CDP Institute

The economy may be sputtering (or not), but funds are flowing more freely for martech and adtech acquisitions. Video platform Vimeo has just agreed to be acquired for $1.38 billion in cash. The buyer is Bending Spoons, a Milan-based mobile app developer.

DeepIntent helps healthcare and pharma brands buy advertising. The ads may be under attack in Washington, but that didn’t stop private equity investor Vitruvian from spending $637 million to buy a majority share.

AI-powered personal companions are apparently a bad idea whose time has come. The FTC and California both have them in their cross-hairs, while two new entrants – Clyx and Born – have just raised money. We might also note a new whistleblower claim that Meta stifled research into how its products might harm kids.

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.

SurveyMonkey is also used by millions. They’ve just added a new AI suite to help users ask better questions and analyze survey results. They’ve also announced a beta version of a tool to categorize open-ended text responses.

ServiceNow counts its clients in the thousands, not millions. But it’s used by most big enterprises so its products impact many people. Their latest release includes tools for faster multi-agent AI development, AI security, and autonomous AI workflows.

One of the normal stages in the maturation of a new technology is appearance of industry-specific applications. AI agent-powered end-to-end marketing campaigns have reached that stage remarkably quickly. Case in point: Birdeye has released an agentic marketing platform for its base of multi-location brand marketers.

Small e-commerce businesses are another specialized segment. ADMaker.ai has launched a one-click ad creation platform tailored to their needs. It’s not entirely clear how this differs from ADMaker.ai’s older video ad generation tools (if it does), and plenty of other companies also offer video ad generators. But maybe the fact that it’s commonplace is itself remarkable.

Another sign of maturity is development of infrastructure products to help manage a new technology. Data monitoring vendor Monte Carlo has just introduced Agent Observability, which helps teams to detect, assess, and resolve issues with AI data and model outputs. The company says it’s the first to combine data and model monitoring in the same platform.

Team management vendor Atlassian is buying The Browser Company, developers of the Dia and Arc browsers. The company plans to embed AI within Dia so it can provide context and connect applications in browser tabs, helping developers and project teams work more efficiently. Price was $610 million in cash.

Does anyone really doubt that ads will eventually appear in AI responses? Start-up Koah, which just announced $5 million in seed funding, is already placing contextual ads within AI apps including AI assistant Luzia, parenting app Heal, student research tool Liner, and creative platform DeepAI. The idea is to help smaller app developers generate revenue so they can keep costs down for end-users.

Two CompTIA analyses offer contrary takes on how AI will impact tech employment: one finds lower employment right now while the other projects strong growth over the next ten years. Somewhat similarly, Salesforce’s Marc Benioff says that AI agents allowed his company to cut 4,000 support jobs while ServiceNow president Amit Zavery says AI hasn’t reduced his headcount but did let workers do a better job, resulting in higher customer satisfaction. Benioff also said that Salesforce will be entering the IT services business, perhaps because he feels AI will make... Read More >