News Blog

Bloomreach announced it has been named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Email Marketing, placed furthest for completeness of vision among the vendors evaluated. The company ties the recognition to progress on its marketing agent, which finds opportunities, builds personalized campaigns and optimizes itself with every send, working from the same customer data and channels marketers use.

PureCars has launched a platform for car dealers that brings its customer data platform, AutoAlert opportunity data mining and outbound marketing execution together in one system, with AI-driven predictive analytics. Sales, service, vehicle equity and marketing engagement data converge into a single customer view. The company presents it as the first in the industry to combine all three.

In an analysis published on November 10, Forrester argues that layering AI onto inefficient advertising processes merely automates the inefficiencies. The real opportunity is to redesign advertising around a new division of labor: people set strategy and guardrails, agents orchestrate execution and optimization. Connected data provides the context both need to make good decisions.

Tealium has launched ChatGPT Ads Connectors to track customer journeys influenced by conversational search. The connectors stream first-party customer data into OpenAI ad environments, resolve user identity across devices and measure post-impression conversions. The news appears in MarTech’s martech roundup of October 8.

Bloomreach announced that brands, technology partners and agencies have already built more than 200 agents with Loomi Connect, the integration foundation of its Loomi intelligence layer. More than 180 tools give compatible agents access to Bloomreach’s analytics, search and marketing capabilities within workflows built with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Cursor and other MCP-compatible frameworks. The agents handle e-commerce merchandising, personalized email campaigns and segment updates.

Databricks has moved CustomerLake into beta: the agentic customer data platform unveiled in June at Data + AI Summit, with the first large enterprises already live. It brings core CDP capabilities into the lakehouse: Customer 360, identity resolution, audience building, campaign automation, activation and personalization. The idea is for customer data, AI models and agents to live in the same governed platform, without copying data elsewhere.

On October 20, Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to acquire customer engagement platform Braze for approximately $5.66 billion in enterprise value, or $47.50 per share in cash. Braze turns real-time customer behavior into personalized experiences across apps, web, email, SMS and WhatsApp, thanks to an event-streaming architecture. Salesforce plans to use it to strengthen Marketing Cloud’s cross-channel personalization alongside Data 360 and Agentforce. Closing is expected in Salesforce’s fiscal 2028, which begins in February 2027, subject to approvals.

In commentary on its Q3 2026 Wave on B2C customer data platforms, Forrester describes a market that has entered a “utility” phase. Data remains the foundation, but investment is driven by outcomes. Platforms are moving beyond profile building and audience generation toward AI-driven decisioning, orchestration and execution.

Oracle announced new tools for its AI data platform, designed to govern enterprise agents more effectively. At the center are business ontologies, which define concepts, terminology, relationships and rules so that analytics systems, agents and applications read data the same way. New agent management and governance features are also arriving. Users will be able to find and use registered agents through Oracle Agent Hub or third-party assistants such as ChatGPT and Claude, with the stated aim of reducing token consumption.

Oracle has extended its Autonomous AI Lakehouse with a Business Semantic Layer, a reusable description of business metrics, hierarchies and KPIs. The goal is to give AI agents and analytics tools the same interpretation of the data. The layer is built from catalog and database annotations and from AI-suggested analytic views. In the same announcement Oracle expanded planning capabilities and support for the Apache Iceberg format.

Twilio Segment has published the 2026 edition of its Customer Data Platform Report, focused on how customer data and artificial intelligence work together for real-time engagement. The central theme is so-called “agent amnesia”: how to connect the systems holding historical data with the memory of ongoing conversations to achieve truly timely personalization.

At SuiteWorld in Las Vegas, Oracle NetSuite introduced SuiteAgents, AI agents built on NetSuite’s unified data model. They spot issues, suggest next steps and support execution within existing workflows and governance rules. They target specific processes in six industries: software, product, services, healthcare, construction and nonprofit. Those for software, product and construction are already available; the others will follow in a later release.

Among the “job-ready” agents announced at Dreamforce 2026, Salesforce introduced Hunter, built for outbound sales. Hunter manages the pipeline from account research to contact preparation and works alongside sellers for weeks or months. It runs on a new runtime designed for long-running work, with memory across sessions, self-correcting execution and the ability to adjust the plan through conversation. It is in pilot, with general availability expected in November 2026.

Microsoft Ignite takes place November 17–20, and the Microsoft Entra team has announced a series of online deep dives on December 15–17 covering adaptive access, identity governance and AI agent security. The underlying theme is that agents, including local ones on employees’ devices, are multiplying beyond the cloud. Administrators need to know which agents exist, tell their actions apart from users’ and control what they can access, with Entra and Agent 365.

Also at Oracle AI World, Oracle introduced Fusion Agentic Home, a personalized, AI-native experience inside Fusion Applications. Users define a business goal, hand it to agents and agentic applications and follow its progress through to completion, supported by Fusion Companion. Customers and partners can build, extend and manage new agents with AI Agent Studio for Fusion Applications.

At Oracle AI World in Las Vegas, Oracle introduced AI Success Navigator, a platform that combines specialized AI agents, implementation expertise and guided learning to accelerate adoption of Fusion Cloud Applications. At its core is an Oracle-maintained repository of configuration definitions and product best practices, packaged as reusable skills. Agents use them to plan, execute, test and validate setup tasks. Oracle plans to add more agents over time.

A CMSWire analysis examines two moves that are reshaping customer data platforms. Hightouch has repositioned itself as an “agentic CDP”, a platform that gives AI agents trusted, real-time customer context to decide and act across marketing, sales and service. Databricks has entered the market with CustomerLake, which brings identity, audience management and activation directly into the lakehouse, leaving data where it already lives.

Cordial, a messaging platform that describes itself as agentic, has launched a “headless” customer data platform, meaning it has no mandatory interface of its own. Marketers can explore and visualize customer data in real time directly from assistants such as Claude, ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot, or from custom-built AI agents. The news appears in Solutions Review’s weekly martech roundup.

A November 6 roundup of martech news reports two data points pointing the same way. According to Gartner, only 13% of CIOs say they already see concrete value from AI investments. According to a ChurnZero survey, 63% of organizations cannot measure AI’s impact. The roundup also includes other updates from the digital marketing world.

Salesforce has expanded Agentforce Coworker, the AI assistant that organizes the work of agents and workflows already in the platform, drawing on Salesforce data, metadata and permissions and on sources connected through Data 360. According to the company, usage has grown 21-fold in three months and now exceeds 185,000 users. During November it gains Microsoft Teams integration, an iOS app, desktop apps for Mac and Windows and an MCP server. The announced price is $50 per user per month.