The European Union’s Digital Markets Act is having the intended effect of increasing competition. Setapp, which runs a subscription platform for Mac users, has announced plans for an alternative mobile app store for iOS. Available only to EU users, it will enable Apple customers to buy apps without using Apple’s own app store and payment system.
Marketing automation platform Klaviyo has added a Customer Data Platform. The company stresses the benefits of integrating CDP data with its analysis and delivery tools – an approach that accounts for 75% of the market, according to CDP Institute data. It avoids the integration cost and complexity of assembling a collection of separate tools.
The prospect of generative AI-powered search from Google both excites and terrifies many in the industry. In fact, Google already has an experimental version running as an option within Chrome. They’ve just added several enhancements including definitions within AI-generated responses, AI-generated summaries of long articles, and improved help with AI-generated code. They’ve also made it easier for publishers to exclude paywalled items from summarization.
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.