Home Blog Page 12

ZoomInfo and Pinecone Bring Real-Time, AI-Powered Contact Recommendations to Go-to-Market Teams

0
ZoomInfo and Pinecone Bring Real-Time, AI-Powered Contact Recommendations to Go-to-Market Teams

Pinecone’s unique serverless vector database slab architecture — with Dedicated Read Nodes now generally available — gives customers exceptional price-performance for any use case

Pinecone, the leading vector database, announced that its next-generation serverless slab architecture and newly released Dedicated Read Nodes (DRN) are powering real-time, AI-driven contact recommendations for sales and marketing teams. With Pinecone, ZoomInfo now serves highly relevant suggestions instantly, driving a 50% increase in user engagement and enabling customers to identify the right buyers in minutes instead of hours.

Companies across industries are racing to operationalize AI, yet they increasingly face a core infrastructure challenge: every AI use case has different performance, concurrency, latency, traffic, and cost requirements. Databases with bolted-on vector capabilities struggle at scale because they were never designed for high-throughput semantic or hybrid search, while open-source vector databases often require deep ANN tuning, cluster management, and complex operational overhead. Neither approach can efficiently support the diverse, production-grade workloads enterprises now run. Pinecone’s serverless architecture — which includes On-Demand indexes, where storage scales elastically and customers pay only for the queries they make, and Dedicated Read Nodes for sustained high queries per second (QPS), low-latency workloads — eliminates these constraints and lets teams optimize price-performance for every use case.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Nicholas Kontopoulous, Vice President of Marketing, Asia Pacific & Japan @ Twilio

Dedicated Read Nodes, generally available today, provides resource isolation and guaranteed warm data which prevents delays caused by cold fetches. This ensures predictable low-latency performance even under sustained high-QPS production workloads, which has been difficult for vector databases until now. Combined with Pinecone’s slab architecture, which stores vectors in large contiguous units to avoid fragmentation and ensure consistent performance, customers benefit from purpose-built managed infrastructure that delivers superior price-performance across all of their AI applications.

ZoomInfo selected Pinecone to power its new real-time recommendation engine, which now serves personalized contact suggestions across more than 390 million and growing high-dimensional embeddings and over 100,000 namespaces. With Pinecone, the Applied AI team moved from prototype to production in weeks, meeting strict sub-second latency requirements and achieving an order-of-magnitude improvement in throughput during scale testing with Dedicated Read Nodes. Pinecone enabled ZoomInfo to deliver a 50% increase in user engagement, a 2x improvement in relevancy and recall, and the ability to handle 50x more peak request volume, all while maintaining predictable low-latency performance. These improvements dramatically reduced ZoomInfo’s customer time-to-action, cutting workflows that previously took hours down to minutes by surfacing the right contacts instantly.

“Pinecone’s slab architecture and Dedicated Read Nodes gave us the speed, consistency, and isolation we needed to run real-time recommendations at scale. Instead of managing infrastructure, we spend our time improving our recommendation model and the product itself. That has reduced the time our customers spend researching, filtering, and evaluating contacts—from hours to minutes—by giving them the right people to reach out to with a single click.” — Carlos Nunez, Vice President of Engineering and Applied AI at ZoomInfo

Marketing Technology News: The ‘Demand Gen’ Delusion (And What To Do About It)

Ash Ashutosh, CEO of Pinecone, emphasized the broader market significance:

“Every company today has multiple AI applications, and each one has different performance and cost profiles. Pinecone is the only vector database that lets customers run all of these workloads in one place, with exceptional speed, accuracy, and cost efficiency at scale. Our serverless slab architecture and Dedicated Read Nodes deliver trusted knowledge to our customers and make it possible to deploy production-grade RAG, search, recommendation systems, and agents without compromise.”

With Pinecone’s unique architecture, enterprises no longer face tradeoffs between price, performance, and scale. ZoomInfo’s deployment illustrates how organizations can use Pinecone to ship AI applications faster, improve user experiences, operate reliably at massive scale, and create experiences that previously weren’t possible.

Write in to psen@itechseries.com to learn more about our exclusive editorial packages and programs.

Using local AI-enhanced workflows on AMD Ryzen AI PCs Can Dramatically Reduce Task Completion Time for Professionals

0
New TDWI Research Report Provides Guidance for Gaining Value from Agentic and Generative AI

Principled Technologies

In our tests of developer and project-management scenarios, AI on new PCs saved 2 or more workdays per week vs. traditional approaches on older PCs

Principled Technologies (PT) has released two new reports demonstrating that using AI tools on a modern PC powered by AMD Ryzen AI processors can significantly accelerate routine project-management and development tasks compared to using traditional workflows on a 4-year-old PC. When professionals can leverage AI to complete certain tasks more quickly, they can redirect the time they save to higher-value work and innovation. Because the AI tools that PT tested primarily ran locally instead of in the cloud, professionals could save time while also better protecting sensitive data, enjoying quicker response times, and being able to work without an internet connection.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Stephen Howard-Sarin, MD of Retail Media, Americas @ Criteo

The report focusing on activities performed by developers stated: “In our testing, using local AI tools on a new HP EliteBook X G2a AI PC powered by an AMD Ryzen AI processor reduced task completion times by as much as 97.5 percent compared to completing the same tasks manually on a 4-year-old HP EliteBook 865 16 inch G9 Notebook PC. Based on our estimates of how frequently these tasks typically occur, we found that using AI tools on the newer system could lower weekly development-related work time from an average of 24 hours and 6 minutes to approximately 6 hours and 13 minutes. This represents a reduction of almost 18 hours of work per week—equivalent to over two standard workdays.”

Marketing Technology News: From MarTech Stack to MarTech Fabric: Weaving Brand, Content, and Conversion Into One Thread

The report focusing on project-management activities stated: “In testing with two HP systems, using primarily local AI tools reduced task completion times by as much as 95.6 percent. Based on estimates of how frequently the evaluated tasks occur, we found that using AI technologies on the new PC could reduce the weekly time spent on a set of common tasks from an average of 24 hours and 40 minutes to 4 hours and 45 minutes—a savings of almost 20 hours, half of a typical workweek.”

Write in to psen@itechseries.com to learn more about our exclusive editorial packages and programs.

Amplitude Names Serial Founder Gab Menachem as CPO

0
Amplitude Names Serial Founder Gab Menachem as CPO

Amplitude, Inc. Logo

Hire signals next phase of company’s AI analytics transformation

As part of its continued transformation into the world’s leading AI analytics provider, Amplitude, Inc. announced Gab Menachem as its new chief product officer.

Menachem founded Loom Systems, an AIOps company that was acquired by ServiceNow in 2020, and has spent the past six years scaling ServiceNow’s IT Operations Management product line to over $1 billion in annual revenue. He will oversee Amplitude’s product management, design, and growth organizations, reporting directly to co-founder and CEO, Spenser Skates.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview With Fredrik Skantze, CEO and Co-founder of Funnel

“Every company building a digital product is asking the same question: are we building the right thing?” said Spenser Skates, CEO and co-founder of Amplitude. “That question is harder to answer than it has ever been, because products like AI agents, autonomous workflows, and entirely new kinds of user experiences are more complex than anything that came before. Gab has spent his career at the center of that problem, and he’s the right person to lead the team.”

“Amplitude continues to lead the way providing behavioral context for product builders,” said Menachem. “You build something, you want to see what users are actually doing in your platform, and then you bring it back to iterate. The difference is that what people are building today isn’t common software — it’s not web pages and applications. They’re building agents. So we’re moving into the world of agent analytics.”

Marketing Technology News: The Death of Third-Party Cookies Was Just the Start. Are You Ready for Consent Orchestration?

Menachem describes Amplitude’s evolving positioning as an intelligence platform for digital and AI builders. “As you build any digital product, you need the intelligence layer for what’s happening after you release it in order to iterate and improve. That’s the core of what Amplitude does,” he said.

Menachem is joining Amplitude amid its first company-wide AI Week – five days dedicated to every employee across every function building AI-powered tools to reinvent and transform their workflows. The initiative is a direct expression of the company’s mission ‘to help companies build better products.’

“Gab started onboarding this week and immediately had a way to influence what we ship next,” added Skates. “That’s exactly what we needed.”

Write in to psen@itechseries.com to learn more about our exclusive editorial packages and programs.

Qlik Brings Agentic Execution to Data Engineering

0
Qlik Brings Agentic Execution to Data Engineering

Qlik

New capabilities across declarative pipelines, real-time routing, streaming, and emerging agentic experiences help data teams move from manual assembly to faster, more intent-driven delivery of trusted data.

Key takeaways:

  • Qlik extends its agentic approach into data engineering: This release takes Qlik’s agentic strategy beyond analytics users and into the teams building, moving, and maintaining trusted data for AI and operations.
  • The announcement centers on engineering execution, not just coding help: Declarative pipelines, real-time routing, Open Lakehouse Streaming, and broader agentic assistance are designed to reduce friction in how pipelines are built, changed, and operated.
  • Fresh, open data becomes easier to deliver: New and expanded capabilities help data teams reduce backlog, simplify delivery, and keep data current for analytics, automation, and agentic workflows.

Qlik® announced an expansion of its agentic execution strategy into data engineering, introducing capabilities designed to help data teams create, evolve, and deliver trusted data faster as demand for AI-ready data continues to rise.

The pressure on data teams has changed. They are being asked to support more AI initiatives, move faster on new data demands, and do it all without adding fragility, backlog, or unnecessary cost. In many enterprises, the constraint is not ambition. It is the amount of manual work still required to build pipelines, maintain transformations, troubleshoot issues, and keep data current enough to support decisions and automation.

Qlik’s latest data engineering release is designed around that reality. It brings agentic execution into the engineering workflow itself, giving teams new ways to translate intent into working data assets, reduce repetitive effort, and speed delivery without stripping away the control required for production environments.

“Most companies do not struggle to imagine AI use cases. They struggle to deliver the trusted, current data those use cases depend on,” said Mike Capone, CEO, Qlik. “As demand rises, data engineering becomes the critical path. Qlik is helping teams reduce friction, protect trust, and keep pace with the business.”

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview With Fredrik Skantze, CEO and Co-founder of Funnel

What’s new

  • Declarative pipelines: Qlik is introducing a more natural-language-driven way to help data engineers create and evolve pipelines in context with the pipeline canvas, offer next-step guidance, and lower the barrier to building trusted flows. This release also establishes the path toward broader Pipeline Agent capabilities over time.
  • AI Assistant for Talend Studio: A new context-sensitive AI Assistant inside the Talend Studio IDE, planned for later this year, is designed to help developers request help, generate jobs, create documentation, and write SQL using natural language, shifting engineering work from manual coding toward higher-level orchestration.
  • Real-time routing for agentic data flows: Qlik is expanding Talend Studio to support real-time message routing for agentic processes, helping data engineers work with large language models, build domain-specific RAG pipelines, and connect agentic systems through MCP components. The latest release also expands context and memory handling to support more complex enterprise-scale workflows.
  • Open Lakehouse Streaming: Qlik has extended its Open Lakehouse with native streaming support so teams can unify continuous event data with batch and CDC workloads in one environment, reducing the need for separate tooling and helping keep AI and analytics closer to current business conditions.
  • A more complete engineering path for agentic workloads: Across declarative pipelines, real-time routing, Open Lakehouse Streaming, Talend Studio AI assistance, and the broader path toward Pipeline Agent capabilities, Qlik is positioning data engineering as a more intent-driven, agent-assisted function, one designed to reduce reinvention and help teams spend more time on architecture, design, and business impact.

Marketing Technology News: The Death of Third-Party Cookies Was Just the Start. Are You Ready for Consent Orchestration?

Taken together, the capabilities available now, along with the broader agentic experiences planned ahead, are designed to help data teams move from manual pipeline assembly toward a more agent-assisted operating model — one where engineering work becomes easier to initiate, easier to evolve, and better able to keep up with the freshness and reliability demands of AI.

“There is a big difference between an assistant that helps write code and a system that actually helps a data team move faster end to end,” said Robin Astle, Principal Developer, Valpak. “The interesting part of this announcement is the focus on pipeline creation, data quality, metadata, and stewardship together, because that is much closer to how real engineering work happens.”

This announcement is part of a broader set of releases at Qlik Connect 2026, Qlik’s annual customer and partner event, focused on agentic analytics, operational trust, sovereignty-ready deployment, and the data capabilities required to support AI under real-world conditions.

Write in to psen@itechseries.com to learn more about our exclusive editorial packages and programs.

Glitter AI Turns Screen Recordings Into SOPs Automatically, Used by 11,000+ Teams

0
GPT Proto Now Fully Supports GPT Image 2

Scribe vs Glitter AI: 2026 Comparison | Glitter AI

AI-powered platform converts screen recordings and voice narration into publish-ready SOPs and training guides for operations teams.

Glitter AI (www.glitter.io), an AI-powered documentation and SOP creation platform, announced continued growth as more than 11,000 teams worldwide now use the platform to create standard operating procedures, training guides, and process documentation without manual writing.

Every company has one person who knows how everything works – when they leave, the knowledge walks out the door.”

— Yuval Karmi, CEO of Glitter AI

Positioned as a simpler, faster, and more affordable alternative to tools like Scribe and Guidde, Glitter AI records a user’s screen and voice simultaneously, then uses AI to generate both a written SOP and a video walkthrough from a single recording. The AI captures screenshots at every click, transcribes voice narration, removes filler words, and produces a professional guide – typically in under two minutes. Traditional documentation tools require separate workflows for video and written content; Glitter delivers both from one session at a fraction of the cost.

The Problem: Tribal Knowledge and Undocumented Workflows

Growing businesses face a persistent challenge: critical processes live inside people’s heads. When the office manager who runs payroll goes on vacation or the accounts payable specialist who knows the invoicing workflow leaves, operations slow down. Traditional documentation takes 30 to 60 minutes per procedure. Most teams never finish the project.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Stephen Howard-Sarin, MD of Retail Media, Americas @ Criteo

How Glitter AI Works

A user opens the Glitter desktop app or Chrome extension, performs the task while narrating the steps, and the AI SOP generator creates a structured guide with annotated screenshots. Existing videos – Zoom recordings, Loom videos, Microsoft Teams meetings – can also be uploaded and converted into guides automatically. Completed guides can be exported to PDF, HTML, or Markdown, or published directly to Confluence, Notion, Zendesk, or WordPress in 99 languages.

Marketing Technology News: From MarTech Stack to MarTech Fabric: Weaving Brand, Content, and Conversion Into One Thread

Built for Operations Teams at SMBs

Glitter AI is designed for operations managers, office managers, accountants, team leads, and customer success managers – professionals who already know their workflows and need to transfer that knowledge to the rest of the team. The platform is used across accounting and finance, construction, logistics, SaaS, hospitality, and field services for workflows such as invoice processing in QuickBooks and Sage, payroll in ADP and Workday, and project management in Procore and Salesforce.

“Every company has one person who knows how everything works – and when that person leaves, the knowledge walks out the door with them,” said Yuval Karmi, CEO of Glitter AI. “We believe every business process should be captured the moment it’s performed, not written up after the fact from memory. That’s the future of documentation – you just do your job, and the guide writes itself.”

Why Teams Switch From Scribe, Guidde, and Other Documentation Tools

Glitter AI captures not just clicks, but also what a user hovers over and explains verbally – context that other click-only screenshot tools miss entirely. The original video recording is preserved alongside the written guide, giving teams both formats from one session. The platform also includes on-device blur for sensitive data, SOC 2 Type II compliance with GDPR and CCPA certification, and a desktop app on the free plan for Mac and Windows.

Write in to psen@itechseries.com to learn more about our exclusive editorial packages and programs.

Appdome’s IDAnchor™ Gets New Risk Intelligence APIs to Power Mobile Reputation & the Enterprise AI Age

0
Appdome's IDAnchor™ Gets New Risk Intelligence APIs to Power Mobile Reputation & the Enterprise AI Age

New Server-to-Server Risk Intelligence APIs strengthen IDAnchor’s threat attribution and decision-ready risk intelligence across the mobile lifecycle.

Appdome, the leader in protecting the mobile economy, announced that its IDAnchor™ device identity and reputation product is now powered by a suite of new, Appdome-provided, server-to-server Risk Intelligence APIs. The new APIs provide operational reputation data and risk intelligence to the mobile backend and across the mobile business. As part of this release, IDAnchor will also use two new mobile identities, known as AppID and InstanceID, which provide a verified identifier for each mobile app (bundle ID) and maintain continuity of identity across updates, upgrades, and downgrades over time.

“At 1.3 trillion threat events per month and growing, we have the largest and most comprehensive data set of mobile threats,” said Tom Tovar, Co-Creator & CEO of Appdome. “It made sense for us to start to expose this via backend APIs and allow mobile brands to consume that data within well-understood and useful contexts to stop fraud and improve decisioning.”

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Stephen Howard-Sarin, MD of Retail Media, Americas @ Criteo

Risk APIs Built for the AI-Generation

Building on the recently announced Threat-Memory™ framework, which provides a threat intelligence substrate within mobile apps, the new Risk Intelligence APIs allow brands to access threat histories and risk intelligence tied to verified mobile identities directly in their backend systems.

These new APIs provide verified threat attribution and history, as well as agentic risk intelligence in real-time within mobile backends. They are designed to support enterprise AI development with continuous, on-demand, and verified threat data and risk intelligence from the mobile business.

“Mobile devices are more a part of daily life than ever,” said Eric Newcomer, Principal Analyst at Intellyx. “Cybercriminals and fraudsters know this and are constantly ramping up their attacks. Fortunately, mobile defense vendors such as Appdome continue to respond. Their new IDAnchor APIs are an important addition to strengthening mobile app protection as well as server side intelligence.”

The new Risk Intelligence APIs announced today as part of IDAnchor include:

  • DeviceMATCH™ — verifies whether mobile activities and interactions originate from the same physical device.
  • InstanceMATCH™ — confirms the authenticity of the AppID and continuity of the mobile app lineage across upgrades, updates, and downgrades
  • ThreatHISTORY™ — provides longitudinal threat evidence associated with IDAnchor’s identity context for the app, install, instance, device or user
  • MobileRISK™ — delivers AI-generated risk and reputation scores for devices, accounts, and sessions

As part of this release, Appdome introduced two new identities in its IDAnchor lineup. AppID, replacing the previously announced ReleaseID, provides the app’s signature fingerprint and an attestation from Appdome that the app has not been modified.  InstanceID™ is new and the first durable identifier that fingerprints the initial installation of an app and maintains continuity across each update, upgrade, and downgrade on a device.

“Binding granular threat data and threat history across verified mobile identities on Appdome’s backend creates so many possibilities,” said Avi Yehuda, Co-Creator & CTO of Appdome. “On the one hand, it can be consumed on the mobile backend to improve risk-based decisions. It can also empower mobile brands to leverage Appdome’s APIs as a trusted and verified source of threat data and identity context to enrich Enterprise AI models.”

Marketing Technology News: From MarTech Stack to MarTech Fabric: Weaving Brand, Content, and Conversion Into One Thread

Creating an Authentic Risk Pipeline

The sophistication and diversity of attack vectors are increasing. Network and fraud teams can no longer rely on inference-based risk scoring. They need to augment risk scoring with facts and correlate detailed runtime threat evidence with trusted, persistent identities across immediate, short, medium, and long-term time frames. With Appdome’s new APIs, mobile brands can do just that and:

  • Catch repeat offenders across mobile devices and accounts
  • Detect coordinated fraud and social media scams
  • Detect determined hackers and malware creators who reuse and manipulate application installs and device resets
  • Block high-risk devices used in fraud rings and device farms
  • Strengthen API authorization using device reputation and threat history
  • Reduce false positives by distinguishing new users from known high-risk hardware
  • Adapt authentication and transaction flows based on real-time risk

“Think of mobile risk as a data pipeline,” said Kai Kenan, VP of Identity & Reputation Solutions at Appdome. “Fraud and Identity team can’t perform risk-based decisioning on a single factor and risk false positives or negatives. Our APIs provide risk scoring but also provide detailed threat data attributed to the mobile identities that brands know and trust.”

APIs Built for Enterprise Decisioning

The new APIs allow mobile brands to retrieve intelligence from Appdome’s backend within secure server environments, enabling integration with fraud engines, case management systems, and risk orchestration platforms.

This backend-driven architecture supports:

  • secure decision orchestration
  • fraud workflow automation
  • risk-based authentication and step-up flows
  • device-level enforcement and bans
  • cross-channel risk intelligence correlation

“Secure access, threat data integrity, and continuous availability are built into our API services from the ground up,” said Srini Avernini, VP of Data & Infrastructure at Appdome. “We recognize that our new API services will be used for real-time and runtime decisioning in billions of mobile apps and as the bedrock for Agentic AI developments our customers invest in, and we’ve taken all of that into account in building the service.”

Write in to psen@itechseries.com to learn more about our exclusive editorial packages and programs.

Optimizely Recognized as a Leader for the 9th Year in a Row in Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Content Marketing Platforms

0
Optimizely Recognized as a Leader for the 9th Year in a Row in Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Content Marketing Platforms

Optimizely - DMFS NY Summit

Optimizely recognized as a Leader for the ninth consecutive year as the CMP category shifts from AI assistance to AI execution

Optimizely, the leading digital experience platform (DXP) provider, today announced it has been named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Content Marketing Platforms. Gartner recognized Optimizely as a Leader for the ninth consecutive year*.

The recognition marks nearly a decade of consistent placement as a Leader in the category, during a period of significant change in how enterprises plan, produce, and distribute content at scale.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview With Fredrik Skantze, CEO and Co-founder of Funnel

“We believe nine years of recognition from Gartner reflects what our customers already know: consistency in this category is earned, not assumed,” said Shafqat Islam, President of Optimizely. “With Optimizely Opal, we’re turning AI into an active operator by embedding agents directly into CMP workflows to plan, create, and orchestrate content with speed, governance, and measurable impact. Our vision for ‘Autonomous Ops’ is about removing friction from the entire content lifecycle so marketing and digital teams can focus on what matters most: being creative and delivering results.”

Optimizely’s Content Marketing Platform, powered by its AI orchestration platform, Optimizely Opal, unifies content planning, creation, and execution within a single system. Built for large, global enterprises across industries including banking, healthcare, and technology, Optimizely Opal agents work natively inside CMP workflows, handling tasks such as drafting and localization, chaining together multi-step workflows, and maintaining enterprise governance and brand consistency.

Marketing Technology News: The Death of Third-Party Cookies Was Just the Start. Are You Ready for Consent Orchestration?

“The pressure on marketing teams is real with more channels, more markets, faster timelines, and higher standards,” said Rupali Jain, Chief Product Officer at Optimizely. “Our CMP gives teams the structure to operate at scale and Optimizely Opal gives them the speed. Together, they change the role of AI from something marketers consult to something that carries out the work inside the system itself, with governance and brand safety built in from the start. ”

This recognition adds to a strong run of recent analyst acknowledgments for Optimizely. Since November, the company has also been recognized as a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Personalization Engines and a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Digital Experience Platforms, Q4 2025.

Write in to psen@itechseries.com to learn more about our exclusive editorial packages and programs.

Optimizely ‘Opal University’ Participants Build 375 AI Agents in Five Days as Demand Grows for Hands-On AI Training

0
Kaltura Puts the AI CEO Into Production With Ron Yekutiel’s Digital Twin, Using the Same Agentic Avatar Tech It Offers Enterprises

Optimizely - DMFS NY Summit

First training cohort draws 1,500-plus signups as enterprise teams turn to structured AI workflows that deliver up to 95% time savings

Optimizely, the leading digital experience platform (DXP) provider, today shared new data from its Opal University program, highlighting growing momentum for Optimizely Opal, its agent orchestration platform for marketing and digital teams, and signaling increased demand for hands-on AI training across the enterprise.

In the first two weeks, more than 1,100 marketing and digital leaders signed up for Opal University, with a waitlist for future cohorts now over 1,500. In its initial cohort, 50 participants built 170 AI agents in five days, with many already delivering measurable time savings across core marketing workflows.

The results highlight a broader shift in how marketing teams are approaching AI. While adoption of AI tools and generative platforms continues to grow, most organizations are still in the early stages of applying AI in a structured, repeatable way across their workflows.

“The teams that are actually winning with AI right now are focusing on change management and ensuring adoption happens not just because of top-down push but because marketers can get time back to create and optimize powerful campaigns,” said Allison Skidmore, Chief Customer Officer at Optimizely. “That’s exactly why we built Opal University. When marketers get hands-on time building agents that work for their workflows, adoption follows because they feel the benefit directly. That’s how you scale AI across the entire marketing lifecycle.”

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview With Fredrik Skantze, CEO and Co-founder of Funnel

From interest to impact in days

Opal University is a free, hands-on certification program designed for senior marketing leaders. Each five-day cohort walks participants through building three AI agents tailored to their organization’s needs, with a focus on immediate, practical application.

Early results include:

  • 1,500+ sign-ups to date

  • 375 AI agents built by over 60 participants in five days across two cohorts

  • 80% to 95% time savings reported across recurring weekly workflows

Participants represent a broad mix of global enterprises, including Canva, Asana, LinkedIn, Zoom, DocuSign, KPMG, Deloitte, Bloomberg, EY, and Foot Locker.

Across both cohorts, participants built agents spanning a wide range of marketing functions, including:

  • 70 agents for SEO, GEO and AI search optimization

  • 39 agents for content operations

  • 30 agents for CRO and experimentation

  • 28 agents for research and intelligence

  • 26 agents for customer success and sales

  • 16 agents for compliance and QA

  • 14 agents for productivity and ops

In practice, these agents are already reshaping how teams work:

  • A CRO prioritization workflow was reduced from several hours to 30 minutes

  • Performance benchmarking and analysis dropped from six hours to 18 minutes

  • Content migration timelines were reduced from seven to 10 days to about two days

  • Prospect research and landing page generation that previously took hours per week can now be completed in two minutes

Moving beyond AI pilot projects

The strong response to Opal University reflects a common challenge across the market. While teams are eager to use AI, many lack the frameworks and integration training needed to apply it consistently across campaigns, content and experimentation.

Marketing Technology News: The Death of Third-Party Cookies Was Just the Start. Are You Ready for Consent Orchestration?

Optimizely Opal addresses this gap by embedding agentic AI directly into the Optimizely platform, connecting content creation, campaign management, experimentation and personalization into a single workflow. This allows teams to move beyond isolated use cases and operationalize AI across the full marketing lifecycle.

“Most teams are still running AI in pockets because MarTech has become too complex for it to work any other way,” Shafqat Islam, President at Optimizely added. “What Opal does is absorb that complexity — the governance, the brand context, the orchestration — so teams can build agents that understand their brand, their data, and their processes, and reuse them across the whole organization. That’s why we’re seeing adoption accelerate the way we are.”

This approach is already reflected in broader platform benchmarks, with Optimizely reporting a 79% increase in experiment velocity, an 85% increase in campaigns delivered, a 54% faster speed to market and an 80% increase in pages created.

Building the next generation of AI-native marketing teams

Opal University will continue as an ongoing program with weekly cohorts, designed to help senior marketing leaders build practical AI skills and scale those capabilities across their organizations. Participants receive certification, access to a dedicated community and early access to new features and agents.

As adoption grows, Optimizely is expanding its agent ecosystem through its directory of ready-to-use agents. In 2026 alone, the company has launched more than 15 out-of-the-box agents designed to help marketing and digital teams improve GEO performance, stay ahead with competitive analysis and run more impactful experimentation programs.

The company will continue to introduce new agents alongside deeper integrations across the platform, helping teams apply AI consistently across content, experimentation and personalization workflows.

Optimizely is helping pave the way for a more AI-native approach to marketing, where teams can plan, execute and optimize campaigns through coordinated, governed workflows that improve speed, consistency and performance.

Write in to psen@itechseries.com to learn more about our exclusive editorial packages and programs.

Sprinklr Unveils Next Wave of AI‑Native Customer Experience Innovation with Spring ’26 (26.4) Release

0
Sprinklr Unveils Next Wave of AI‑Native Customer Experience Innovation with Spring ’26 (26.4) Release

File:Sprinklr Logo.png - Wikimedia Commons

  • As AI Agents autonomously resolve more customer issues and deliver measurable business outcomes, Sprinklr’s new autonomous evaluation capability provides transparent, test‑backed, explainable validation — helping teams understand, trust, and continuously improve agent performance.

  • AI+ Studio (a centralized, no-code workspace to build, manage, and scale GenAI agents and workflows) provides simple tools to test AI in bulk and monitor its behavior, giving teams clearer oversight and control.

  • Marketing Copilot introduces deeper conversational automation and performance insights for social and paid teams.

  • Powerful enhancements across Voice of the Customer, Marketing, and Customer Service—delivered through Sprinklr’s Unified-CXM Platform—transform how enterprises listen, learn, automate, and act at scale.

Sprinklr , the AI‑native Unified Customer Experience Management (Unified‑CXM) platform, today announced the Spring ’26 Release (26.4) — a major advancement in AI‑powered insights, marketing automation, service intelligence, and platform governance. This release deepens Sprinklr’s AI leadership with new agentic and copilot capabilities, precision listening, governed automation, and a next‑generation foundation for safe, scalable enterprise AI.

“With the Spring ’26 Release, we’re taking a major step forward in how enterprises drive outcomes with AI,” said Karthik Suri, Chief Product and Corporate Strategy Officer at Sprinklr. “As AI Agents resolve more customer issues autonomously, we’re giving teams the transparent, test‑backed validation they need to trust and scale them. Paired with a more intuitive AI+ Studio and smarter copilots across the Sprinklr suite, these advancements help brands turn automation into measurable impact — and ultimately into more seamless, personalized moments of customer delight.”

Sprinklr AI: Smarter Intelligence Across the Suite with Expanded Copilots

Recently named a leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Voice of the Customer Platforms, Sprinklr continues to strengthen VoC capabilities with Customer Feedback Copilot, transforming feedback into accurate insights, visual trends, comparisons, and multi‑level drilldowns. Marketing Copilot brings conversational automation to social and paid workflows — helping teams explain performance changes, summarize engagement, and build analytics widgets instantly, while Deep Research provides structured, cited analysis for faster decision‑making.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview With Fredrik Skantze, CEO and Co-founder of Funnel

Sprinklr Service: Contact Centers Gain Transparent, Test‑Backed AI

As AI Agents are rapidly deployed to autonomously deliver more measurable business outcomes, Spring ’26 introduces Autonomous Evaluation — providing clear, explainable logs and test‑backed validation so teams can understand, trust, and continuously refine agent behavior. Agent Copilot is now proactive, offering real‑time nudges that improve core service metrics like first call resolution (FCR) and average handle time. Service organizations can also streamline operations with automatic shift bidding for fair, preference‑aligned scheduling and guided service analytics that unify KPIs and accelerate insight‑to‑action workflows.

Sprinklr Insights: Higher‑Fidelity Listening and Unified, Actionable Intelligence

Sprinklr is strengthening the entire insights workflow — from how signals are captured to how teams activate them. AI Topics now use GenAI enrichments to filter out noise and surface only the social and conversational mentions that truly matter to brands, driving far more precise listening. With unified, governed customer profiles consolidating feedback and signals across channels, teams gain a consistent, complete view of each customer without digging through dashboards or disconnected data. Expanded support for global Web Surveys — including one-click localization, stronger governance, and intelligent sampling — helps organizations capture cleaner, more representative feedback at scale. And with Action Plans now extended across the Insights suite, teams can operationalize insights immediately by creating tasks, assigning owners, and tracking progress directly inside Sprinklr.

Marketing Technology News: The Death of Third-Party Cookies Was Just the Start. Are You Ready for Consent Orchestration?

Sprinklr Marketing & Sprinklr Social: Modern Marketing Powered by Automation and Creative Integration

Marketers can now easily create on‑trend, compliant video content with access to TikTok’s Commercial Music Library. New integrated workflows with Canva’s Digital Asset Management system streamline how teams import creative assets while strengthening brand governance across channels.

Sprinklr is also enhancing performance insights by automating root‑cause analysis for sudden shifts in campaign results and providing a unified dashboard comparing pre‑ and post‑boost metrics. Additionally, teams can now track and optimize seller profile performance on LinkedIn, giving marketers deeper visibility into how social selling efforts are performing.

Sprinklr Unified-CXM Platform: A More Open, Governed, Self‑Service Platform

New bulk testing and AI telemetry in AI+ Studio help enterprises evaluate AI performance at scale. Additional platform upgrades include unified integration management through the Sprinklr Marketplace, CRON-based automated ingestion via the UDC Connector, AI‑powered guidance through Sprinklr Assist, and next‑generation compliance controls with DRP 2.0.

Write in to psen@itechseries.com to learn more about our exclusive editorial packages and programs.

Teradata Launches Analyst Agent on Microsoft Marketplace for AI-Assisted Business Decision-Making

0
Teradata Launches Analyst Agent on Microsoft Marketplace for AI-Assisted Business Decision-Making

Move from insight to action with Teradata Analyst Agent—designed for business and data analysts, with built-in telemetry for transparent, governable AI

Teradata announced the availability of its enterprise-grade Analyst Agent on Microsoft Marketplace, bringing AI-assisted, conversational analytics directly into customers’ existing Azure environments. Microsoft Marketplace is the unified online destination for customers to buy trusted cloud solutions, AI apps, and agents to meet their business needs. Teradata customers can now discover and deploy trusted solutions through Microsoft Marketplace, with smooth integration and streamlined management across Microsoft Azure and other Microsoft products.

About the Teradata Analyst Agent
The Teradata Analyst Agent enables business and data analysts to ask questions and explore data through a conversational interface, without needing to write code or build BI reports. The agent orchestrates complex SQL queries on the Teradata platform, performs iterative analysis, and surfaces supporting visualizations to help users understand patterns, trends, and outcomes faster.

At the core of the Analyst Agent is Agent Telemetry, developed by Teradata to capture execution details for every request – including performance, estimated cost, model usage, agent orchestration steps, and user feedback. This makes the agent’s reasoning and behavior observable and auditable, replacing “black box” AI with a transparent, continuously improvable system. Customers can also configure quality signals to monitor based on their business priorities – such as detecting orchestration loops, identifying prompt weaknesses, or flagging hallucinated results – turning raw telemetry into actionable intelligence that improves agent performance over time.

Marketing Technology News: Martech Interview with Meena Ganesh, Senior Product Marketing Manager @ Box AI

Key Benefits of the Teradata Analyst Agent on Microsoft Marketplace

  • Seamless Integration: Designed to work effortlessly with existing Teradata environments, Teradata Enterprise MCP, and Azure platforms, minimizing integration complexity.
  • Transparent, Governable AI: Built-in Teradata Agent Telemetry provides full visibility into agent planning, execution steps, performance, estimated cost, quality signals, and user feedback—supporting governance, optimization, and trust at scale.
  • Interactive, Insight-Driven Experience: A conversational UI designed for business and data analysts—not just technical users—surfaces visualizations alongside answers, helping users move from question to understanding to action without writing a single line of code.
  • Configurable Quality Signals and Guardrails: Customers can define which quality signals matter most and enforce customizable guardrails aligned to enterprise policies, compliance needs, and risk tolerance.
  • Faster Time-to-Value: A pre-built, Analyst Agent for Azure and extensible multi-agent template reduces development effort, shortens deployment cycles, and enables teams to move from experimentation to production quickly.
  • Cost Efficiency: Reduce upfront investment and leverage shared innovation for a lower total cost of ownership.
  • Customizable AI Services: Expert guidance provided by Teradata AI Services to align with enterprise architecture, governance standards, and business requirements.

Marketing Technology News: Feature-Rich to Functionally Effective: Adjusting your Martech Strategy

Executive Quotes
“Enterprises don’t just need AI that can answer questions, they need AI they can trust, govern, and continuously improve,” said Sumeet Arora, Chief Product Officer, Teradata. “By bringing our Analyst Agent to Microsoft Marketplace with built-in Agent Telemetry, we’re giving organizations a practical, transparent path to operationalizing agentic AI where their data already lives – within their existing Azure environments.”

“Microsoft Marketplace helps organizations and partners move faster, work smarter, and grow by connecting them with the right solutions—all in one trusted place,” said Cyril Belikoff, vice president, Microsoft Azure Product Marketing. “We’re happy to welcome Teradata’s Analyst Agent solution to the growing Microsoft Marketplace ecosystem.”

Write in to psen@itechseries.com to learn more about our exclusive editorial packages and programs.

StackAdapt Launches Industry First Live Events Campaign Workflow for CTV

0
StackAdapt Launches Industry First Live Events Campaign Workflow for CTV

StackAdapt Logo

New capability helps advertisers plan, pace, and activate campaigns around live sports moments with greater transparency and control

StackAdapt , the leading AI advertising and orchestration platform, announced the launch of its dedicated Live Events campaign workflow designed to help advertisers activate and manage CTV campaigns during live sports moments. The new workflow introduces a centralized planning hub, a dedicated campaign subtype, and enhanced pacing and frequency controls tailored for the short, high-demand event windows that define live sports advertising.

As more broadcasters and streaming platforms introduce programmatic access to live sports, advertisers have new opportunities to reach audiences during premium live moments. At the same time, audience demand continues to grow as sports viewership shifts from linear television to streaming environments. Digital live sports viewership in the U.S. is projected to grow from 114.5 million viewers in 2025 to more than 137 million by 2029, reaching nearly 40% of the population, according to EMARKETER. Major global events like the 2026 FIFA World Cup are expected to accelerate this trend further, creating powerful opportunities for brands to reach highly engaged audiences in real time.

Yet traditional CTV campaign workflows are designed for always-on delivery models, making it difficult to manage the sudden demand spikes, pacing constraints, and inventory coordination required during live events. StackAdapt’s Live Events campaign workflow addresses these challenges with a purpose-built solution designed specifically for live sports advertising within CTV, making premium live sports inventory more accessible to advertisers.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview With Fredrik Skantze, CEO and Co-founder of Funnel

Key benefits include:

  • Purpose-Built Live Events Workflow: Advertisers can launch campaigns using a dedicated Live Events campaign subtype designed specifically for live sports activation.
  • Simplified Event-Based Planning: A centralized inventory hub and integrated calendar allow advertisers to discover upcoming sports moments and align campaigns with specific events.
  • Pacing For High Demand Moments: Pacing settings to ensure campaigns spend effectively during unpredictable traffic spikes.
  • Protect the Viewer Experience: Frequency controls to ensure ads don’t appear on repeat, creating a poor brand experience and ad fatigue.
  • Greater Transparency into Performance: Package-level reporting and improved delivery visibility provide clearer insights into live sports campaign performance.
  • Access to Premium Live Sports Inventory: Advertisers can activate campaigns across premium broadcast and streaming partners without rigid spend minimums or complex planning requirements.

“Premium live events have become one of the most valuable environments in streaming, but it’s also one of the most operationally challenging for advertisers to execute effectively,” said Greg Joseph, VP of Inventory Development at StackAdapt. “With a dedicated Live Events workflow, advertisers gain a simpler and more reliable way to plan and activate campaigns around major sports moments while maintaining full visibility and control over pacing and performance.”

Marketing Technology News: The Death of Third-Party Cookies Was Just the Start. Are You Ready for Consent Orchestration?

StackAdapt’s Live Events campaign workflow is designed specifically for the operational realities of live sports, combining event discovery, event-based pacing controls, and transparent reporting within a single interface. The platform’s infrastructure also supports the high-concurrency traffic environments live sports generate, helping ensure reliable campaign delivery during periods of intense demand.

“Live sports has always been high impact but difficult to execute,” said Sarah VanLandingham, Associate Director, Media Strategy at Silverback Strategies. “With StackAdapt’s dedicated Live Events workflow, we finally have more confidence in how our campaigns will pace and perform during critical moments. The added transparency and controls make it easier to activate around premium inventory without overcomplicating our setup.”

Write in to psen@itechseries.com to learn more about our exclusive editorial packages and programs.

Uniform Appoints Industry Veterans to Accelerate Next Phase of Growth

0
Uniform Appoints Industry Veterans to Accelerate Next Phase of Growth

Uniform, a leader in digital experience management, announced the appointment of Gary Roberts as Board Director and Jason Crea as VP of Growth, strengthening the company’s leadership as it executes on ambitious global growth plans.

Roberts brings decades of senior-level experience advising and scaling technology-led organizations, with a proven track record of helping companies move from high-growth stages into sustained market leadership. Known as a trusted operator and board-level advisor, he has supported leadership teams through periods of rapid expansion, product innovation, and commercial scale.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Haley Trost, Group Product Marketing Manager @ Braze

Crea joins Uniform with a strong track record of scaling technology businesses at critical inflection points. Most recently, he served as Chief Revenue Officer at Cherwell Software, where he led commercial strategy and revenue operations during a period of significant growth. Prior to that, Crea held senior leadership roles at Sitecore, where he was instrumental in scaling the company’s US operations, expanding its enterprise footprint and go-to-market reach across the region. His deep experience in the digital experience and enterprise software ecosystem, combined with a hands-on approach to building high-performing revenue teams, makes him ideally suited to drive Uniform’s next chapter of growth.

“Gary and Jason are true veterans of building and guiding technology businesses,” said Lars Petersen, CEO of Uniform. “Their experience, pattern recognition, and steady leadership will be invaluable as Uniform accelerates growth, expands our ecosystem, and continues to define the future of composable digital experiences.”

As Board Director, Roberts will work closely with Uniform’s executive team to support strategic planning, go-to-market execution, and operational scaling, ensuring the company maintains focus while growing aggressively across enterprise, partner, and global markets. His guidance will be particularly valuable as Uniform deepens relationships with technology partners and agencies, expands its customer footprint, and continues investing in its platform and community.

Marketing Technology News: Cross-Department Collaboration with Marketing Workflow Automation: Enhancing Alignment Between Sales, Customer Service, and Marketing Teams

As VP of Growth, Crea will spearhead Uniform’s commercial expansion, bringing the operational discipline and scaling playbook he refined at Sitecore and Cherwell to bear on Uniform’s rapidly growing pipeline. He will focus on accelerating customer acquisition, strengthening partner channels, and building a repeatable growth engine to match the company’s ambitious market opportunity.

Uniform has already demonstrated strong momentum, including significant venture backing and continued expansion of its composable digital experience platform, positioning the company to meet increasing enterprise demand for flexible, scalable digital experience solutions.

“I’m excited to join Uniform at such a pivotal stage,” said Gary Roberts. “The team has built a category-defining platform with enormous market opportunity. I look forward to supporting the company’s leadership as they scale responsibly, move fast, and capitalize on the momentum they’ve created.”

“Having spent my career scaling companies in the digital experience space, I see enormous potential in what Uniform has built,” said Jason Crea. “The platform, the team, and the market timing are all aligned. I’m looking forward to helping Uniform capture the growth opportunity ahead and bring composable experiences to more enterprises worldwide.”

Both appointments reinforce Uniform’s commitment to pairing innovative technology with experienced, proven leadership as it enters its next phase of growth.

Write in to psen@itechseries.com to learn more about our exclusive editorial packages and programs.

8×8 Brings Agentic AI Natively to the 8×8 Platform for CX

0
8x8 Brings Agentic AI Natively to the 8x8 Platform for CX

8x8, Inc. Logo

8×8 AI Studio, now in early availability, lets any team build and deploy next-gen AI agents on the 8×8 Platform for CX through natural language conversation

8×8, Inc. , a leading global business communications platform provider, introduces 8×8 AI Studio, a native AI development environment that lets any team build, test, and deploy AI agents directly on the 8×8 Platform for CX using natural language instructions. 8×8 AI Studio is now in early availability for 8×8 customers.

Most organizations trying to deploy AI run into the same set of obstacles: specialist developer requirements, expensive professional services, long implementation projects, and tools that sit outside the platforms they already operate. The result is a persistent gap between AI ambition and AI execution. 8×8 AI Studio is built to close it.

Nearly three in four CX leaders prefer to build their own AI agents rather than buy off-the-shelf solutions, according to the Metrigy Customer Experience Optimization 2025-26 report, citing trust and domain expertise as the primary reasons. 8×8 AI Studio is designed for exactly that preference. Because it is native to the 8×8 platform, customers build on infrastructure they already trust, with voice channels, digital routing, interaction data, and telephony pre-integrated from day one. No new vendor. No new contract. No additional infrastructure layer to stand up or configure before the first agent goes live.

“Many companies — especially mid-sized ones — have held back deploying AI agents because of the cost of specialized developers and months of integration work. 8×8 built AI Studio natively on infrastructure its customers already operate so no intricate integration is required,” said Sheila McGee-Smith, President & Principal Analyst at McGee-Smith Analytics. “A business user can describe what they want an agent to do in natural language, and the native Builder creates it, including the ability to take real action such as scheduling appointments or filing tickets. This combination of accessibility for non-technical teams and the flexibility to expand into agentic workflows on a single platform is what will allow companies to transform AI from a concept to repeatable outcomes.”

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview With Fredrik Skantze, CEO and Co-founder of Funnel

AI that ships with the infrastructure

Unlike legacy conversational AI solutions, 8×8 AI Studio comes with a Builder that lets any user describe what they need in plain language and get from concept to a live AI agent across voice and digital channels in minutes rather than months, without professional services or specialist developers.

Dozens of customers across more than 15 verticals are already running hundreds of agents in early availability, putting agents into production across inbound routing, outbound follow-up, sales qualification, scheduling, internal helpdesk triage, and individual employee productivity workflows.

Marketing Technology News: The Death of Third-Party Cookies Was Just the Start. Are You Ready for Consent Orchestration?

“8×8 AI Studio is not an AI layer sitting on top of a communications platform, it’s AI embedded in the infrastructure itself,” said Hunter Middleton, Chief Product Officer at 8×8, Inc. “The LLM has direct access to real-time voice data, network telemetry, and the full interaction context that external tools typically cannot access. That direct access also eliminates the transcription intermediaries responsible for the latency and drop-offs that destroy the natural conversation experience on older architectures. That is what separates AI that demos well from AI that holds up at production scale.”

What teams are building

Organizations in early availability are deploying 8×8 AI Studio agents across a range of operational use cases:

  • Always-on inbound coverage. AI agents handle intake, identity verification, call routing, and multi-location reception around the clock – with business-hours awareness built in.
  • Proactive outbound engagement. Outbound agents confirm appointments, follow up on open service requests, and collect structured data from customers without adding headcount.
  • Sales qualification and CRM handoff. AI agents capture inbound leads, run qualification workflows, and hand off to CRM with live Salesforce integration, enabling sales teams to pick up conversations that are already qualified.
  • Internal support resolution. Helpdesk agents triage employee requests, create tickets in connected systems, and resolve common issues before they reach a support team.
  • Employee productivity. Any 8×8 user can configure a personal AI agent through the AI Studio Builder to handle calls, screen requests, and manage after-hours interactions, without IT involvement.

Write in to psen@itechseries.com to learn more about our exclusive editorial packages and programs.

Qlik Extends Analytics from Answers to Agentic Action

0
Qlik Extends Analytics from Answers to Agentic Action

Qlik

New capabilities across Qlik Answers, Discovery Agent, MCP Server, and new agents for prediction, automation, and analytics development help teams move from inquiry to action, with Discovery Agent surfacing more than 100,000 discoveries for customers since its February GA.

Key takeaways:

  • Agentic analytics is already gaining traction: Since the February GA of Qlik’s agentic experience, the majority of Qlik Cloud accounts with agentic tools are actively using their agents.
  • Qlik Answers becomes an on-demand analyst for decisions: New capabilities for discovery, analysis, prediction, and automation help teams move from signal to action in one governed flow.
  • Prediction becomes part of the agentic flow: Qlik brings predictive signals, explainable reasoning, and workflow action together so users can understand what is likely to happen, why it matters, and how best to respond.

Qlik® announced a major expansion of its agentic analytics capabilities, bringing together Qlik Answers, Discovery Agent, and MCP Server with new agents for prediction, automation, and analytics development to support a more complete path from question to action.

The pressure on enterprise AI initiatives has changed. Teams are being asked to move faster, prove value sooner, and make outputs usable inside real operating workflows. A simple question-answer bot does not solve that problem. Enterprises need AI systems that can surface what matters, reason in context, and drive action with traceability, control, and trust.

Qlik’s latest agentic analytics release is designed around that reality. Qlik Answers remains the entry point, combining structured analytics and unstructured content to deliver richer, more contextual answers. Discovery Agent monitors key data areas and helps surface important changes and anomalies early so users can act faster. Automate Agent executes actions and workflows in downstream systems based on insight and agentic reasoning. Predict Agent builds machine learning models, generates predictions, and helps answer forward-looking questions. Analytics Agent helps teams accelerate analytics development tasks and creation workflows more efficiently.

“The bar for enterprise AI is getting much higher,” said Mike Capone, CEO, Qlik. “It is not enough to produce a fluent answer. AI has to understand the business in context, run on a trusted foundation, and connect insight to action in the systems teams already use. That is how organizations create value without adding more fragility, lock-in, or spend.”

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview With Fredrik Skantze, CEO and Co-founder of Funnel

Key advances in agentic analytics

  • Qlik Answers as the entry point for agentic analytics: Qlik Answers brings together structured analytics and unstructured content in one governed experience, designed to support richer responses and follow-up reasoning rather than isolated prompts.
  • Semantic Layer for governed business context: Qlik is extending data products with shared, reusable business definitions — including measures, dimensions, and relationships — so Qlik Answers, analytics apps, and third-party assistants can work from more consistent business meaning across analytics and AI workflows.
  • Discovery Agent for early signal detection: Discovery Agent monitors key data areas, detects anomalies and important changes, and delivers prioritized signals so users can investigate earlier and act faster.
  • Analytics Agent for analytics development: Analytics Agent can now support analytics development tasks in addition to generating insights, helping teams move through creation workflows more efficiently.
  • Automate Agent to take action: Qlik extends the path from analysis into execution by enabling teams to trigger workflows directly using natural language.
  • Predict Agent for forward-looking insight: Users can ask forward-looking questions, and Predict Agent will build machine learning models, generate predictions, and interpret results to help teams act earlier and with more confidence.
  • MCP Server for broader AI access: MCP Server allows third-party AI assistants to use Qlik analytics to support decisions, bringing Qlik’s context-rich calculations into the assistants teams already use while helping preserve value from existing Qlik investments.

Marketing Technology News: The Death of Third-Party Cookies Was Just the Start. Are You Ready for Consent Orchestration?

Together, these capabilities create a more complete agentic experience: detect, investigate, predict, and act. They also reflect a broader Qlik view that analytics becomes materially more useful when answers are grounded in context, supported by explainable reasoning, and connected to execution.

“What stands out here is the focus on the part that usually gets harder after the demo, helping teams understand what matters, work through why it matters, and move into action without losing trust,” said Charles (Cal) Link, Sr. Director – Data and Analytics, Reworld. “For organizations trying to make AI useful in day-to-day operations, that combination of reasoning, prediction, and workflow follow-through is exactly where the conversation needs to go.”

This announcement is part of a broader set of releases at Qlik Connect® 2026, Qlik’s annual customer and partner event, focused on agentic analytics, open and reusable data foundations, operational trust, and sovereignty-ready deployment.

Write in to psen@itechseries.com to learn more about our exclusive editorial packages and programs.

Backpack Media and Kargo Launch Exclusive Partnership Powered by Predictive Life-Stage Intelligence

0
Backpack Media and Kargo Launch Exclusive Partnership Powered by Predictive Life-Stage Intelligence

Sallie Logo

Predictive Audience Insights From Backpack Media, Paired With Kargo’s High-Impact Creative, Help Brands Reach Students and Families at the Right Moment

Backpack Media, a first-to-market education media network which connects brands to high-intent moments across the college student journey, announced its strategic partnership with Kargo, the leading creative optimization platform. Together, the companies will give brands and agencies an exclusive opportunity to reach college students, recent graduates, and their families during their higher education journey. Key benefits of the partnership include:

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview With Fredrik Skantze, CEO and Co-founder of Funnel

  • A powerful combination of data, inventory, and creative: Backpack Media’s trusted, intent-rich first-party data insights through Sallie, combined with Kargo’s engaging creative formats and brand-safe premium environments, work together to capture attention, drive engagement, and deliver measurable performance.
  • Meaningful reach that builds lasting loyalty: This partnership offers the reach, relevance, and efficiency needed to build impact and brand loyalty with students and families at scale and before key purchasing moments. Unlike broad Gen Z proxies or modeled segments, it’s built on life stage intelligence, including who’s heading off to college, about to graduate, or moving into their first apartment, so brands can show up at the moments that actually shape what students need next.
  • Multi-format, full-funnel reach: Brands gain access to onsite placements across Backpack Media, part of the Sallie’s owned properties, and offsite digital and CTV distribution powered by trusted first-party audiences. Kargo’s CTV creative has been shown to capture attention 76% longer than the 30-second CTV ad benchmark and deliver impressions 78% more effective at keeping eyes on screens.

“Backpack Media’s deep education industry expertise, rich first-party audience intelligence, and growing partner ecosystem gives brands a precise, trusted channel to reach students and families. Our active campaigns show we can reach this audience at scale and efficiently across CTV and other channels where we operate. This is a highly engaged audience, and the results we’re delivering reflect that,” said Marco Steinsieck, Managing Vice President and Head of Advertising at Backpack Media. “Pairing Backpack Media’s predictive insights with Kargo’s high-impact offsite formats will enable brands to reach coveted Gen Z audiences with precision, utilizing first-party data to ensure accuracy and real-world relevance.”

Marketing Technology News: The Death of Third-Party Cookies Was Just the Start. Are You Ready for Consent Orchestration?

“College students and their parents are making some of the biggest financial decisions of their lives during this time, and they’ll remember the brands that show up in an impactful way,” said Libby Dondero, Senior Manager, Retail Media Solutions at Kargo. “Kargo’s high-impact creative formats are built to stop the scroll, tell a story, and drive action. Paired with Backpack Media’s verified educational audiences, we’re not just putting a brand in front of the right person, we’re putting the right experience in front of them at the right moment.”

The partnership comes as commerce media expands well beyond retail into new categories like education. Backpack Media gives brands direct access to students and early-career adults. Gen Z’s spending power is projected to hit $12 trillion by 2030, and with $86 billion flowing through the college back-to-school market annually, there are immediate opportunities for advertisers.

Write in to psen@itechseries.com to learn more about our exclusive editorial packages and programs.

Parsnipp Launches New Behavior-Driven AI Search and GEO Platform That Models Real Buyer Interactions

0
Parsnipp Launches New Behavior-Driven AI Search and GEO Platform That Models Real Buyer Interactions

Parsnipp Logo GEO Platform

Seattle-based company helps marketers better understand and improve AI search visibility, and prepare for agentic commerce and LLM-based advertising

  • The Parsnipp platform uses and builds persona-based agents that model more realistic user interactions through multi-turn LLM conversations, moving beyond early GEO best practices that rely on contextless single prompt responses.
  • Parsnipp makes AI Search and GEO accessible to small and large brands through a free trial and low cost licensing options.
  • While the platform offers better visibility data and a more simplified approach to GEO, the company is building the agentic commerce and LLM-native advertising capabilities marketers’ will need later this year.
  • Parsnipp was founded by Andrew Higgins, a former executive at Pixlee, Emplifii, and StartX, and Awad Sayeed, the former CTO and co-founder of Pixlee.

Parsnipp has announced the launch of the Parsnipp AI Search and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) platform. Built for marketers at small to large organizations that want to get started with GEO, the Parsnipp platform moves beyond traditional tools, modelling real user and buyer behavior through persona-based agents and simulations. This not only provides a more realistic view of a brand’s AI-driven discoverability, but enables the platform to curate and prioritize GEO recommendations with the highest impact for marketers.

As consumers increasingly rely on AI systems like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Grok to research products and make decisions, marketers need a more realistic view of how their brands, products, and content appear across AI search . Parsnipp gives marketers free and low-cost subscription options to start prioritizing GEO now, and is building the agentic commerce and LLM-native advertising tools marketers will need in the future.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview With Fredrik Skantze, CEO and Co-founder of Funnel

Most AI visibility and GEO tools currently analyze isolated prompts from large language models (LLMs), similar to how early SEO tools tracked keyword rankings. These tools mirror earlier approaches to search and social, testing large volumes of single prompts and analyzing outputs at scale. Parsnipp takes a different approach by simulating full research journeys instead of isolated prompts, capturing more realistic insight into how AI systems evaluate brands and speak to real people. This produces more accurate visibility data and deeper insights into how AI recommendations are actually formed.

“The majority of data in this category looks comprehensive, but it’s not grounded in realistic behavior. People typically don’t interact with AI through isolated prompts. They have conversations. They bring context. They change direction,” said Andrew Higgins, co-founder of Parsnipp. “If you’re not using an AI Search tool that simulates customer personas and behavior, the data may look useful, but it’s not based on how real users interact with AI search. Marketers need to accurately measure how customers are interacting with them via AI, and use it to build tactical and simplified plans that are prioritized, easy to measure, and that help ensure they are visible to today’s shopper.”

The Parsnipp platform helps brands understand at a foundational level how they show up inside AI-driven discovery and search by identifying specific signals, misconfigurations, and content gaps. It prioritizes and gives practical steps to improve visibility today, while helping brands uplevel internally and stay on top of all the changes AI is having on consumer behavior. Some of the key features include:

Marketing Technology News: The Death of Third-Party Cookies Was Just the Start. Are You Ready for Consent Orchestration?

  • Brand Analytics – Measure brand visibility across LLMs including ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity, and receive clear recommendations on the most important changes to improve how a brand appears in AI-generated searches.
  • Competitor Tracking – Benchmark competitors, track Share of Voice, and identify specific opportunities where a brand can improve visibility relative to competitors.
  • Prompt and Citation Tracking – Analyze topics and prompts in detail to understand which sources influence AI responses and receive guidance on how to strengthen a brand’s presence in those conversations.
  • GEO Content Optimization – Identify content gaps and get prioritized recommendations to improve readability, create new content, and optimize existing pages using the built-in content editor.
  • Search Personas – Model different user personas and research journeys to understand how real buyers interact with AI to uncover the most impactful actions to improve visibility across those interactions.
  • AI Readiness Recommendations – Parsnipp analyzes a brand’s full digital footprint, including website structure, product feeds, social media, reviews, ratings, and earned media to identify signals that influence how LLMs interpret and cite a brand. The platform then delivers prioritized, practical recommendations brands can implement immediately to improve AI readability, visibility, and discoverability.
  • Agentic Commerce (coming soon) – Optimize your product catalog for AI-powered shopping experiences by tracking visibility, customizing your catalog, and enabling direct commerce through LLM platforms. This includes analyzing shopping topics, commerce integrations, and catalogue performance across various AI platforms,
  • LLM Ads (coming soon) – Directly advertise within AI search experiences to test and optimize ad placements in LLMs with an AI-native ads manager. Use AI visibility personas to quickly expand your organic and targeted paid programs. Prepare for OpenAI’s ChatGPT ads testing program.

While many AI visibility tools are priced for enterprise customers, Parsnipp offers comparable insights through a free trial and low-cost licensing model (starting at $39.99 USD per month). The platform not only measures AI visibility but provides curated, prioritized recommendations by scanning a brand’s marketing signals across websites, content, social media, reviews, and other digital sources to identify the highest-impact actions brands can take to improve AI visibility now.

Write in to psen@itechseries.com to learn more about our exclusive editorial packages and programs.

B2B Cold Email Reply Rates Jump 2-3x When AI Personalization Replaces Templates, New Industry Data Reveals

0
B2B Cold Email Reply Rates Jump 2-3x When AI Personalization Replaces Templates, New Industry Data Reveals

LeadHaste

LeadHaste data from 10M+ cold emails shows AI-personalized outreach hits 3.2% reply rates, 2-3x the industry average.

New performance data from managed outbound firm LeadHaste, drawn from more than 10 million B2B cold emails sent across multiple industries, shows that AI-personalized cold email campaigns consistently achieve positive reply rates of 3.2% – two to three times the 1-1.5% industry average for template-based outreach.

Cold email is not a one-tool problem. It’s a systems problem. The companies using AI to personalize at scale are seeing 2x to 3x the industry average.”

— Dimitar Petkov, Co-Founder, LeadHaste

The findings, based on aggregate campaign data from LeadHaste’s client base spanning healthcare, SaaS, manufacturing, staffing, professional services, and financial services, point to a widening gap between companies that have adopted AI-driven personalization and those still relying on traditional cold email methods.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Haley Trost, Group Product Marketing Manager @ Braze

“The industry average for cold email reply rates has barely moved in five years – it’s still stuck around 1 to 1.5 percent,” said Dimitar Petkov, Co-Founder of LeadHaste. “Meanwhile, the companies using AI to personalize at scale are seeing 2x to 3x those numbers. The gap is only getting wider, and it’s becoming a real competitive disadvantage to still be sending batch-and-blast templates.”
Key findings from the 10 million email dataset:

According to LeadHaste’s analysis, AI-personalized sequences outperform templates by 2-3x on positive reply rate. Multi-channel campaigns that combine cold email with LinkedIn touchpoints generate 2-3x more positive replies than single-channel email. A multi-provider email verification waterfall (using four or more verification providers in sequence) significantly improves deliverability versus single-provider approaches. The compound effect is real – campaigns in their third month outperform first-month campaigns by a measurable margin as domain reputation strengthens and targeting refines based on actual reply data. Companies that own their sending infrastructure (domains and mailboxes registered in the company’s name) see more consistent long-term deliverability than those using shared or rented infrastructure.

Marketing Technology News: Cross-Department Collaboration with Marketing Workflow Automation: Enhancing Alignment Between Sales, Customer Service, and Marketing Teams

The data also revealed that the number of tools in a B2B outbound stack matters. LeadHaste orchestrates 35+ specialized tools per client – covering data sourcing, enrichment, verification, personalization, multi-channel sending, and CRM integration – compared to the 3-5 tools used by most agencies or in-house teams. The performance difference, Petkov argues, is not incremental.

“Cold email is not a one-tool problem. It’s a systems problem,” Petkov said. “When you connect the right data sources, enrich through multiple providers, verify at every step, and personalize with AI that actually has context on the prospect – the output is fundamentally different from what a template and a purchased list produces.”

Industry shift toward owned infrastructure
The data highlights another emerging trend: B2B companies are increasingly demanding ownership of their outbound infrastructure rather than renting access through agencies. LeadHaste’s model – where every domain, mailbox, sending platform subscription, and contact list is registered in the client’s name – reflects this shift.

“Historically, agencies held the infrastructure hostage,” Petkov noted. “You’d pay $5,000 a month, and when you left, you started from zero. The market is moving away from that model. Companies want to own what they’ve built, and they should.”

LeadHaste reports that its owned-infrastructure approach has been a key driver of client retention, with clients citing transparency and data ownership as primary differentiators.

Write in to psen@itechseries.com to learn more about our exclusive editorial packages and programs.

Enhancing Asset Manager Distribution Intelligence with AI

0
Enhancing Asset Manager Distribution Intelligence with AI

No complex queries. No manual report building. Just answers. Ask. Discover. Execute.

SalesFocus Solutions (SFS), a fintech leader servicing the asset management industry, announced its comprehensive MARS Distribution Intelligence and Master Data Management (MDM) solution which has been instrumental in providing a single, trusted source of data(“Golden Copy”) for its clients, empowering quicker, smarter sales and marketing decisions will include the new MARS-AI™ feature with MARS v11.

Currently, MARS v10 includes an automated insights feature that provides asset management firms with business insights, such as identifying Advisors who may have an interest in particular products based on user-defined factors, identifying cross-selling opportunities, identifying Advisor trends, and alerting when Advisors break trends, and more. MARS v10 also includes business-critical Distribution Intelligence features such as Advisor Team information, segmentation, lead scoring, cross-sell identification, and automated insights, which leverage behavioral and transaction data that typically fall outside the scope of a traditional MDM platform.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Haley Trost, Group Product Marketing Manager @ Braze

MARS v11, targeted for release later this year, will provide AI-powered analytics to help distribution teams quickly uncover actionable insights and trends and make faster strategic decisions. Powered by secure AI agents, MARS v11 understands the context, runs the analysis, validates the output, and delivers clear narrative insights, structured data, visualizations, and grounded, explainable results without complex queries and manual report building.

Marketing Technology News: Cross-Department Collaboration with Marketing Workflow Automation: Enhancing Alignment Between Sales, Customer Service, and Marketing Teams

MARS provides multi-product reporting and automated distribution insights across all product types, including model portfolios, mutual funds, ETFs, Managed Accounts, UCITs, UMAs, SICAVs, CITS, interval funds, DCIO/retirement, and alternative investment products. MARS v11 enhances current capabilities by helping sales and marketing teams shift from administrative work to high-value selling and proactive risk management, thereby growing AUM.

Write in to psen@itechseries.com to learn more about our exclusive editorial packages and programs.

Harmonic Introduces Breakthrough AI Orchestration Service for Live Video Workflows

0
Harmonic Introduces Breakthrough AI Orchestration Service for Live Video Workflows

New Service Simplifies Integration of AI Applications with Exceptional Reliability and Security

Harmonic announced a breakthrough new AI orchestration service that enables broadcasters, streamers and service providers to seamlessly integrate AI applications into live video workflows with broadcast-grade reliability and security. The service empowers media companies to efficiently and securely enhance their workflows with best-of-breed AI applications developed by Harmonic and its trusted partners. As a result, service providers can lower AI-related investments and accelerate time to market for more personalized, cost-efficient live streaming and broadcast services.

“As video workflows increasingly become more complex and distributed, media companies face growing challenges with fragmented AI tools, complex integrations and inconsistent reliability,” said Yaniv Sibony, vice president of growth product management at Harmonic. “Our new AI orchestration service changes the game by enabling multiple AI applications to operate from a unified control plane, with built-in reliability and security, helping media companies innovate faster, reduce complexity and confidently bring AI-powered video experiences to market.”

Marketing Technology News: Martech Interview with Meena Ganesh, Senior Product Marketing Manager @ Box AI

Boosting Video Workflow Efficiency with a Unified AI Control Plane
Harmonic’s AI orchestration service aggregates, orchestrates, maintains and updates AI applications implemented by Harmonic and best-in-class partners. Through a unified interface, service providers can easily configure, schedule and activate AI applications dynamically for simpler, more cost-effective operations. The service coordinates AI-based processing for live content, synchronizes outputs across multiple AI engines and ensures seamless failover through built-in redundancy mechanisms.

Available as a stand-alone SaaS offering, the orchestration service supports a suite of AI-driven applications, including real-time audio translation and transcription, dubbing and localization, automated live sports highlight generation, scene-level metadata generation, ad-break detection and in-stream ad triggering. Built for the broader ecosystem, the service works natively with Harmonic’s full suite of media processing solutions including VOS®360 Media SaaS, VOS Media Software, XOS media processor and Spectrum™ X Plus.

Marketing Technology News: Feature-Rich to Functionally Effective: Adjusting your Martech Strategy

Delivering Broadcast-Grade Reliability
Harmonic’s AI orchestration service offers media companies a host of benefits, including:

  • Unified Governance: Service providers can manage multiple AI vendors from a single, secure control plane.
  • Synchronized Processing: Precise alignment of AI outputs across multiple engines enables media companies to deliver frame-accurate broadcast and streaming services.
  • Built-in Redundancy: Seamless failover mechanisms, combined with security and health monitoring for AI tasks, help service providers prevent on-air disruptions.
  • Dynamic Scheduling: Service providers can effortlessly schedule and activate AI applications on a per live event basis.

Simplifying AI Adoption
By unifying multiple AI applications into a single platform, the AI orchestration service enables media companies to avoid costly integration cycles and rip-and-replace upgrades as AI technologies evolve. Ultimately, the service accelerates time to market for new AI-powered offerings by eliminating the need for complex integrations and repeated platform migrations.

Write in to psen@itechseries.com to learn more about our exclusive editorial packages and programs.