Experience management vendor Qualtrics is being purchased by private investment firm Silver Lake for approximately $12.5 billion in cash. Qualtrics was purchased for $8 billion by SAP in 2018, and then spun off as a separate company in 2020. SAP had announced it was exploring a sale of its Qualtrics stake in January, so the deal is not much of a surprise.

“Charm offensive” isn’t in the playbook at Meta, which has announced it will block access to Canadian news sites if the country passes its proposed Online News Act in current form. The law would require Meta to pay news organizations when someone posts a link to their materials. A similar threat failed spectacularly in Australia last year but that isn’t deterring Meta from trying again.

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.