Rising consumer expectations for personalized and timely content is driving marketers to abandon traditional methodologies in favor of new data-driven approaches to providing tailored experiences. Artificial intelligence is emerging as an increasingly popular means of accomplishing that, with an entire array of vendors both big and small currently working to productize the technology for the enterprise.

Among them is Cognea, an up-and-coming developer of Siri-esque virtual agents that adapt specialized “personalities” based on individual users’ activity patterns in order to improve engagement. The startup’s unique value proposition has caught the attention of IBM’s recently established Watson group, which had acquired it for an undisclosed amount in newly announced deal.  The purchase fills yet another missing piece in Big Blue’s vision for cognitive computing, a term that it uses to describe futuristic applications capable of actively interacting with their human operators and learn from those interactions rather than merely performing pre-programmed tasks.

SAP, meanwhile, is taking a more straight-forward path to content personalization with a fresh acquisition of its own.  The business intelligence giant last Tuesday revealed plans to buy SeeWhy, a Boston-based developer of in-memory ad targeting solutions. The firm’s flagship solution, CORE, sifts through consumer interactions  in real-time to identify behavior patterns that can be used to tailor ads on an individual user basis.

SAP is not the only incumbent software vendor trying to step its analytics game. Service management juggernaut BMC, a long time ally of the German firm, made another friend this week after joining Hortonworks’ partner program. As part of the move, the company has updated its Control-M for Hadoop workload automation framework to support the Yahoo! spin-off’s distro, thus eliminating the need for users to develop custom scripts in order to link the two solutions.

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