Salesforce agrees to buy Braze for $5.66 billion, ChatGPT Ads hit a $1 billion run rate, and more - Sales & Marketing AI Weekly #76

In this edition, covering 17 to 22 October:

• Salesforce agreed to buy Braze for about $5.66 billion in enterprise value.
• OpenAI says ChatGPT Ads reached a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate in under 200 days, and ads now run in 89 markets.
• Different raised a $48 million seed round, led by General Catalyst, for an AI platform that runs B2B marketing campaigns.

Salesforce buys Braze and counts revenue from its own agents

Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to acquire the customer engagement platform Braze for about $5.66 billion in enterprise value, paying $47.50 per share in cash. Braze's real time engagement and BrazeAI decisioning will join Marketing Cloud, Data 360, Customer 360 and Agentforce. The deal is expected to close in Salesforce's fiscal year 2028. Braze deal

Salesforce also says its AI agents generated more than $88 million in revenue by contacting potential customers its staff had not reached. Speaking at the Israel Information Technology Conference 2026 in Tel Aviv, sales executive Itai Margalit said the agents handled first contact and could replace the work of about 400 employees. Salesforce did not say how it calculated the revenue. $88 million from leads

OpenAI grows ChatGPT Ads

OpenAI says ChatGPT Ads reached a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate in under 200 days and has been used by more than 100,000 advertisers. It describes a separate ad system led by a post trained LLM that interprets conversations, retrieves and ranks ads, runs auctions and selects placements, which OpenAI says does not influence ChatGPT's answers. $1 billion run rate

Ads are coming to 26 more countries, bringing ChatGPT Ads to 89 markets. They run on the Free and Go plans, while Plus, Pro and Enterprise stay ad free. From 30 October, creative enhancements will be switched on for new and existing self serve campaigns. They can change ad text, resize images, optimize destination URLs and translate content based on the ad and its landing page. Advertisers can opt out in Ads Manager. 89 markets · Creative enhancements

Vinay and Aman, the founders of Notch, are joining OpenAI after more than two years of building AI agents for advertising. Notch says their work on brand understanding, ad creation, testing and optimisation will inform their work at OpenAI. Notch

Agents that run marketing campaigns

Different, based in San Francisco, came out of stealth with a $48 million seed round led by General Catalyst, with Lightspeed Venture Partners taking part. Its platform creates, deploys and optimizes B2B marketing campaigns across channels, and marketers approve strategy and content. Different

JustAI launched a platform that combines CRM, campaign orchestration, creative, delivery and measurement, with agents that build and adapt customer journeys and test campaigns against revenue goals within limits set by marketers. The company says customers including Better Mortgage, Acorns and Coursera have reported improvements in applications, retention and subscriptions. JustAI

ThinkingStreams launched an agent based marketing automation platform built into Microsoft Dynamics 365. It uses brand and CRM data to plan and draft emails, SMS messages, landing pages, forms, social and blog posts and nurture journeys, and a person must approve before anything is published or sent. Mindmatrix introduced GTMOS, a go to market operating system that turns structured and unstructured data into partner intelligence, recommendations and workflows. ThinkingStreams · Mindmatrix

BCG on AI in sales, monday.com Harmony and Firmable

A Boston Consulting Group survey of 398 revenue leaders in 23 countries found that 90% report meaningful AI use in sales, but only 6% have autonomous AI completing end to end workflows. 65% expect sales headcount to grow, 72% expect larger budgets and 91% expect higher quotas or productivity requirements in 2027. BCG

monday.com launched Harmony, a voice AI platform for mid market and enterprise sales teams in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Singapore. It uses specialized language models for calling, lead qualification, follow up, CRM updates and transfers to human representatives, includes voice technology from monday.com's OneAI acquisition, and works with Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho and Pipedrive. monday.com Harmony

Firmable launched Tech Intelligence, a paid add on that identifies the software, infrastructure, cloud and AI used by more than 19 million businesses across 75,317 technologies, linked to verified companies and decision makers. It is available in Firmable and, through the Firmable MCP, in Claude, ChatGPT and Copilot. Firmable

Customer service agents

ElevenLabs released ElevenAgents Architect in alpha, an assistant that analyzes agent conversations, finds problems, proposes configuration changes and tests them in simulated conversations. It works for voice and chat, creates versioned drafts and needs approval before changes go live. boost.ai launched version 14 of its conversational AI platform with LLM testing, AI assisted integration building and no code chat panel setup; it reaches customers over the coming weeks. ElevenLabs · boost.ai

Grupo Boticário, the Brazilian beauty company, runs its own platform with hundreds of AI agents on OpenAI models for reseller onboarding and support. Since November 2025 it has handled all conversations from its app chat and WhatsApp Enterprise channels, and it resolves up to 80% of operational requests without human help. Grupo Boticário

Product research with simulated consumers

Highlight launched Pulse, which lets CPG teams define an audience, start a discussion and get product feedback in seconds from Highlight Twins, each modeled on one member of its product testing community and that person's survey and testing history. Vectorial AI raised $3 million in seed funding led by Smilegate and SenseAI Ventures to expand its consumer behavior dataset and build SAPIENS 2.0, its model for simulating target audiences. Highlight · Vectorial

Also

Mastercard introduced Mastercard Max, an assistant that helps cardholders find and use card benefits through their bank's channels, with C6 Bank in Brazil as the first partner. TrueLoyal launched Advanced Analytics in the US, an add on that predicts member churn and next purchases and compares loyalty programs with industry benchmarks. Cruise Planners unveiled five AI tools for travel advisors at CP World 2026 in Fort Lauderdale, covering research, sales, digital marketing, itineraries and resource sharing. After a US pilot, UK oral care brand Dr Dent extended its work with Vidsight to its UK TikTok Shop affiliate programme, with creator briefs, trend alerts and automated affiliate support. Mastercard Max · TrueLoyal · Cruise Planners · Dr Dent