The Gilbane Advisor

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Day: May 14, 2025

Perplexity and PayPal partner

May 14, 2025 /

Perplexity today announced that it has partnered with PayPal to power agentic commerce across its Perplexity Pro platform. Starting this summer in the U.S., consumers can check out instantly with PayPal or Venmo when they ask Perplexity to find products, book travel, or buy tickets.

The entire process, including payment, shipping, tracking, and invoicing will be handled behind the scenes with PayPal’s account linking, secure tokenized wallet and emerging passkey checkout flows, which could eliminate the need for passwords and streamline the experience to a single user query or click. Features include:

  • Agentic Commerce: Integration of PayPal’s commerce solutions, enabling users to buy products or services directly in Perplexity’s chat interface.
  • Global Reach: Expanding Perplexity’s commerce tools to PayPal’s 430+ million active accounts across approximately 200 markets.
  • Secure Transactions: Leveraging PayPal’s robust fraud detection and data security protocols.

Whether users are researching a topic, comparing products, or planning a trip, Perplexity turns natural questions into trustworthy, ready-to-use results, streamlining how people learn, decide, and get things done online.

https://www.perplexity.ai/shopping ■ https://newsroom.paypal-corp.com/2025-05-14-Perplexity-Selects-PayPal-to-Power-Agentic-Commerce

Databricks to acquire Neon

May 14, 2025 /

Databricks, a Data and AI company, announced its intent to acquire Neon, a serverless Postgres company. Databricks plans to continue innovating and investing in Neon’s database and developer experience for existing and new Neon customers and partners.

Recent internal telemetry showed that over 80 percent of the databases provisioned on Neon were created automatically by AI agents rather than by humans. These workloads differ from human-driven patterns in three ways:

  1. Speed + flexibility: Neon can spin up a fully isolated Postgres instance in 500 milliseconds or less and supports instant branching and forking of database schema but also data, so experiments never disturb production.
  2. Cost proportionality: Neon’s full separation of compute and storage keeps the total cost of ownership for thousands of ephemeral databases proportional to the queries they actually run.
  3. Open source ecosystem: Neon is Postgres-compatible and works out of the box with popular extensions.

Databricks and Neon will work to remove the traditional limitations of databases that require compute and storage to scale in tandem — an inefficiency that hinders AI workloads. The integration of Neon’s serverless Postgres architecture with the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform will help developers and enterprise teams efficiently build and deploy AI agent systems.

https://www.databricks.com/company/newsroom/press-releases/databricks-agrees-acquire-neon-help-developers-deliver-ai-systems ■ https://neon.tech

Gilbane Advisor 5-14-25 — LLMs prefer analogies, MCP vs CodeAct

May 14, 2025 /

This week we feature articles from Valentin Hofmann, Leonie Weissweiler, David R. Mortensen, & Janet B. Pierrehumbert, and Kelvin Lu.

Additional reading comes from Erica Vendetti, Rachel Dixon, David Leininger & Matt Argomaniz, Gretel Kahn, Scott Brinker, and Thomas Claburn.

News comes from Algolia, OpenSearch, Optimizely, and Bloomreach.

Our next issue arrives May 21.

All previous issues are available at https://gilbane.com/gilbane-advisor-index

Opinion / Analysis

Like humans, ChatGPT favors examples and ‘memories,’ not rules, to generate language

Really interesting new study…
“by researchers at the University of Oxford, the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), and others found that large language models (LLMs) generalize language patterns in a surprisingly human-like way: through analogy, rather than strict grammatical rules.”

Summary (3 min): https://techxplore.com/news/2025-05-humans-chatgpt-favors-examples-memories.html

Full paper (37 min):  https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2423232122

MCP or not, Manus made a choice

Kelvin Lu discovered that Manus provides more detail on how it works than other AI vendors, and was not using MCP (Model Context Protocol). Instead, Manus is focused on CodeAct. Lu’s comparison of MCP and CodeAct is enlightening. The article is written for developers. (7 min)

https://pub.towardsai.net/mcp-or-not-manus-made-a-choice-40b0a66d2d7c

More Reading

All Gilbane Advisor issues

Content technology news

Algolia unveils AI agents for Salesforce and Adobe

The real-time, context-aware AI agents illustrate how autonomous systems can act on real-time data across enterprise platforms.
https://www.algolia.com/about/news/algolia-unveils-new-real-time-context-aware-ai-agents-across-salesforce-and-adobe

Optimizely updates Opal

Opal unlocks use cases for marketing and digital teams, from task automation, to brand content creation, and experimentation analysis.
https://www.optimizely.com/ai

OpenSearch releases OpenSearch 3.0

To improve efficiency, performance, and accelerate AI application development via data management, AI agent, vector search capabilities.
https://opensearch.org/blog/unveiling-opensearch-3-0

Bloomreach adds marketing and ecommerce features

New features highlight agentic AI personalization and customer engagement across marketing and product discovery.
https://www.bloomreach.com/en/news/2025/bloomreach-unveils-the-features-ushering-in-the-agentic-era-of-marketing-and-ecommerce/

All content technology news

The Gilbane Advisor is authored by Frank Gilbane and is ad-free, cost-free, and curated for content, computing, data, web, and digital experience technology and information professionals. We publish recommended articles and content technology news most Wednesdays. We do not sell or share personal data.

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Foxit launches enterprise Smart Redact Server

May 14, 2025 /

Foxit, a provider of PDF and eSignature products and services, announced Smart Redact Server, a new AI-driven platform built to automate the redaction of sensitive data at scale across enterprise environments. Designed for organizations that manage large volumes of regulated content, the solution enables legal, financial, healthcare, and compliance teams to detect and redact classified, personally identifiable (PII), and other sensitive information.

Smart Redact Server equips teams tasked with data privacy and regulatory compliance, including enterprise administrators, legal and compliance departments, financial institutions, and healthcare organizations with a scalable way to identify and redact sensitive content, whether it’s personally identifiable information (PII), financial records, or protected health data. Features: 

  • AI-powered detection and redaction of PII, financial, legal, and medical data 
  • Batch processing and scheduled scans automate compliance workflows, reduce manual effort 
  • Support for 47 file types, including PDF, DOCX, scanned images, HTML, JSON, XML 
  • Cloud-native SaaS platform with integration across OneDrive, SharePoint, AWS S3, and Box 
  • Zero data retention policy with AES-256 and SSL 2048-bit encryption for in-place, secure document processing 
  • Regulatory compliance with GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, SOX, ISO 27001, and SOC 2 Type II 
  • Role-based team management, audit trails, and reusable redaction templates tailored by industry and region.

https://redact.foxit.com/

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