Localogy

After lots of waiting, Siri AI is finally here. That is… it’s here in beta form. With iOS 27’s open beta, available for the first time this week, Siri AI can finally see the light of day. This will likely be downloaded by a handful of early adopters and AI enthusiasts, but it’s also time to anticipate the wider release. Stepping back, where are we and how did we get here?

Customer experience (CX) has always been a ripe area of data collection and analysis. It helps businesses get a health check on their customers – or potential customers – to help steer their product road maps or get smarter about what to do next. These are the insights that Alchemer synthesizes. “Maybe you just bought a video game, and they want to know after the first 10-hours of playing, are you still finding the game interesting?” said Alchemer Chief Customer Officer, Ryan Tamminga.

With the May launch of iOS 26.5, ads are gradually showing up in Apple Maps. This is the first time the 13-year-old Apple Maps has shown ads. Though the UX-obsessive Apple is treading carefully into ads, this is one of the many ways it’s diversifying its revenue as its cash cow, the iPhone, matures. But before getting into those strategic drivers and implications, what do these Apple Maps look like, and what do they offer to local advertisers?

Sell-side advertising platform Magnite has announced a new coordination layer that lets advertisers create, buy, and manage ad campaigns in automated and agentic ways. Known as Orchestration, it builds agentic AI capabilities on top of Magnite’s premium inventory and sell-side intelligence. One of the outcomes for Magnite Orchestration is to create an environment where the AI agents that represent media buyers have an environment to do their thing.

After IPO pops from Tesla, Bending Spoons, and others – not to mention highly-anticipated AI-giant IPOs on the horizon – you could say that the IPO window has swung open. And the latest company to file to go public is a multi-location brand that’s a bit outside of the tech world: Jersey Mike’s.

The next generation of location intelligence may not come from satellites or street-view vehicles—it may come from millions of delivery drivers already visiting commercial properties every day. This Precisely collaboration with DoorDash highlights how AI is reshaping not only how businesses use data, but how that data is collected in the first place. Artificial intelligence has made data one of the most valuable assets in enterprise technology.

Amazon has fired the latest shot in the CTV wars, while advancing its sleeping-giant position in the field. This latest series of moves includes an analytics tool for attributing lower-funnel shopping outcomes to CTV ad campaigns; and a collaboration with iHeart to resell Amazon’s streaming inventory. There’s a lot there, so let’s unpack it. Starting with the new measurement tool, it ties ad campaigns on CTV channels to shopping outcomes that result.

The marketing world has spent decades perfecting advertising. Now consumers are increasingly tuning it out. According to recent research, 86% of Americans distrust AI-generated information, while 75% prefer interacting with humans over AI on business websites. At the same time, AI-generated content is flooding digital channels at an unprecedented pace, with AI traffic growing 6.5 times faster than human traffic across parts of the internet.

In this edition of Localogy’s Local Radar, we examine newly funded startups Doss, Legora & Zest Being the central nervous system of any business – connecting product, accounting, and other key functions – ERP systems are primed for all the AI disruption that’s been taking over the world. Startups jumping on this wave include a few we’ve profiled in past installments of this Local Radar series, including Rillet.

Google recently announced plans to add Search agents to Google Search, starting with what it calls “information agents.” These are AI-powered agents capable of running in the background around the clock, monitoring the web and surfacing relevant updates on a user’s behalf. Paired with Google’s expansion of agentic booking capabilities for local services and experiences, this development has significant implications for how customers discover and transact with local businesses.