Walmart has taken another step in the direction of offering its own shopper bot by incorporating an Ask Sparky button in its mobile app. Sparky, a genAI assistant, will respond to natural language queries by discovering products, making recommendations, synthesizing reviews and explaining product features. Down the road, Walmart envisions adding agentic AI capabilities, including re-ordering household supplies and booking services.
Kepler Group, a marketing agency, is introducing a new feature to its Kepler Intelligence Platform. Kip AIR (AI Recommendations) will score a brand’s organization of product data for its likelihood to get noticed and ranked by AI shopper bots — because shoppers aren’t all human any more. It’s yet more acknowledgment that AI search results are becoming more important than traditional search.
Cloud communications vendor Infobip has announced the availability of a Conversational Experience Orchestration Platform (CXOP) that uses Microsoft/OpenAI agentic AI to bring together conversational data from web chat, WhatsApp and other communications services. Based on this data, it will be able to take autonomous actions as well as collaborate with human teams. Infobip signals that this is a step beyond rules-based automation.
It barely feels like news when industry giants add AI features, since that’s what they’re expected to do. But lots of people use their products, so their announcements are probably of higher interest than most. With that in mind, let’s note that Adobe has just announced general availability of agents for audience creation, journey orchestration, experimentation, journey insights, website optimization and agent support.