Here's your TNB Tech Minute for Monday, June 2nd. I'm Julie Chang for The Wall Street Journal. We exclusively report that Meta plans to enable brands to fully create and target ads using artificial intelligence by the end of next year. That's according to people familiar with the matter. The social media's ad platform already offers some AI tools.
Through the new tools, a brand could present an image of a product and a budget. The AI would then create the entire ad and decide which Instagram and Facebook users to target based on the budget. Advertisers will also be able to personalize ads. so users see different versions of the same ad in real time based on factors such as geolocation.
Some big brands worry AI-generated ads won't be as good as human-made ones, but smaller to mid-sized businesses, which represents most of the advertisers on Meta's platforms, could benefit from easier and cheaper ad creation. German antitrust officials are looking into Amazon's pricing mechanism. The country's federal cartel office said today that tools Amazon uses to highlight competitively priced goods and filter out overpriced listings could be in breach of competition law.
When Amazon systems detect that prices for certain products are unusually high, its tools can downgrade listings. The German watchdog said this limits visibility of retailers' offers and interferes with sellers' freedom to set their prices. An Amazon spokesperson said the group strongly disagreed with the regulator that its system prevents the promotion of uncompetitive or abusive pricing and that each seller is free to set their own prices.
And in another exclusive, we report that Snowflake, a cloud-based data warehousing company, has agreed to acquire database startup CrunchyData for roughly $250 million in an attempt to attract customers who want to build their own agency. That's according to a person familiar with the matter.
The deal comes less than a month after Snowflake rival Databricks said it was purchasing Neon, a similar database startup, in a deal valued at around a billion dollars. Snowflake and Databricks are going head-to-head as they both chase businesses that want to build a AI agents, and other applications with their own data. For a deeper dive into what's happening in tech, check out tomorrow's Tech News Briefing podcast.