CDP Institute

Meta has paid $14.3 billionen for 49% stake in Scale AI, which prepares training data for AI systems, and recruited its founder, Alexander Wang, to work on Meta’s own AI program. Scale AI will continue as an independent vendor, now valued at $29 billion. Scale’s clients include nearly all genAI vendors.

The Trade Desk now has a Connector App, the first it has natively built on an independent data platform — in this case, Snowflake. It will allow brands to share SKU-level sales and conversion data with The Trade Desk clients “in a way that makes sure that data stays with the advertiser and respects user agreements and privacy,” said CEO Jeff Green. Along similar lines, The Trade Desk also recently announced a deal to give advertisers access to product-level data from Instacart and Ocado.

“Hyper-personalized commerce journeys” sound great until you think how much work it is to create them. Commerce platform FERMÀT doesn’t generate all that content in real time, but offers the next best thing: agents that can generate thousands (or is it millions?) of variations in advance and then match those to the right customers in real time. The company just raised a $45 million Series B funding to move things along.

Composable CDP Hightouch is introducing same-session personalization, providing the ability to combine warehouse data and real-time signals during real-time interactions. It requires caching audience data outside of the data warehouse, bending the company’s “no copy” rule. This blog post explains how they do it.

In another example of a global advertising agency bringing tech inhouse, PMG has acquired retail media platform Momentum Commerce. Integrating Momentum with PMG’s Alli platform (AI-powered analytics) will allow signals from the 37 million products and 880,000 brands tracked by Momentum to be translated into media and creative outcomes. The acquisition follows a long history of partnership between the two entities.

Sending loud signals that its ambitions exceed delivering your dinner, DoorDash has spent $175 million to buy retail media platform Symbiosys to boost its off-site advertising capabilities. Advertisers, from enterprise CPG leaders to local restaurants, utilize DoorDash in an attempt to reach high intent customers. That reach will now be expanded across search, social, and off-site display.

There’s no shortage of lawsuits by publishers against genAI platforms for copyright infringement; now major studios are getting with the program. Walt Disney and Comcast’s Universal are accusing Midjourney of using some of their best known characters (think Darth Vader and the Minions) in its AI image generator — a “bottomless pit of plagiarism,” they say. No response yet from Midjourney.

The Minions are great, but when it comes to truly valuable data, nothing beats live humans. Salesforce-owned Slack is reinforcing the point by blocking other firms from searching or storing Slack messages. The company cites customer privacy, although some observers suspect the real purpose is denying data to AI rivals.

Email deliverability specialist mailX has purchased mailbox warm-up vendor mailwarm. The firm hopes to build “the world’s #1 email deliverability ecosystem,” which seems charmingly modest compared with most AI vendors’ goal of world domination.

Kepler Group, a marketing agency, is introducing a new feature to its Kepler Intelligence Platform. Kip AIR (AI Recommendations) will score a brand’s organization of product data for its likelihood to get noticed and ranked by AI shopper bots — because shoppers aren’t all human any more. It’s yet more acknowledgment that AI search results are becoming more important than traditional search.

Walmart has taken another step in the direction of offering its own shopper bot by incorporating an Ask Sparky button in its mobile app. Sparky, a genAI assistant, will respond to natural language queries by discovering products, making recommendations, synthesizing reviews and explaining product features. Down the road, Walmart envisions adding agentic AI capabilities, including re-ordering household supplies and booking services.

Cloud communications vendor Infobip has announced the availability of a Conversational Experience Orchestration Platform (CXOP) that uses Microsoft/OpenAI agentic AI to bring together conversational data from web chat, WhatsApp and other communications services. Based on this data, it will be able to take autonomous actions as well as collaborate with human teams. Infobip signals that this is a step beyond rules-based automation.