Lots of people want to help retailers compete with Amazon. Swiftly Systems offers tools for online and instore promotions plus retail media networks. They just announced their second $100 million funding round in six months.
Ok, here’s a crazy coincidence: we have news from another CDP that specializes in telecom. Intent HQ has launched an AI-driven audience builder that finds hidden opportunities within a customer base. The tool doesn’t require data scientist support and lets marketers choose from a list of predictive indicators to model against. It uses other Intent HQ features to automatically ensure the audience data is privacy-compliant.
Instacart is also manning the anti-Amazon barricades. They just launched Connected Stores, an initiative that helps retailers compete with Amazon’s no-checkout technology. Clients also get an online component and lots of fresh customer data. Success isn’t guaranteed: Wegmans recently dropped a self-scanning program due to high shoplifting costs.
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.