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Category: Enterprise software & integration (Page 1 of 35)

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

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

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

Adobe announces updated Firefly

April 24, 2025 /

Adobe updated Firefly, their all-in-one app for AI-assisted content ideation, creation and production. Firefly empowers creators to generate images, video, audio and vectors from a single place with creative control, iterate on their creations across Adobe’s creative apps and seamlessly deliver them into production. The choice of partner models includes Google Cloud and OpenAI and AI-powered tools deeply integrated into Creative Cloud apps.

Firefly includes all of Adobe’s commercially safe creative AI models, including the new Firefly Image Model 4 for lifelike images, the new Firefly Image Model 4 Ultra for detail and complexity and the Firefly Video Model which generates footage from text prompts and images with creative control.

Firefly also provides creative professionals with the choice to explore in different aesthetic styles using models from partners, with Google Cloud and OpenAI models available today and models from partners including fal .ai, Ideogram, Luma, Pika and Runway available in the coming months. The all-new Firefly Boards, now in public beta in Firefly, gives creators an AI-first surface for moodboarding, exploring creative concepts, iterating on hundreds of variations at once and collaborating on ideation. 

Creators can use Firefly on the web today, with the mobile app coming soon.

https://www.adobe.com/ai/overview/firefly/gen-ai-approach.html

Elastic’s Cloud Serverless now on Google Cloud Marketplace

April 24, 2025 /

From the Elastic blog…

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Elastic Cloud Serverless on Google Cloud — now available in the Iowa (us-central1) region. Elastic Cloud Serverless provides the fast way to start and scale observability, security, and search solutions without managing infrastructure. Built on the Search AI Lake architecture, which leverages Google Cloud Storage, it combines storage, separate storage and compute, low-latency querying, and advanced AI capabilities.

  • No compromise on speed or scale: Elasticsearch Serverless dynamically scales to accommodate your workload, handling unpredictable traffic spikes automatically — all while delivering low-latency search on boundless object storage.
  • Hassle-free operations: Say goodbye to managing clusters, provisioning nodes, or fine-tuning performance. Free your team from operational tasks — no need to manage infrastructure, do capacity planning, upgrade, or scale data. 
  • Purpose-built product experience: Elastic Cloud Serverless offers a streamlined workflow to help you create projects tailored to your unique use cases in observability, security, and search. With guided onboarding, you can use in-product resources and tools that guide you every step of the way, accelerating time to value.
  • Flexible usage-based pricing model: Elastic Cloud Serverless offers a usage-based pricing model that scales with your needs.

https://www.elastic.co/blog/elastic-cloud-serverless-google-cloud-general-availability

Sitecore launches AI Innovation Lab

April 16, 2025 /

Sitecore, a provider of digital experience and content management software, launched Sitecore AI Innovation Lab, a program created in collaboration with Microsoft that provides a guided environment for marketing professionals to rapidly explore AI-driven solutions for optimizing content operations. It helps marketers define their AI journey and fast track the development of solutions best suited for their specific use cases.

A Sitecore AI Innovation Lab guided environment explores AI-driven solutions with Microsoft Azure and Azure OpenAI Services. Participants work alongside Sitecore and Microsoft experts to prototype solutions for their unique challenges using an agile, low risk approach. The result is either a validated AI solution or learnings to help marketers achieve their business objectives. AI innovations developed with customers will be integrated into Sitecore’s DXP to further enhance, improve and future-proof the platform.

Sitecore recently released more than 250 enhancements for its composable DXP to help marketers create, build, and optimize digital experiences and content that align with their brand identity and drive engagement and conversions. Sitecore Stream helps marketers meet evolving customer expectations by speeding the creation and delivery of personalized digital experiences across all touchpoints.

The Sitecore AI Innovation Lab is available to current Sitecore customers.

https://www.sitecore.com/products/ai-innovation-lab

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