This is the second year that Salesforce’s Dreamforce and HubSpot’s Inbound conferences happened in the same week. That is, unless you ask Google’s Gemini, which told me 2024 is the first time. This is ironic and/or funny given the “AI is everything” theme of both conferences.
The word from both events is agents, and that is not a euphemism for bots. Agents are autonomous tools that perform complex tasks without human intervention. Agents are the next big thing and may deliver all the promises made about AI.
Both HubSpot co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said so, and they know a lot about this. Shah said agents will soon be as ubiquitous and widely used as apps. Benioff went further, dedicating his company to them: “The only thing we’re going to do at Salesforce is Agentforce.”
I’m attending Inbound and Shah’s explanation of HubSpot’s agent builder made it look very easy to use. I would be astonished if the same isn’t true for Salesforce’s creation tool. I look forward to putting them both to the test.
And now, here are this week’s AI-powered martech releases.
- SocialPubli’s Brand Detector streamlines the process of evaluating influencers by analyzing their content and interaction trends. It provides insights into brand affinity, usage, and engagement, allowing marketers to make more informed decisions, leading to more effective and transparent influencer marketing campaigns.
- Yellow.ai’s VoiceX is an AI-powered customer service voice tool. Key features include: Natural multi-turn conversations with context retention, accurate handling of complex queries and alphanumeric inputs, contextual responses based on user history and preferences, acknowledgment and management of user interruptions and background noise cancellation for clearer audio. VoiceX aims to enable more natural and effective AI-driven voice interactions for customer service.
- Viant Technology’s ViantAI is an autonomous programmatic advertising platform. It handles every stage of programmatic advertising, from building campaigns to optimizing execution, creating fully data-driven media plans and executing them.
- Sprout Social has a new integration with Salesforce’s Agentforce assistant for Service Cloud. It gathers customer insights from social media and takes accelerated action to enhance customer experiences. It provides a full view of customers, allowing businesses to be more proactive and less reactive to inquiries with Agentforce’s case-specific assistance, guiding service reps toward the best next step.
- Pipedrive’s Pulse is a prospecting tool designed to streamline workflows while prioritizing the most promising deals. Currently in beta, its key benefits include reducing the time spent sorting through prospects and quickly sifting through large volumes of leads to take the most impactful next action.
- Adobe’s Adobe Experience Cloud has several new features, including personalizing, testing, and measuring AI-generated content. Other features include Adobe Content Analytics within Customer Journey Analytics, which provides attribute-level insights on content spanning platforms such as web and mobile. AI Assistant Content Accelerator in Adobe Journey Optimizer generates on-brand marketing assets for channels including email, SMS and more, optimized for certain target audiences based on language, tone and content type.
- CortexClick launched a self-service content generation platform explicitly designed for developer tools, cloud, and enterprise SaaS companies. It can produce high-quality content for developer audiences, including blog posts, tutorials, landing pages, and technical documentation at scale. Features include content editor, GitHub integration, automated knowledge base management and custom AI agents.
- DreamHost’s Liftoff is an AI website builder for WordPress designed to create fully customized WordPress websites. Features include One-Click Installation, a content creator and an Extensive Design Library.
- ElementalTV’s 1Audience is a platform providing direct-to-publisher access to high-value CTV audiences.
- ZapScale’s Campaigns feature for its customer success platform provides hyper-personalized communication and precision targeting for email campaigns. It supports hyper-contextual campaigns incorporating an array of customer-specific details to ensure emails are timely and relevant. Users can design and execute complex, multistep campaigns to manage intricate customer journeys.
About the author
Constantine von Hoffman is managing editor of MarTech. A veteran journalist, Con has covered business, finance, marketing and tech for CBSNews.com, Brandweek, CMO, and Inc. He has been city editor of the Boston Herald, news producer at NPR, and has written for Harvard Business Review, Boston Magazine, Sierra, and many other publications. He has also been a professional stand-up comedian, given talks at anime and gaming conventions on everything from My Neighbor Totoro to the history of dice and boardgames, and is author of the magical realist novel John Henry the Revelator. He lives in Boston with his wife, Jennifer, and either too many or too few dogs.
