AI-powered martech releases and news: May 2

What do Facebook-parent Meta and the Catholic faith have in common? Why AI failure, of course!

We will start with Meta — which has been injecting AI into all its customer-facing surfaces. The “Instagram header … features a side-scrolling list of prompts for interacting with the AI: ‘Imagine rooftop gardens,’ ‘advice for the modern stoic,’ ‘anime reels,’ writes Fast Company’s Scott Nover. He is rightfully amazed that a company with 15 years of data on him came up with suggestions that perfectly targeted topics he isn’t interested in. So far he hasn’t been the victim of any hallucinations, but cites some of the many other people who have.

And speaking of AI cluelessness … Last week, a group called Catholic Answers put up a chatbot named Justin to answer questions. In no time at all Justing had ordained itself and was diverting from church teachings by saying it was OK to baptize someone with Gatorade. The group very quickly defrocked Justin and put more guardrails in place. They are working on a new and improved version and I can’t wait.

Now, here are this week’s AI-powered martech releases, features and upgrades. 

• StreamAlive added GenAI capabilities to its live audience engagement platform. Functions include generating polls and open-ended questions that presenters can use as prompts and conversation starters. These are based on presentation topic and audience type (e.g. corporate employees, students, etc.). Audience interactions are captured and visualized in StreamAlive’s existing suite of visual interactions such as Wonder Words (wordclouds) and Talking Tiles.
• Iterable added two functions to its customer engagement platform. Journey Assist uses prompt-based AI to create custom-designed journeys or efficiently enhance existing ones.  Smart Segmentation simplifies building instant customer segments by unifying and activating data.
• Tealium’s Tealium for AI is a suite of customer data collection, management and activation solutions. Functions include collecting consented, real-time, and comprehensive customer data collection across all devices and platforms. Mitigating AI compliance risks in consent integration, encryption, filtering, and orchestration through actions like blocking non-consented data from AI models. Labeling customer data and enriching it with contextual information, such as metadata, visitor profiles, and audience badges. Automating standardization, transformation, error management, and enrichment for incoming customer data right from the source.
• Toast’s Digital Storefront and Marketing Suite lets restaurants create email marketing campaigns aligned with brand and marketing goals. It also automates marketing campaigns based on guest data. 
• Zingtree’s AI CX toolkit includes CX Answers which uses CX-specific Large Language Models (LLMs) to help customers and agents find accurate information; CX Actions a no-code workflow layer that can automate critical business actions, such as appointment scheduling, billing inquiries, refunds, and returns. 
• Tunnl’s Reach & Frequency provides audience-based linear TV exposure measurement and optimization. It measures impressions, reach and frequency on linear TV. It provides data for optimizing campaigns by retargeting exposure-based audiences across linear, streaming and digital channels. 
• Monocle is an AI-powered promotion platform. It connects to a brand’s store and email/SMS platforms, delivering a performance snapshot alongside a granular analysis of promotion indicators impacting brand performance such as online revenue, budget spent on promotions to date, average incentives given to customers, customer lifetime value, and more.
• AdGPT can automate digital ad creation for SMBs. It lets users create high-finish ads, without any previous advertising experience, that are optimized for digital platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), Google, Taboola and Outbrain. It can also generate 100 complete and unique ads in seconds based on simple user prompts.