Top MarTech News From the Week of January 19th: Updates from Salesforce, Udacity, Algolia, and More

The editors at Solutions Review have curated this list of the most noteworthy MarTech news from the week of January 19th. This round-up covers announcements and updates from Salesforce, Udacity, Algolia, and more.

Keeping tabs on the most relevant CRM and MarTech news can be time-consuming. As a result, our editorial team aims to summarize the week’s top headlines in the marketing technology landscape. The Solutions Review editors will compile a weekly round-up of vendor product news, mergers and acquisitions, venture capital funding, talent acquisition, and other noteworthy MarTech news. With that in mind, here is some of the top MarTech news from January 19th.

Top MarTech News From the Week of January 19th, 2024

Algolia Announces New Generative AI Capabilities for Retailers

Algolia, an end-to-end AI Search and Discovery platform, has announced a new strategic initiative to tailor its generative AI capabilities to the merchant and shopping experience. This initiative includes the release of Generative Shopping Experience products, enabling realtors to “reimagine” their search and discovery experience and create unique, revenue-generating interactions with customers. The Generative Shopping Experience will debut with five generative AI-powered products, including tools for generating product comparisons, personalizing the product review experience, and streamlining the shopping process with AI-powered chat agents.

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Blueshift Receives a $40 Million Investment from Runway Growth Capital

Blueshift, an AI-powered customer engagement platform provider, has received a $40 million debt commitment from Runway Growth Capital LLC, a growth loan provider to venture and non-venture-backed companies looking for an alternative to raising equity. Runway’s financing will help Blueshift refinance existing debt, scale its operations, and provide it with the resources it needs to expand the sales, marketing, and operations of its intelligent, data-driven customer engagement platform.

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Emplifi Appoints a New CEO as it Plans for Growth

Emplifi, a customer engagement platform, has appointed Ohad Hecht as its new CEO. Hecht will take over the position during a pivotal time for the company as it moves from “build mode” into an accelerated growth phase. As CEO, Hecht will focus on cultivating a culture that maintains performance, embracing a customer-centric strategy, and developing a customer engagement solution that gives clients a quick time to value. Before joining Emplifi, Hecht was the co-founder and CEO of Prodport. He was also the COO and then the CEO of Emarsys, an omnichannel customer engagement SaaS platform acquired by SAP in 2020.

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Salesforce Releases New AI-Powered Tools for Retailers

Salesforce has announced several new data and AI-powered tools to help companies improve shopping experiences. By building generative AI technologies into the Commerce Cloud and Marketing Cloud solutions, retailers and marketers can use generative AI to unlock a real-time understanding of customer behavior, optimize customer interactions, increase loyalty, maximize employee productivity, and drive revenue. These capabilities are powered by the Einstein 1 Platform, which will connect with retail and shopper data and integrate with large language models (LLMs) to maintain context, brand voice, data governance, and security.

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Udacity Details its New Generative AI Nanodegree Program

Udacity, an online provider of educational programs, has launched a new Nanodegree program for generative AI. With the Udacity Generative AI Nanodegree program, technical professionals who enroll will gain a deeper understanding of generative AI, complete capstone projects modeled on real-life tasks using GenAI, and receive meaningful feedback from experienced mentors. The program is taught by instructors from Advocate, Cape Analytics, DeepMind, LanceDB, Meta, NVIDIA, rocketship.vc, SoFi, and UC Berkeley.

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Expert Insights Section

Watch this space each week as our editors will share upcoming events, new thought leadership, and the best resources from Insight Jam, Solutions Review’s enterprise tech community for business software pros. The goal? To help you gain a forward-thinking analysis and remain on-trend through expert advice, best practices, trends and predictions, and vendor-neutral software evaluation tools.

Chatting for Success: How Messaging Apps Are Revolutionizing B2C Communications, by Prashant Tomar

As part of Solutions Review’s Contributed Content Series, Prashant Tomar, a product leader with a background in product management and engineering across Fortune 500 companies, explains how messaging apps are changing B2C communications. The article also talks about the role of these apps in B2C marketplaces, the benefits they can offer, and what the future might look like for them.

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For consideration in future news round-ups, send your announcements to wjepma@solutionsreview.com.