Salesforce is buying Airkit.ai, which builds low-code, AI-powered e-commerce customer service agents. You might have thought Salesforce could already do that, but presumably Airkit does it better. It doesn’t hurt that the company founders sold a previous business to Salesforce, the company was partly funded by Salesforce Ventures, and the product is already listed on AppExchange. Price was not announced.
Fear of losing your job to AI is never far from the surface. This study from job site Indeed puts marketing in the top 20% (9th of 47) of jobs that generative AI can most easily perform. It may seem odd that jobs like driving, heathcare, and manufacturing are deemed least at risk, but remember this is specifically about generative AI, not all kinds of automation.
Microsoft Advertising has expanded its search ad buying platform to include video and connected TV campaigns. The integration will let advertisers take advantage of search data to target the video and CTV audiences. They also announced that Microsoft Monetize, the ad sales platform that was formerly AT&T Xandr, will make the ID5 universal ID available to its publishing clients, expanding the addressability of their cookieless inventory.
Media mix models (MMM), originally developed in the 1960’s, have undergone a resurgence as new technologies make them easier to execute and click-based attribution becomes less credible. But evaluating MMM brings its own challenges. Australia-based Mutinex offers a vendor-neutral Open Source MMM Validation Framework which is now available for free to North American marketers and agencies.