Perplexity is bringing direct commerce to its chat interface, partnering with PayPal to let consumers purchase products as well as services like travel within the chat. (ChatGPT doesn’t have this yet.) PayPal will handle payments, shipping and customer support; there will also be an option to pay using Venmo. Perplexity had already integrated with sellers like Shopify to provide purchase capabilities outside the chat.
Twilio is adding ‘contextual awareness’ to its Segment CDP, which in plainer English means data stored in Segment will be available when creating event-triggered, real-time messages. This and a redesigned journey architecture are part of Twilio’s “next generation” customer engagement platform, which also includes natural voice AI agents, voice and text analytics, and RCS and WhatsApp messaging. Twilio separately announced a multi-year partnership with Microsoft to speed the adoption of conversational AI for customer engagement.
Confounding predictions that AI search would challenge Google, BrightEdge reports total Google search impressions rose 49% year-on-year after the company introduced AI-powered summaries. But Google is keeping more of that traffic to itself: the same data shows a 30% drop in click-through rates. The findings conflict with a SOCi report that search impressions are down 10%, although SOCi’s source is not stated.
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.