New York, USA – Web advertising company Taboola has officially launched ‘Abby,’ an industry-first generative AI technology designed to help advertisers easily start and manage campaigns, regardless of their expertise in advertising.

As an AI assistant, Abby provides advertisers with a conversational approach to seamlessly build and launch every aspect of their campaigns, including budgeting, targeting, creative development, optimisation, and more.

Abby handles every aspect of advertisers’ media plans by guiding users through simple prompts that automatically create plans tailored to any marketing objective. With Abby, advertisers can focus on goals such as driving purchases, boosting brand awareness, or generating leads, while also setting budget allocations between desktop and mobile, and more.

With Abby, advertisers can also access advanced generative AI creative features, enabling them to use a conversational approach to create and modify images. They can easily edit backgrounds, adjust call-to-action (CTA) elements, and craft relevant captions—all without needing image editing software or expertise.

Abby draws on more than a decade of insights from successful advertiser campaigns on Taboola, allowing advertisers to launch effective campaigns in minutes across a trusted network of premium publisher websites that reach over 600 million daily active users. In testing, campaigns initiated with Abby were found to go live 75% faster than those set up manually.

Commenting on the launch, Adam Singolda, CEO of Taboola, said, “Abby reinvents what’s possible for advertisers of all sizes, taking the guesswork and time demands out of launching campaigns. Abby democratises access to advertising so that anyone can build their campaigns, in the same way they would talk to a seasoned ad industry executive.” 

“Advertisers can ‘speak’ to Abby in plain language and sit back as she acts as a campaign expert. Abby combines the best of generative AI with our unique data and best practices to help advertisers succeed. This is one more step on our journey to drive advertiser success with Taboola,” Singolda added. 

Singapore – Gupshup, a conversational engagement platform for businesses, has announced the acquisition of AskSid, a conversational AI provider. This shortly comes after Gupshup acquired Active.Ai, conversational AI platform for BFSI companies.  

Through the new acquisition with AskSid, Gupshup’s customer experience (CX) solutions will be strengthened by AskSid’s full-stack AI solution, which includes the Retail AI brain, and will help make the entire shopping journey -pre-purchase, purchase and post-purchase phases fully conversational.

Bengaluru-based AskSid have helped  enable major businesses such as AkzoNobel, Danone and Wolford create engaging shopping experiences to customers through AI-powered discussions, resulting in increased sales. The tech startup has operations in more than 25 countries and supports more than 100 different languages. 

Beerud Sheth, co-founder and CEO of Gupshup, commented that conversational commerce is about to transform shopping, both online and offline.

“Gupshup is building the most comprehensive conversational commerce solution and AskSid’s deep-domain AI offering will help us bring even more advanced capabilities to ecommerce and retail businesses worldwide,” Sheth said.

Sheth added, “We welcome the AskSid team onboard and look forward to collaborating with major brands across the world to enable next-gen shopping experiences.”

Sanjoy Roy, Co-founder and CEO of AskSid, commented, “Per a recent report by McKinsey, ecommerce could grow up to 5x faster compared to pre-pandemic times. 

“This presents a huge opportunity for Retail and ecommerce brands – but only if they are able to provide expert guidance anytime, anywhere to their consumers, which is exactly what AskSid delivers. Together with Gupshup, we will help businesses drive richer conversational experiences,” Roy adds.