analytics, and journey orchestration. It includes features drawn from the Lytics CDP that Contentstack purchased in January.

Salesforce announced it will buy Waii, which sells a natural language-to-SQL translation engine based on a sophisticated semantic map of a company’s data assets. Price was not announced; Waii has 15 employees and no previous funding. Its technology will bolster data access in Data Cloud and Tableau, supplementing the Informatica acquisition that Salesforce announced in May.

Healthcare is a growing industry for CDP deployments. Ours Privacy, a year-old CDP specializing in healthcare, has expanded its features to include an integrated consent management platform. The company announced a seed funding round although it didn’t share the amount.

TakeUp isn’t a CDP: it’s a rate optimization system for independent bed & breakfasts, boutique hotels and glamping retreats. But there’s a good chance it’s managing customer data as the basis for its decisions, even though it reads that data from the client’s property management system. The company just raised an $11 million Series A.

SE Ranking spent more than a decade building its suite of search engine optimization tools, only to have gen AI search raise a new set of challenges. Aiming to accelerate delivery of new solutions, the company just bought social media management platform Planable. While Planable doesn’t measure gen AI search results, it does help companies create social media posts that support gen AI search success.

If I had a nickel for every “first-of-its-kind fully agentic AI marketing platform”, I’d have, well, a lot of nickels. Adtech vendor Mobiquity just launched its version of the breed, CMOne, which combines AI content creation, social media publishing, advertising campaigns, and a performance dashboard. Although Mobiquity says the tool lets users manage “every component of their marketing strategy,” it seems to have a few gaps including a CDP and email.

Adtelligent also has a new “all-in-one” system, in its case for retail media. Retailers gain control over ad inventory, monetization and shopper experience, delivering ads across all digital and physical touchpoints. The system includes a built-in CDP, server for on-site, off-site, and in-store ads, and attribution.

Big tech vendors including Amazon argue loudly and often that they have a right to freely scrape data from publicly-available web pages. So let’s raise an eyebrow at news that Amazon has blocked AI agents from Google, OpenAI, Perplexity, and others from scanning its own site. The goal, of course, is to ensure that shoppers visit Amazon rather than reading AI search results.

Nothing like a little acquisition news to brighten your morning, eh Dear Reader? The emphasis here is on little: Salesforce announced a deal to buy tiny AI-prospecting platform Bluebirds, which shows 15 employees on LinkedIn and $5.5 million in funding on Crunchbase. Price wasn’t announced but could probably be assembled from spare change in Salesforce break-room couch cushions.

We noted yesterday that tools to help companies improve their visibility in AI-generated search results have quickly become too common to count. MCP (Model Context Protocol) connectors are also well on their way to becoming table stakes. We have recent announcements of MCP connectors from Informatica (along with many other new features) and Audiense, as well as MCPEval, a tool from Salesforce researchers that tests agent performance using MCP servers.