AI-powered martech news and releases: August 15

Tech companies are spending a lot of money on ads about AI, despite tons of research showing consumers’ dislike for it. 

As observed here last week, products mentioning AI are significantly less popular with consumers than the same products when they don’t mention it. Now comes word people really don’t like it in customer service.

Seven out of every 10 consumers are frustrated with current virtual agents, according to a study commissioned by AI voice solution Tenyx and conducted by Centiment. Also, 55% said dealing with a chatbot would get them to stop doing business with a company.

But, as anyone who watched the Olympics knows, ads boasting about AI are everywhere. Technology companies have spent about $196 million this year through Aug. 8 on TV commercials about AI in some way, according to TV measurement firm iSpot. That’s nearly half of the companies’ total spending on national TV commercials this year, the company said.

What would AI say about this particular marketing strategy?

Anyway, here are this week’s AI-powered martech news and releases.

• MetaRouter, a provider of server-side tag management and real-time event routing, is partnering with Magellan AI, an audio intelligence, analytics, and measurement company. They hope to enhance the accuracy and breadth of ad performance data, helping marketers improve advertising strategies.
• AnswerRocket, which provides gen AI-powered analytics, is partnering with Kantar, a marketing data and analytics company. They will let joint clients use genAI to reduce the time needed to understand data, produce insights and distribute the information across the organization.
• Shapiro+Raj, a global insights company, launched its interactive AI personas platform. It finds patterns of behavior and uses contextual data from primary and secondary data to create AI avatars that can have open-ended conversations mimicking real consumer interactions.
• HubSpot’s AI Search Grader is a free tool to help brands understand their presence in large language models (LLM) and AI search. This tool simplifies assessing brand visibility in AI search by eliminating the need for specialized AI knowledge. It provides prompt engineering for marketers and contextualizes brand performance to streamline Language Model Optimization (LMO). The AI Search Grader provides an overall grade indicating brand performance across AI search engines, a brand sentiment score, a share of voice score comparing brand visibility with competitors, and a personalized analysis highlighting strengths and weaknesses while suggesting improvements.
• Conversica upgraded its Conversational AI platform. The new release enhances conversation management with flexible AI-supported messaging options. These include Flexible AI Messaging Modes, allowing users to customize conversations beyond basic domain information for improved brand alignment, localization, and formatting. Additionally, the platform introduces ‘Rewrite with AI,’ which offers supervised generative AI support for crafting and editing conversations. 
• Five9 upgraded its Intelligent CX Platform with the Five9 Genius AI Suite. It lets businesses create AI-powered customer experience journeys, offering more contextual and personalized interactions that align with their business objectives. It also lets companies identify and implement high-value AI use cases to improve ROI.