The Gilbane Advisor

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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

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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.

Subscribe | View online | Editorial policy | Privacy policy | Contact

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/

Algolia unveils AI Agents for Salesforce and Adobe

May 8, 2025 /

Algolia, a AI-native search and discovery platform, announced a new AI agent experience that illustrates how autonomous systems can act on real-time data across enterprise platforms. Demonstrated using Salesforce’s Agentforce and integrated with Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), Adobe Experience Platform (AEP), and Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC), Algolia shows what’s possible when agents are equipped with live, structured context, without latency or hallucination.

Algolia semantically interprets user intent, retrieves structured content from its index containing data from multiple customer datastores, and assembles context-aware responses in real time—bridging the gap between front-end agent platforms like Agentforce and the backend systems that hold critical content and customer signals.

Algolia handles this orchestration through its AI-native search engine, which retrieves the most relevant information from its index, content that has been ingested and structured from platforms like Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC), and Adobe Experience Platform (AEP). Whether surfacing personalized media, live product availability, or behavioral attributes, Algolia assembles responses that reflect the full customer context and returns them in milliseconds. The result is an agent experience that feels intuitive, precise, and deeply responsive to user needs.

https://www.algolia.com/about/news/algolia-unveils-new-real-time-context-aware-ai-agents-across-salesforce-and-adobe

Optimizely updates OpaI

May 7, 2025 /

Optimizely, a digital experience platform (DXP) provider, introduced the next evolution of Optimizely Opal. With an all-new user interface and a direct embed across the Optimizely One product suite, Opal unlocks use cases for marketing and digital teams—from task automation, to brand content creation, and experimentation analysis.

Opal builds context windows by combining diverse data sources from an organization’s corporate knowledge, including existing assets, campaign performance, and experimentation results. Opal is enhanced by Optimizely’s domain expertise incorporating content and experimentation practices. Opal agents leverage dozens of tools built for marketing that integrate with external systems. Users can fine-tune with custom instructions and orchestrate these agents within workflows. Enhancements include:

  • A redesigned platform experience puts marketers in control with features like Instructions, a dedicated user interface to manage new and pre-built agents, and Chat which is persistent across all Optimizely products.
  • A pre-built tool library helps marketers with analyzing webpages, creating presentation decks, and conducting keyword research.
  • Specialized agents for marketing tasks, each equipped with instructions and tools to deliver results or complete actions on marketers’ behalf.
  • Agent workflows allow admins to combine multiple Specialized Agents to work together—either step-by-step or at the same time.

https://www.optimizely.com/ai

Bloomreach adds marketing and e-commerce features

May 6, 2025 /

Bloomreach, an agentic platform for personalization, announced features to transform AI-driven personalization and customer engagement across marketing and product discovery. From workflows to conversational search, these features highlight agentic AI.

Marketing:

  • Autonomous Marketing Agents: AI-powered agents to help marketers automate and execute the entire campaign creation process.
  • Recommendations+ : Analyzes each customer’s journey and behavior in real-time to recommend products that align with a customer’s preferences.
  • Contextual Personalization: Automates personalization through the delivery of individualized emails, mobile messages and onsite experiences to each customer.

⠀Conversational Shopping:

  • Search Triggered Conversations: Launches a personalized conversation directly from the search bar and acts as an integrated shopping assistant.
  • Embedded Conversations: Brings Clarity’s conversational capabilities directly to Product Detail Pages (PDPs) and Product Listing Pages (PLPs).

⠀Search:

  • Personalization Studio: Learns from live customer signals and optimizes in real-time to reflect current shopper intent.
  • Ranking Studio: Gives practitioners control to integrate critical business signals like margins or offline sales into search algorithms.
  • Multi-language search: Expands global reach by extending autonomous search across 33 supported languages.
  • Conditional Slot Merchandising: Elevates product placement by allowing the merchandiser to define their own business-driven conditions so AI can autonomously populate product grids and placements.

https://www.bloomreach.com/en/news/2025/bloomreach-unveils-the-features-ushering-in-the-agentic-era-of-marketing-and-ecommerce/

OpenSearch releases OpenSearch 3.0

May 6, 2025 /

The OpenSearch Software Foundation, the vendor-neutral home for the OpenSearch Project, announced the general availability of OpenSearch 3.0. OpenSearch 3.0 enables users to increase efficiency, deliver superior performance, and accelerate AI application development via new data management, AI agent, and vector search capabilities.

Vector engine features:

  • GPU Acceleration for OpenSearch Vector Engine: Delivers superior performance for large-scale vector workloads while significantly lowering operational spend by reducing index building time.
  • Model Context Protocol (MCP) support.
  • Derived Source: Reduces storage consumption by removing redundant vector data sources and utilizing primary data to recreate source documents.

⠀Data management features:

  • Support for gRPC: Enables faster and more efficient data transport and data processing for OpenSearch deployments.
  • Pull-based Ingestion: Enhances ingestion efficiency and gives OpenSearch more control over the flow of data and when it’s retrieved by decoupling data sources and data consumers.
  • Reader and Writer Separation: Ensures consistent, high-quality performance for indexing and search workloads by configuring each in isolation.
  • Apache Calcite Integration.
  • Index Type Detection: automatically determining whether an OpenSearch index contains log-related data and speeding up log analysis feature selection.

Other updates include: Lucene 10, Java 21 minimum supported Runtime, and Java Platform Module System Support.

https://opensearch.org/blog/unveiling-opensearch-3-0

Gilbane Advisor 4-30-25 — Normal AI, vibe blogging, zero-copy

April 30, 2025 /

This week we feature articles from Sayash Kapoor & Arvind Narayanan, and Philip Guo.

Additional reading comes from Steve Jones, Alberto Romero, Shawn Wang & Alessio Fanelli, and Anthony Chavez.

News comes from Adobe, Access Innovations, Syncro Soft, and Elastic.

Our next issue arrives May 14.

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

Opinion / Analysis

AI as normal technology

“We articulate a vision of artificial intelligence (AI) as normal technology. To view AI as normal is not to understate its impact—even transformative, general-purpose technologies such as electricity and the internet are “normal” in our conception. But it is in contrast to both utopian and dystopian visions of the future of AI which have a common tendency to treat it akin to a separate species, a highly autonomous, potentially superintelligent entity.”

This paper by Sayash Kapoor & Arvind Narayanan has been getting a lot of attention, not because it is radical, but because it is a grounded, reasoned, centered, and promising worldview of AI. An important read. (73 min)

https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/ai-as-normal-technology

Vibe coding, vibe checking, and vibe blogging

Using generative AI for personal-scale projects

I’ve experimented with a few GenAI writing tools but haven’t found a productive use for them — too much untrusting micromanagement by me — so haven’t even considered code generation or vibe coding. That is until I read this piece by Philip Guo describing his experiment with vibe coding, and tips for building trust with vibe checking. (10 min)

https://www.oreilly.com/radar/vibe-coding-vibe-checking-and-vibe-blogging

More Reading

All Gilbane Advisor issues

Content technology news

Adobe announces updated Firefly

Firefly combines new Firefly image and video models and the choice of models from partners including Google Cloud and OpenAI. Firefly Boards are in beta.
https://news.adobe.com/news//2025/04/adobe-delivers-creative-pros-unparalleled-speed-precision-flexibility

Access Innovations releases catalogue of 53 Knowledge Domains

The Knowledge Domain products can enhance content prior to ingestion into large language models (LLMs) and will provide improved GPT outputs.
https://www.accessinn.com/2025/04/24/releasing-catalog-of-53-knowledge-domains/

Syncro Soft releases Oxygen Content Fusion 8.1

Version 8.1 streamlines DITA content management and collaboration, with flexible project creation, enhanced file comparison and merging, and new AI-enabled features.
https://www.oxygenxml.com/content_fusion/whats_new.html

Elastic’s Cloud Serverless now on Google Cloud Marketplace

Elastic Cloud Serverless provides a fast way to start and scale security, observability, and search solutions without managing infrastructure.
https://www.elastic.co/blog/elastic-cloud-serverless-google-cloud-general-availability

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.

Subscribe | View online | Editorial policy | Privacy policy | Contact

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