Algolia announced Algolia AI, a suite of AI tools that enables businesses of all sizes to create always-optimized, personalized digital experiences with less manual tuning and curation. Algolia AI, designed using trillions of searches, is packaged inside an easy-to-use and flexible API. Algolia removes the complexity of implementing AI while giving companies the ability to deeply customize and control the end user experience. Algolia AI search and discovery capabilities include:
Algolia Answers: Combines Algolia’s tunable relevance with AI-driven natural language and real-world understanding. Built on top of technology from Algolia and OpenAI, Algolia Answers addresses the most difficult natural language questions, finding the answer that best responds to the searcher’s question.
Algolia Understand: Detects the actions consumers want to take and the items they seek through human-like Natural Language Understanding (NLU). Through advanced understanding of numbers and named entities, consumers can move from search to conversion quickly, without needing to refine or update search requests.
Dynamic Synonym Suggestions: Improves the user experience by analyzing search patterns and recommending new synonyms that will deliver the most relevant results. Dynamic Synonym Suggestions makes it easier to choose the right synonyms by giving clear context for its recommendations.
Dynamic Re-Ranking: Leverages AI to analyze consumer actions on websites and mobile apps to boost results for each query. Dynamic Re-Ranking also gives granular control to the business user, and complements Algolia’s personalization and merchandising functionalities.
Personalization: Utilizes AI to analyze individual consumers’ actions to build dynamic, high-fidelity user profiles. Algolia Personalization activates those profiles to deliver a unique digital experience tailored to each consumer whether they search or browse, based on previous interactions with the website including purchases, additions to carts and wishlists, and page and video views.
Bridgeline Digital, Inc., a provider of cloud-based digital experience software, announced the release of Celebros Studio 9.0. The upgrade includes a newly designed Studio, and new features to drive increased revenue for eCommerce websites. The improved look-and-feel makes managing eCommerce website search and merchandising more efficiently. In addition, there are new features such as the ability to filter and export lists from Campaigns, Queries, and Merchandising in addition to enhancements to the Instant Search and Auto Complete capabilities. Improvements to the Celebros Instant Search feature improves the customer experience by automatically updating search results as a customer types their query – allowing them to narrow their selection and find products of interest quicker. New updates to the Auto Complete make it more dynamic – visually suggesting up to nine related product thumbnails which automatically update as users hovers over top queries. The new Celebros Studio 9.0 upgrade includes:
User experience overhaul
New list views with slide-out detail panels
Merchandising list vs. thumbnail view
Updated pop-up modals with user-friendly validation
Ability to filter campaign lists, query lists, and merchandising lists
Ability to export campaign lists, query lists, and merchandising lists
A Customer Data Platform is packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems. This definition has three critical elements:
“packaged software”: the CDP is a prebuilt system that is configured to meet the needs of each client. Some technical resources will be required to set up and maintain the CDP, but it does not require the level of technical skill of a typical data warehouse project. This reduces the time, cost, and risk and gives business users more control over the system, even though they may still need some technical assistance.
“creates a persistent, unified customer database”: the CDP creates a comprehensive view of each customer by capturing data from multiple systems, linking information related to the same customer, and storing the information to track behavior over time. The CDP contains personal identifiers used to target marketing messages and track individual-level marketing results.
“accessible to other systems”: data stored in the CDP can be used by other systems for analysis and to manage customer interactions.
Twilio announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire CDP platform vendor Segment for approximately $3.2 billion in Twilio Class A common stock, on a fully diluted and cash free, debt free basis. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2020. The businesses that deliver the best customer experiences are the ones that know their customers well and use customer data to provide more relevant interactions. However, wrangling these customer insights is extremely difficult as the information is typically spread across disparate systems and functions throughout an organization. By combining the companies experience in the cloud communication and customer data platform (CDP) spaces, Twilio can now help alleviate this pain for businesses by delivering a single, unified view that helps companies better understand their customers in order to engage more effectively.
Adobe announced new capabilities to their Intelligent Services with AI throughout organizations to improve customer experience, giving brands access to smarter workflows and real-time scalability.
Content and Commerce AI Now in beta, Content and Commerce AI helps brands understand context around how the content is performing in market, by delivering insights and guidance on content features such as colors, or subjects. Brands can combine the power of Adobe Experience Manager with Content and Commerce AI to automatically extract keywords and tags from documents and content fragments, as well as label documents and images with custom AI models, a process that previously could take a long time and manual effort. For example, a retailer can automatically label and quantify the color composition of an image, and deliver visually similar product recommendations to customers based on intuitive product features such as shape, design and color, based on customer actions. The use of content intelligence can also be important for B2B businesses. Search based on color metadata or visual similarity can be used by franchisees to optimize their product selections from catalogs.
Customer AI in Real-Time CDP Adobe’s Real-time CDP bridges marketing and IT, helping brands find meaning in different data sets, from CRM to online analytics to offline point of sale (POS). Available today, brands can leverage Customer AI within Adobe’s Real-time CDP to analyze historical and real-time data to dig deeper and understand the underlying reasons behind customer actions. Customer AI in Real-time CDP will help brands understand and predict customer propensity such as the likelihood to convert or churn along with the reasons behind their actions.
Infosys announced a definitive agreement to acquire Blue Acorn iCi, Adobe Platinum partner in the US, focused on digital customer experience, commerce and analytics. Blue Acorn iCi brings to Infosys cross-technology capabilities through the convergence of customer experience, digital commerce, analytics, and experience driven commerce services. With services that include strategy, analytics, design, and engineering, Blue Acorn iCi serves global brands across industries from Media, Consumer Goods & Retail, to Financial Services, Manufacturing and Technology. Together with Infosys’ earlier acquisition of WONGDOODY that offers creative and marketing services, BlueAcorn iCi brings complimentary capabilities to help global CMOs and businesses thrive in a digital commerce world. This acquisition deepens Infosys’ capabilities in the Adobe, Magento, Salesforce Commerce and Shopify ecosystems. The acquisition is expected to close during the third quarter of fiscal 2021, subject to customary closing conditions.
EX.CO, a global content technology company, announced the launch of Journey, a decision tree-style content experience on the company’s interactive content creation suite. With Journey’s ability to adapt to a user’s responses. With Journey, each question presented to the user changes based on their previous response, creating a personalized and scalable “choose your own adventure” experience, and making it better for matching specific results such as product recommendations with users based on their unique series of responses. Journey is easily embeddable on any owned digital asset including websites, in apps or landing pages. CTA buttons and lead forms can be automatically integrated into Journey experiences leading consumers from the consideration stage of the sales funnel to the conversion stage.
SAP SE announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire Emarsys, an omnichannel customer engagement platform provider. Emarsys enables businesses to engage more effectively and more personally with their customers. Enhancing the SAP Customer Experience portfolio with Emarsys will change how commerce is managed digitally as it will deliver hyperpersonalized, omnichannel engagements in real time, helping organizations make every engagement is relevant and impactful. Emarsys is an easy-to-use integrated cloud-based marketing platform. It allows companies to deliver personal customer interactions across e-mail, mobile, social, SMS, and the web. The company’s operations will become part of the SAP Customer Experience business unit. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2020, subject to regulatory approval. Purchase price and other terms of the transaction are have not been disclosed.
