We’re in the thick of Love Island season, which—if you don’t watch—generally means Brits in bikinis crowing, “I got a text!”

Consumers, too, might have noticed an influx of messages on their mobiles. According to Attentive CEO Amit Jhawar, brands are increasingly on the other end of the line, and they could have a lot to gain from it.

Jhawar recently spoke to Tech Brew about how the digital marketing platform helps retailers integrate SMS—or short message service—communications into their campaigns and how it’s leveraging artificial intelligence to deliver a highly tailored shopping experience.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

For starters, can you tell us a little bit about what Attentive does and where it fits into the communications landscape?

Attentive is a mobile marketing platform that focuses on personalizing messages between brands and their consumers. And ultimately…we want to deliver bespoke shopping experiences. If you think about going to a website today, [we] can all go to the same website. And we’ll get the exact same experience regardless of what we’re each interested in.

As more shoppers move to mobile—and you want to reach shoppers where they’re spending their time on their mobile devices—you’re seeing a lot more behavior where these consumers are distracted. And hitting these consumers with SMS messages that have the right content for the categories that they’re most interested in, the brands they care about, results in a much better experience, both for the consumer and the brand.

Can you give some examples of brands that are doing this?

Customers like Reebok, Tecovas, the Milwaukee Bucks, Boston Proper, all these brands are the brands that use Attentive, and then people like Crate & Barrel, Michaels, Chico’s, are all using different versions of the technology.

Keep reading here.—KG

IT teams are looking for the latest news and updates, and BetterCloud’s State of SaaSOps report has arrived to serve up just that—real-world data on the IT landscape.

IT teams are being asked to do more with less, and this report uncovers valuable insights about how IT teams are feeling, what their top concerns are, and how automation can be used to effectively manage SaaS.

One major trend emerged across all of this key info: Tighter budgets are colliding with higher expectations. If this sounds all too familiar, get a copy of the report for a glimpse into what’s next for managing SaaS at scale.

Use the State of SaaSOps to advocate for, strategize, and evolve your team.

What’s the old saying—if you can’t beat them, form a joint venture with them?

That’s the idea that Volkswagen is betting on, anyway, with a new partnership with EV startup Rivian. The agreement, which the automakers announced late last month, would see VW invest up to $5 billion into a joint effort to develop “next-generation software-defined vehicle platforms” that both companies would use for their own vehicles.

“Our customers benefit from the targeted partnership with Rivian to create a leading technology architecture,” Volkswagen Group CEO Oliver Blume said in a joint press release announcing the deal. “Through our cooperation, we will bring the best solutions to our vehicles faster and at lower cost…We are strengthening our technology profile and our competitiveness.”

What Rivian gets out of the deal is fairly straightforward: an infusion of cash. That’s important because the EV maker is in the midst of a critical effort to cut the roughly $39,000-per-vehicle loss it’s currently generating even as it undertakes the capital-intensive task of scaling up production and investing in future products.

Keep reading here.—JG

A year and a half after the launch of ChatGPT sparked conversations about how generative AI might change finance and accounting, the technology is still all over the place, in both senses of the phrase: (1) Everyone is talking about it, and (2) it’s unclear how useful it’s actually been.

To get the pulse on the GenAI discourse, CFO Brew checked in with finance leaders who attended the June CFO Leadership Council conference, where the topic was omnipresent.

Ready when you are. “Like most finance departments, we’ve started exploring GenAI tools that can potentially improve process efficiency or provide insights to help us create value,” Keith Ma, VP of finance at the pasta maker Banza, told CFO Brew in an email. “What we’ve found is that some GenAI tools being touted by vendors are not yet fully developed and in some cases are utilizing large amounts of manual human intervention in place of GenAI as the tool is built out. I’m excited for the future of GenAI, but for now, we need to be prepared to meaningfully partner with vendors in the development of those tools.”

Safety first. “I am very hesitant to use AI because of the confidential nature of our financial information,” Kelley Milligan Kline, CFO of research firm D3 Systems, told CFO Brew. “Using the various platforms to perhaps budget or project, but not knowing where that data is going, gives me great pause.”

Keep reading here.—GD

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Climate anxiety can hit harder than caffeine after 3 pm, but The Cool Down is here to say: Put down the double shot.

America’s most popular climate brand can chill you out with hopeful tech stories about the cleaner, cooler future of everything—your home, your car, even the batteries in your TV remote. Sign up for the free newsletter.