Salesforce and Google have expanded their strategic partnership to permit the use of Google Gemini generative AI models in the Salesforce Agentforce eco-system. This will not only allow AI agents to work with images, audio, and video but also give access to insights from Google Search. There will also be enhanced integration between Salesforce Service Cloud and Google Customer Engagement Suite.
The 2025 Customer Engagement Review from Braze says that, while 85% of senior marketers are concerned their messages aren’t hitting home, 60% of brands that exceeded their revenue goals were very concerned with making emotional connections to customers. Key to this personalization, but 99% of the over 2,000 executives surveyed say personalization plans are impacted by privacy worries. Almost a third aren’t testing their engagement efforts because of resource constraints.
Walmart’s evolving ad business is booming, reporting $4.4 billion in global revenue in 2024, up 27% on the previous year. Welcome news for a company that has predicted slowing profit growth this year. It still has a long way to go to compete with the big players like Amazon (over $56 billion in ad revenue last year).
Preliminary findings by the European Commission state that Apple and Google are in violation of the EU’s Digital Markets Act. Among the findings, Google Search is accused of prioritizing Google’s own products and services in results; Apple is instructed to improve interoperability between iOS and third-party devices. The companies now have an opportunity to respond.