Nothing like a little acquisition news to brighten your morning, eh Dear Reader? The emphasis here is on little: Salesforce announced a deal to buy tiny AI-prospecting platform Bluebirds, which shows 15 employees on LinkedIn and $5.5 million in funding on Crunchbase. Price wasn’t announced but could probably be assembled from spare change in Salesforce break-room couch cushions.
Big tech vendors including Amazon argue loudly and often that they have a right to freely scrape data from publicly-available web pages. So let’s raise an eyebrow at news that Amazon has blocked AI agents from Google, OpenAI, Perplexity, and others from scanning its own site. The goal, of course, is to ensure that shoppers visit Amazon rather than reading AI search results.
We noted yesterday that tools to help companies improve their visibility in AI-generated search results have quickly become too common to count. MCP (Model Context Protocol) connectors are also well on their way to becoming table stakes. We have recent announcements of MCP connectors from Informatica (along with many other new features) and Audiense, as well as MCPEval, a tool from Salesforce researchers that tests agent performance using MCP servers.
CDP Zeta Global has unveiled Athena, a “superintelligent” voice-activated interface that delivers instant answers, smarter decisions, and agentic actions throughout the Zeta platform. It activates a suite of agentic apps that can adapt to each user’s specific goals and styles. Early access will begin later this year, with a suite of agentic apps to follow in the first half of next year.