CDP Institute

New media require new metrics. Value intelligence startup Pay-i has landed $4.9 million in seed funding to fill that gap for genAI. The solution provides a real-time dashboard that lets users assign dollar and time values to measurable genAI outcomes, comparing the performances of models, agents or prompts.

“Contextual commerce” is here to stay: within just the past month, 7.5 million U.S. households have purchased a physical product through a CTV ad, according to research and consultancy service Parks. That’s eight percent of households that watch streaming video. It’s still way short of the 24% that subscribed to one or other video service — the biggest type of transaction in streaming.

A new study published in Jama Internal Medicine compared responses to almost 200 patient questions by physicians and chatbots in a social media forum. In almost 80% of cases, evaluators preferred the longer and more empathetic responses by the bots (maybe doctors are just busier than bots?). The next step would be to use AI agents for this; after all, Cisco forecasts that AI assistants will be handling 68% of customer service in the tech sector by 2028.

As Oprah never quite said, Everybody gets an agent! If you’re keeping score, the latest announcements we have include: Aprimo adding AI agent to its digital asset management and content operations platform; customer success platform Gainsight adding a new agent suite called Atlas, and Similarweb offering agents to help with search marketing and sales outreach.

Bored with agents? Looking for the Next Big Thing? This Winterberry Group reports says it’s “contextual commerce”, which “enables transactions directly within content, apps and platforms that users already engage with.” This (very long) David Raab blog post argues for something similar.

The New York Times, a jealous guardian of its editorial content from poaching by LLMs (it sued OpenAI and Microsoft) has concluded a deal licensing content for use by Amazon. In the first deal of its kind for the Times, Amazon will be permitted to use Times content in its AI platforms. This “will bring Times editorial content to a variety of Amazon customer experiences,” the news organization has said, although it’s not clear whether users will know when that’s happening.

Call tracking and conversation analytics platform Invoca has acquired Symbl.ai, an LLM trained on human conversations. Using Symbl technology, Invoca plans to capture the real-time flow of conversational interactions, surfacing emotional and contextual insights for the immediate use of human agents. Symbl will also be able to perform tasks like booking an appointment in the absence of human agents and when contact centers are closed.