AI Agents Force Rethink of SaaS Pricing and Improve Customer Experiences

April 7, 2026

New enterprise deployment data from Automation Anywhere shows AI service agents resolving more than 80% of employee support requests, reducing ITSM licensing costs by up to 50%.

Automation Anywhere, the leading provider of Agentic Process Automation (APA) and agentic solutions, released new data showing that its AI agents are materially changing the economics of enterprise IT support. Based on analysis of millions of service requests and tickets across more than 70 enterprise deployments, the company found its AI agents resolving more than 80% of employee service requests on average, potentially reducing IT service management (ITSM) licensing costs up to 50%.

The findings signal a fundamental disruption in pricing enterprise software. For decades, enterprises have paid a “SaaS tax”— a compounding cost tied to seats, usage, and growing complexity, rather than outcomes. As AI systems diagnose and resolve service issues autonomously, pricing models tied to seat licenses, including those used by legacy SaaS platforms, are increasingly disconnected from the work performed.

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

Across enterprise deployments using Automation Anywhere’s purpose-built AI agents for service desks and ITSM, organizations reported:

AI agents auto-resolving more than 80% of IT support requests.
ITSM licensing costs may reduce up to 50%, resulting in large enterprises saving more than $5 million annually on average.
Significant reductions in service desk workload, including 50% fewer call volumes and faster resolution times.
Time-to-value with first AI agents in as little as 8 weeks.
Corresponding gains in employee productivity.

The shift comes as enterprise software costs continue to rise. Gartner reports that “SaaS vendors are driving substantial cost increases for enterprise clients, with renewal uplifts reading 10 to 20% on average — far exceeding global inflation and typical IT budget growth.^[1]” At the same time, AI adoption is accelerating this change with its core promise of helping CIOs reduce the SaaS tax of legacy ITSM platforms.

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

Legacy ITSM platforms are largely priced based on per-seat licenses, and platform usage, meaning organizations spend more as their workforce and IT complexity grow. As AI agents, especially those purpose-built with domain-specific knowledge, execute more work autonomously, fewer employee and customer service interactions are required, challenging pricing models tied to service desk seats and usage.

“AI agents aren’t just reducing cost, they’re raising the standard for how work gets done,” said Mihir Shukla, CEO and co-founder of Automation Anywhere. “They can prevent issues, resolve them instantly, and deliver consistent, high-quality outcomes. That resets expectations for service across the enterprise.”

With strong traction with Fortune 1000 enterprises in IT, Automation Anywhere customers are expanding agentic AI-first services from IT to support HR, finance, procurement, and broader customer and employee experience workflows, signaling a rapid shift as AI agents begin executing tasks directly across enterprise systems.

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

The Arena Group and Playwire Partner to Bring High-Impact Ad Inventory to Scale

Business Wire

April 7, 2026

The Arena Group and Playwire Partner to Bring High-Impact Ad Inventory to Scale

The Arena Group Holdings, Inc. , the brand, data and IP company home to many of the most recognizable brands including TheStreet, Parade, Men’s Journal, Athlon Sports, Surfer, ShopHQ and more, announced its partnership with Playwire, the ad monetization platform for digital publishers, bringing scale to high-impact advertising inventory. Through the partnership, Playwire’s direct sales team has the ability to sell Flex Suite advertising units across The Arena Group’s portfolio of brands.

The Flex Suite is Playwire’s exclusive set of high-impact advertising formats. It uses code-on-page technology to provide custom placements that go beyond the capabilities of standard programmatic advertising. The formats now available across The Arena Group’s portfolio include:

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

Flex Video: Large-format mobile video that loads above content and remains sticky as the user scrolls. Auto-play, non-skip, 15-second creatives built to capture attention and keep it.
Flex Skin: A cross-platform, adhesive, dynamic unit highly sought after by premium brands. It compresses as users scroll and supports video and shoppable features.
Flex Rail: A full-screen interactive mobile canvas that loads as an animated overlay, prompts the user to expand for a large-format video or interactive experience, then collapses and stays in view.
Roadblock (SOV Add-On): Any Flex Suite unit can be upgraded to 100% Share of Voice, blocking out the competition entirely on that first impression across our network.

“The synergy between Playwire’s sales force and our premier brand portfolio represents a strategic partnership positioned for significant scale,” said Chris Heck, VP of Integrated Marketing at The Arena Group. “By integrating Playwire’s Flex Suite across our properties, such as Parade and Men’s Journal, we are providing advertisers with streamlined access to a curated ecosystem of premium, high-impact brand environments.”

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

Additionally, this partnership seamlessly unlocks the opportunity for brands to partner with The Arena Group’s network of sites on custom branded content campaigns, allowing brands to connect with target audiences through immersive storytelling that perfectly complements Playwire’s Flex Suite activations.

“The Arena Group has built something rare in digital media: a portfolio of brands that people trust and return to,” said Jayson Dubin, CEO at Playwire. “Pairing that kind of audience quality with Playwire’s direct sales reach and Flex Suite capabilities is a combination that should get every serious advertiser’s attention. We’re proud to bring this partnership to market.”

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

BlueDolphin Launches as the First AI-Powered Business Transformation Platform, Marking Strategic Rebrand from ValueBlue

Business Wire

April 7, 2026

Robutler Launches Unified Infrastructure Platform for AI Agent Commerce

Company Unveils Next Generation Platform with New AI-First Experience, Major Enhancements, Free Trial, and a New Company Identity as BlueDolphin

ValueBlue announced its transformation into BlueDolphin, unveiling a new brand and platform vision designed to redefine how organizations execute business transformation.

The launch marks a significant milestone following the company’s 15th anniversary earlier this year. BlueDolphin now expands beyond traditional enterprise architecture to support transformation from strategy through execution, bringing together solution design, architecture management, and strategic planning in a single AI-powered platform. While the product has long been known as BlueDolphin, the company now fully adopts the name as its unified brand.

Transforming Transformation

In today’s business environment, change is constant, high-stakes, and unavoidable. Yet according to Bain & Company, 88 percent of organizations remain constrained by fragmented tools, disconnected teams and information, and approaches built for a slower, simpler world. The result is the illusion of progress, where significant time and resources are invested without meaningful impact.

BlueDolphin is leading a new way to change those odds.

“Too many organizations are working harder than ever without moving forward,” said Jelle Visser, CEO of BlueDolphin. “They plan, align, and redesign, yet momentum never builds. We take a different approach. By bringing strategy, architecture, and solution design into one connected, AI-powered flow, we turn transformation into continuous, collaborative, and measurable progress.”

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

With this evolution, BlueDolphin also addresses a new class of transformation challenges, including how organizations manage and scale AI and autonomous agents across systems, processes, and teams.

As organizations move from experimenting with AI to using autonomous agents more widely, new challenges are emerging around how to manage and control them. Without a shared view of the business, clear rules, and coordination across teams, these systems can quickly become fragmented and difficult to manage. BlueDolphin provides a central layer of control for AI-driven work.

By connecting agents to a shared architecture and guiding their actions through solution design, the platform ensures decisions stay aligned with business goals, follow defined standards, and adapt as the organization evolves. This allows organizations to scale AI automation with confidence while maintaining visibility and control.

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

Expanding Beyond Enterprise Architecture

This launch reflects BlueDolphin’s expansion into a broader business transformation platform, bringing together Strategic Planning, Architecture Management, and Solution Design in a single, integrated environment. By connecting these capabilities, BlueDolphin enables organizations to align strategy and maintain a unified view of data, processes, and stakeholders across current and future states. Teams can shape and manage initiatives within one system that keeps decisions aligned and plans grounded in reality.

AI is embedded across the platform as a foundational capability, supporting natural language querying, AI-assisted modeling, impact analysis, and decision support to enable faster insights and more informed decisions.

As part of the launch, BlueDolphin is introducing new AI capabilities, enhancements to its solution design features, improved platform navigation, and a free trial of the platform. These updates accompany the company’s transition to a unified BlueDolphin brand, reflecting its expanded product scope and positioning.

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

Levanta Acquires Perch+, Expanding Its Affiliate Marketplace with Hundreds of Amazon Sellers and Publishers

Globe Newswire

April 6, 2026

Levanta Acquires Perch+, Expanding Its Affiliate Marketplace with Hundreds of Amazon Sellers and Publishers

The acquisition accelerates Levanta’s marketplace growth and gives Perch+’s sellers and publishers access to modern affiliate infrastructure

Levanta, the leading affiliate and creator platform for e-commerce, announced the acquisition of Perch+, one of the earliest affiliate networks built specifically for Amazon sellers. Perch+’s network of sellers and affiliate partners will now operate within Levanta, giving them access to a modern affiliate and creator platform built for e-commerce.

Levanta is acquiring Perch+ at a time of significant momentum, having grown 60% since last year. In 2026 alone, it has expanded its platform to support unified affiliate and creator programs across Amazon, Shopify, and Walmart, and introduced Paid Placements, which enables brands to secure flat-rate creator deals with affiliate-level performance measurement. The acquisition of Perch+’s sellers and affiliate network is the latest step in that momentum, further strengthening Levanta’s position as the leading platform for affiliate and creator-driven e-commerce.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Liat Barer, Chief Product Officer @ Odeeo

“Perch+ built meaningful traction with Amazon sellers early on when very few affiliate platforms were focused on their needs,” said Ian Brodie, CEO and Co-Founder of Levanta. “By bringing this network into Levanta, we’re expanding opportunity on both sides of the marketplace — more brands for creators, and more creator-driven growth for brands.”

For Perch+ brands, the move to Levanta represents a significant upgrade in capability, enabling them to work directly with 60,000+ vetted partners in Levanta’s Marketplace, with advanced tooling for creator recruitment at scale and full support for Amazon Attribution and Creator Connections. Brands can also run Paid Placement campaigns, automate Product Sampling, and surface who is already talking about their brand across social, all from a single system.

Marketing Technology News: What Marketers Need to Know About the European Accessibility Act

For creators and publishers, the transition brings more than just a new platform. Levanta’s platform offers improved tracking, faster payouts, and a more centralized place to manage partnerships. Creators gain access to a significantly expanded roster of brands and greater earning opportunities, giving them more ways to land paid campaigns, earn performance-based commissions, and get products into their hands to create content.

“We built Perch+ to help Amazon brands tap into affiliate marketing as a meaningful growth channel,” said Jason Baer, chief marketing officer at Infinite Commerce, parent company of Perch+. “Levanta has built the platform and scale to take that vision much further. We’re excited to see the network continue to grow within Levanta.”

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

Swoogo Launches Native MCP Server, Becoming the First and Only Event Platform to Connect Live Event Data to AI Tools

PRNewswire

April 6, 2026

Swoogo Launches Native MCP Server, Becoming the First and Only Event Platform to Connect Live Event Data to AI Tools

Event teams can now query registrations, analyze attendance, and vibe code custom event sites using Swoogo together with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Lovable and others

Swoogo, the event management platform for B2B event teams, announced the launch of its native Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. Swoogo is the first and only event management platform to offer a native, ready-to-use MCP server, giving event teams direct access to their live event data inside AI tools like Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Lovable, Replit, and Cursor.

Setup takes five minutes. No code or engineering resources required.

MCP is an open standard that lets AI tools connect securely to external systems. With Swoogo’s MCP server, the AI tools event teams use every day can now read, query, and act on real event data.

“Most event platforms are building AI inside their own walls and stopping there,” said Chris Sykes, CEO of Swoogo. “We’re building AI into Swoogo too, but we’re also doing something different: connecting event data to the AI tools our customers already use. Planners shouldn’t have to choose between our AI and theirs.”

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

Three use cases, one connection

Swoogo’s MCP server unlocks three capabilities for event teams:

Conversational data access. Event teams can ask plain-language questions about registrations, session capacity, attendee profiles, and more, and get answers in seconds without opening a dashboard or exporting a spreadsheet. Which companies have the most registrants? Which sessions are approaching capacity? Who still needs follow-up? Swoogo delivers answers.

AI-powered event builds. With tools like Lovable, Replit, or Cursor, event teams can vibe code a fully branded event site or registration experience through conversation. Teams describe what they want, the tool builds it, and registration data flows directly back into Swoogo as the system of record. No design team or engineering resources required.

Cross-event intelligence. Most event data lives in silos, one event at a time, one report at a time. Swoogo’s MCP server connects the dots across an entire event portfolio and pulls in outside data sources to add context event data alone can’t provide. For example, by pairing two completely different data sources, like Swoogo and a CRM, teams can identify which attendees converted to customers, compare which events and regions drove the most revenue, and pinpoint which content or experiences closed the most deals. The server enables insights across an organization’s full event history that no single dashboard could surface, powering recommendations teams can actually act on.

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

Why it matters

Most event platforms are building AI as closed, internal features that live inside their own products. Swoogo took a different approach: rather than locking AI capabilities behind a proprietary interface, Swoogo built an open connection point that lets event teams bring their own tools.

Because MCP is an open standard, Swoogo’s MCP server works with any AI tool that supports the protocol. As adoption grows, Swoogo’s compatibility expands automatically.

Swoogo’s MCP functionality also compounds with other connected data sources. Paired with Salesforce, event teams can identify which attendees turned into pipeline. Layered with company data, they can segment registrants by industry. The insights stack.

“We didn’t want to build another chatbot,” said Mike Olivieri, CTO of Swoogo. “We wanted to build a connection point. The best AI tool for any given team is the one they’re already using. Our job is to make sure their Swoogo data is there when they need it.”

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

RankScore Launches ‘Vibe SEO’ AI Agent to Automate SEO for Businesses

MTS Staff Writer

April 6, 2026

FOXVISITS LTD Brings AI-First Local SEO to Cyprus Service Businesses in Paphos, Larnaca and Nicosia

RankScore gives small businesses a full SEO workflow for a one-time fee, replacing tools that cost $400 a month and agencies that cost thousands

Gulf Coast Brands LLC, a Tampa-area digital media and software company, has launched RankScore, an AI-powered SEO platform built for small business owners, solo founders, and content operators who need search results without the overhead of agencies or enterprise tools.

Most small businesses lose in search not because their product is worse, but because their content is.”

— Sam Frost, founder

The platform centers on Artemis, an AI agent that handles the full SEO workflow in a single conversation — finding keyword opportunities, writing optimized articles, and publishing them directly to your website. Where traditional tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush hand users data and walk away, Artemis executes.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Miguel Lopes, CPO @ TrafficGuard

RankScore launched with a lifetime deal priced at $99 — a one-time payment covering all features, all future updates, and no renewal fees.

Early results have been notable. Simon Hood of Sooper Books, the award-winning children’s storytelling platform, said the tool helped take his site “from near zero to hundreds of thousands of clicks in Google.” A lawn care business owner reported his organic traffic doubling within weeks.

“Most small businesses lose in search not because their product is worse, but because their content is,” said Sam Frost, founder of RankScore and Gulf Coast Brands LLC. “Agencies charge $3,000 to $8,000 a month. The big SEO tools charge $400 a month and still make you do all the work. I built RankScore because neither of those options made sense for the businesses I kept seeing struggle.”

Marketing Technology News: Disrupt or Be Disrupted: The AI Wake-Up Call for B2B Marketers

The $99 lifetime deal includes keyword discovery, AI-generated articles, one-click publishing, rank tracking, topic cluster planning, and priority support. A 30-day money-back guarantee covers every purchase.

RankScore is live at rankscore.co. The lifetime deal is available for a limited period before moving to a monthly subscription model.

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

Vuzix Ships Follow-On Production Order from Major Defense Customer for Waveguide-Based AR Display Systems

PRNewswire

April 6, 2026

Vuzix Ships Follow-On Production Order from Major Defense Customer for Waveguide-Based AR Display Systems

Order supports broadening initial production rollout of next-generation head-mounted display program

Vuzix Corporation, a leading supplier of AI-powered smart glasses, waveguides, and augmented reality technologies, announced that it has received and shipped against a new six-figure follow-on production order for waveguide-based AR display systems from a U.S.-based company that is a leader in technologically advanced and intelligent solutions for the global aerospace and defense industry.

Marketing Technology News: What is a Full Stack Marketer; What MarTech Matters Most to Full Stack Marketers?

The display component systems being delivered under this order support the customer’s initial production rollout of a next-generation head-mounted display (HMD) program. This further follow-on order reflects continued customer progress toward broader deployment and further validates the role of Vuzix waveguide and display technologies in advanced defense-oriented wearable display solutions.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Lee McCance, Chief Product Officer @ Adverity

“We believe this order reflects the value of our waveguide-based display technologies in demanding defense applications and reinforces Vuzix’ position as a trusted supplier of advanced optical systems. Vuzix continues to expand its presence in defense and other high-performance OEM markets where advanced optics, display performance, ruggedization, and domestic manufacturing are critical to customer success,” said Paul Travers, President and Chief Executive Officer of Vuzix.

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

Xoople Announces $130M Series B to Build Earth’s System of Record for the Agentic Era

Business Wire

April 6, 2026

Xoople Announces $130M Series B to Build Earth’s System of Record for the Agentic Era

Xoople, the data infrastructure company building a global system of record for physical change on Earth, announced it has closed a $130M Series B, bringing its total raised to $225M, from investors including Nazca Capital, MCH, CDTI (Government of Spain), Buenavista Equity Partners and Endeavor Catalyst. This capital makes Xoople the top funded company in the category, with satellites capable of producing the most precise, reliable, scientific-grade data sets that will expand enterprise access to physical-world intelligence to power the AI and agentic revolutions as it starts commercialization this quarter after seven years in development.

“Every major computing era creates a new system of record; those that define that system become the economic centers of that era,” said Fabrizio Pirondini, CEO of Xoople. “CRMs gave companies a system of record for customers. Cloud platforms create systems of record for software and data. We are building the system of record for the physical world in the AI era with Xoople. After seven years developing our system in stealth, we are incredibly excited to begin commercialization in Q2 and start scaling up that capability in the market.”

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

As AI systems increasingly move from analysis to autonomous action through agentic workflows, the need for and ability to easily ingest reliable ground-truth data about the physical world is expected to grow rapidly – optimizing supply chains, managing infrastructure, underwriting risk, responding to disasters, and monitoring geopolitical and security risks. As models become increasingly commoditized, proprietary datasets that connect digital systems to the physical world are emerging as a critical source of advantage. Xoople calls this infrastructure and data layer the “Earth’s System of Record,” and the company expects that it will be transformational in providing AI with a real-time understanding of the physical world.

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

Since its creation in 2019, Xoople has worked in stealth mode, building its end-to-end system while forging global strategic partnerships to integrate its Earth data layer directly into existing business tools, to allow organizations to seamlessly analyze and act on real-world information.

Xoople’s private preview customers include government agencies and Fortune 500 companies who use the intelligence to enable:

Supply chain optimization and infrastructure monitoring
Agricultural forecasting and resource planning
Insurance risk modeling and disaster response
Urban planning and infrastructure resilience
Scenario planning and forecasting

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

Five9 Appoints Jay Lee as Chief Marketing and Growth Officer

Business Wire

April 6, 2026

Five9 Appoints Jay Lee as Chief Marketing and Growth Officer

Experienced GTM and analytics leader to unify marketing, data, and revenue strategy to accelerate AI-driven CX innovation

Five9, Inc. (“Five9”), provider of the Intelligent CX Platform, announced the appointment of Jay Lee as Chief Marketing and Growth Officer, effective April 6, 2026. This new role unites global marketing with revenue strategy and operations to create a more powerfully aligned go-to-market (GTM) engine for a cohesive, insights-driven, and streamlined experience for customers and partners at every stage of their journey with Five9.

Lee brings extensive experience driving business transformation, growth, and measurable financial outcomes across enterprise technology and payments industries. His appointment reflects Five9’s continued investment in integrating marketing, operations, data, and analytics to accelerate innovation and deliver more personalized, intelligent customer experiences.

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

“Jay’s appointment comes at a defining moment for Five9 as we continue to accelerate our leadership in AI-powered customer experience,” said Amit Mathradas, CEO, Five9. “His ability to connect sales and customer-facing teams with underlying data and analytics to influence how we market is exactly what companies need in this next era of CX. Jay brings a rare combination of strategic marketing vision, creativity, and operational rigor, with a deep understanding of how to translate customer insight into meaningful business outcomes. As we advance our CX vision, where human expertise and AI work seamlessly together, Jay will be instrumental in helping our customers unlock greater value from their customer experience investments.”

“I’m thrilled to join Five9 at such a pivotal moment,” said Jay Lee, Chief Marketing and Growth Officer, Five9. “Customer experience, data, and commerce are converging faster than ever, and Five9 is uniquely positioned to lead that transformation. I look forward to working with the team to strengthen our brand further, deepen customer relationships, and drive measurable business impact through innovative, data-driven marketing and GTM strategies.”

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

Lee joins Five9 from Icertis, where he served as Chief Marketing Officer, leading a global marketing and sales development organization driving brand, demand generation, and GTM planning and execution. Prior to Icertis, he served as Chief Marketing Officer at Avalara, where he led global demand generation and communications strategies to support commercial growth across markets and customer segments. Earlier in his career, Lee held senior leadership roles across B2B and B2C organizations, including GE Capital, American Express, and PayPal. His background across consulting, finance, marketing, and enterprise technology has shaped a disciplined, data-first approach to go-to-market strategy, with deep expertise in revenue operations and execution.

Lee is known for his collaborative leadership style, emphasizing idea generation, thoughtful problem-solving, and mentorship to help teams build durable, real-world skills across strategy, storytelling, and execution. He holds an MBA from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University.

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

New Study Finds Alert Fatigue Has Become a Production Reliability Risk and Incident Response Alone Is No Longer Enough

Business Wire

April 6, 2026

New Study Finds Alert Fatigue Has Become a Production Reliability Risk and Incident Response Alone Is No Longer Enough

Engineers spend 40% of their time firefighting while outages are discovered by customers before monitoring tools catch them

Modern production environments have outpaced the incident management practices built to support them, and the deficiency is now producing measurable failures. A new study released by NeuBird AI finds that nearly half of organizations (44%) experienced an outage in the past year directly linked to suppressed or ignored alerts, and a vast majority (78%) experienced at least one incident where no alert fired at all, leaving engineers to discover failures only after customers were already affected. Meanwhile, 74% of executives say their organizations are actively using AI to address these problems, compared to just 39% of engineers. The 2026 State of Production Reliability and AI Adoption Report, based on a survey of 1,039 SRE, DevOps and IT operations professionals conducted in February 2026, documents an industry at an inflection point: reactive, alert-driven incident response is no longer sufficient for the scale and complexity of modern production environments, and the path forward requires autonomous systems that can prevent, resolve and optimize operations end to end.

“This data highlights a gap in how tools support modern production environments,” said Gou Rao, CEO and co-founder of NeuBird AI. “As systems grow more complex, alert-driven approaches alone can’t keep pace. Teams need AI that works alongside them to identify risks before they surface, resolve incidents faster and continuously improve operations so reliability scales with the business.”

Incident Management Is Consuming Engineering Capacity and Driving Up Costs

According to the 2026 State of Production Reliability and AI Adoption Report, the majority of engineering teams spend 40% or more of their time on incident management rather than product development and innovation.

The overhead compounds quickly.

When a business-impacting incident strikes, almost all (93%) of organizations pull in three or more engineers to resolve it and nearly 40% involve six to ten people.
Thirty-six percent of teams spend five to ten hours every week on incident reports and post-mortems alone.
With 83% of teams navigating four or more tools during a live incident, every context switch adds time to an already costly response.

The financial exposure of infrastructure downtime is significant.

Sixty-one percent of organizations estimate infrastructure downtime costs at least $50,000 per hour, and 34% put that figure at $100,000 or more.
Almost 60% of organizations report their mean time to resolve a critical incident is between 30 minutes and two hours.
With almost 90% of companies handling up to 50 incidents per month, the cumulative cost of downtime is a material business risk.

Burnout is also a direct downstream consequence. Nearly 40% of organizations report that more than a quarter of their on-call engineers show burnout symptoms related to incident management.

“The math is stark. At a median downtime cost between $50,000 and $100,000 per hour, a one-to-two-hour resolution window for a critical incident represents $50,000 to $200,000 in direct exposure per event, not counting the engineering hours that disappear into diagnosis, root cause analysis and post-mortems,” continued Rao. “MTTR is the number one KPI organizations track for incident response, which reflects how central resolution speed is to operational performance, yet most organizations are still resolving incidents the same way they were five years ago.”

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

Alert Fatigue Has Crossed from Morale Problem to Reliability Risk

When asked to identify their challenges, respondents ranked alert fatigue and noise at the top, followed by insufficient automation, knowledge silos and documentation gaps, difficulty identifying root causes and integration challenges between tools.

Seventy-seven percent of on-call teams receive at least ten alerts per day, and 57% report that fewer than 30% of those alerts are actionable.
Engineers have adapted accordingly, with 83% ignoring or dismissing alerts at least occasionally.

Taken together, these findings describe an environment in which reactive, manual incident management has become the default, leaving little capacity for the preventive work, capacity planning and reliability improvements that would reduce incident volume over time.

Executives and Practitioners Report Sharply Different Realities on AI Deployment in Incident Management

When it comes to AI in incident management, executives and practitioners are living in two different realities. A majority (74%) of C-suite respondents say their organization actively uses AI for incident management, while only 39% of practitioners say the same. Executives report what has been purchased or decided; practitioners report what is running in the environments where they work.

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

The divide in perceived impact of AI is equally pronounced.

C-suite respondents overall were nearly three times as likely as practitioners to say AI has significantly reduced operational toil (35% vs. 12%).
Among practitioners who do use AI tools, 28% said the impact on their workload has been less than 10%.
Practitioners aren’t skeptical of AI; more than half say they’re actively evaluating AI solutions. They are more realistic about what’s been deployed, not what’s been purchased or decided.

Among organizations that have deployed AI in incident management, automated root cause analysis is the leading use case, followed by anomaly detection and prediction and alert correlation and noise reduction. Budget constraints were cited as the top barrier to AI adoption, followed closely by concerns about AI increasing system complexity and security and compliance concerns.

Today, the company also announced $19.3 million in new funding, led by Xora Innovation, and the launch of its autonomous production operations agent, bringing continuous predictive intelligence across cloud, on-premises and hybrid systems. With NeuBird AI Falcon, NeuBird AI’s next-generation engine, platform, DevOps and SRE teams can now prevent issues before they impact services, resolve incidents in minutes and continuously optimize operations.

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

Ridge AI Emerges from Stealth with $2.6M Pre-Seed for AI-Native Analytics That Prove a Product Team’s Value in Hours

Business Wire

April 6, 2026

Ridge AI Emerges from Stealth with $2.6M Pre-Seed for AI-Native Analytics That Prove a Product Team's Value in Hours

Ridge AI announced its emergence from stealth and a $2.6 million pre-seed funding round led by Madrona, with participation from TheFounderVC and a group of angels that includes founding leaders from Tableau, Trifacta, and Streamlit. Built on decades of data visualization research and open-source technology, the company enables B2B software companies to ship interactive, customer-facing dashboards and AI data agents in hours — not months.

The company was founded by CEO Ellie Fields and Chief Scientist Jeff Heer. Fields spent more than a decade at Tableau before serving as Chief Product and Engineering Officer at Salesloft, where she experienced firsthand the problem Ridge is now solving. Demonstrating value to customers is a constant pressure for product leaders. It’s one that existing tools couldn’t meet and custom-built solutions addressed only by diverting months of engineering from core development priorities. Existing tools are slow to implement, costly to maintain, and still leave customers unable to answer their most important questions. Fields and Heer co-founded Ridge to fix that.

“In my career as a product leader I routinely experienced the problem where our team was creating real value for customers and had no good way to prove it,” said Ellie Fields, CEO and Co-Founder of Ridge AI. “We would spend months building dashboards instead of focusing on what made us different. That’s a terrible trade-off, and it’s exactly what Ridge eliminates.”

Heer is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Washington, co-director of the UW Interactive Data Lab, and helped create D3.js, Vega, and Mosaic — tools that underpin data visualization across the modern web. He previously co-founded Trifacta, which was acquired by Alteryx in 2022. His most recent research produced Mosaic, an open-source framework for building highly interactive, browser-native analytics using DuckDB and WebAssembly. It is the technical foundation on which Ridge is built.

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

That architecture is what makes Ridge categorically different from legacy embedded analytics tools. By processing data natively in the browser rather than on a server, Ridge delivers sub-second interactivity on datasets with millions of rows — without requiring cloud infrastructure that the software company has to pay for with every query. When a customer opens a Ridge-powered dashboard embedded in their SaaS product, they can ask follow-up questions in natural language and get immediate answers from Ridge’s AI data agent. What previously required months of engineering time to build, embed, maintain, and update can now go live in hours.

“I’ve had the pleasure of working with Ellie and partnering with Jeff for years now,” said Mark Nelson, Venture Partner, Madrona, and former CEO, Tableau and CTO, Concur. “I experienced the problem that Ridge is solving personally at Concur. Providing rich insights for customers into their data inside of our system was critical, but not our expertise or the unique focus of our products. Having then been part of Tableau, I can appreciate the specific focus and capabilities that need to be delivered to provide great data insights for users. Ridge is the first solution I’ve seen that brings this power to software providers in the form of both great visualizations and AI agents for users to interact with.”

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

The convergence of three technologies made this moment possible: large language models capable of reasoning over data, WebAssembly enabling near-native compute performance in the browser, and the Mosaic framework providing the visualization and interactivity layer to tie it together. That combination didn’t exist two years ago. Ridge was built specifically for it.

“This is what I would have wanted to see built for data in the age of AI.” — Chris Stolte, Co-Founder, Tableau

The angel round includes founding and senior leaders from Tableau, Trifacta, and Streamlit, representing some of the deepest institutional knowledge in data analytics and visualization.

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

Metazoa Announces Updates to Snapshot on Salesforce AppExchange

Business Wire

April 6, 2026

Infometry Launches INFOFISCUS Conversa for macOS to Interact with Enterprise AI Analytics Using Natural Language

New AI capability helps teams analyze org metadata context and take action to manage complex CRM environments

Metazoa announced a new Intelligent Assistant for its Snapshot platform on Salesforce AppExchange, the leading enterprise marketplace for partner apps and experts. The new capability helps organizations running Salesforce to analyze metadata context, diagnose issues, and take action to manage complex CRM environments.

Metazoa launches the Intelligent Assistant for Salesforce. AI that takes action on org complexity. Find Anything. Fix Everything.

The Metazoa Intelligent Assistant helps teams investigate metadata relationships, understand system complexity, and take action to modernize environments that support AI-driven applications and automation.

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

Metazoa Snapshot helps organizations analyze metadata, reduce technical debt, improve security, document complex environments, and execute large-scale transformation initiatives such as cleanup, optimization, org cloning, splits, and merges.

Metazoa Snapshot is currently available on AppExchange.

Metazoa Intelligent Assistant

The Metazoa Intelligent Assistant operates directly within the Snapshot platform and assists teams as they investigate issues, understand metadata relationships, and execute remediation tasks. The assistant understands the current screen context and helps users navigate reports, analyze metadata, and initiate actions.

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

The assistant can help teams:

Analyze metadata and org structure
Launch and navigate Snapshot reports
Identify technical debt and unused assets
Evaluate validation rules, permission sets, and Apex classes
Explain deployment errors and configuration issues
Generate documentation and architecture insights
Recommend and initiate remediation steps

Comments on the News

“Many AI tools today can describe issues but do not assist teams in resolving them,” said Bill Appleton, CTO of Metazoa. “The Metazoa Intelligent Assistant is designed to understand the structure of an org and help teams move from analysis to action directly within Snapshot.”

“Organizations using Salesforce will benefit from tools that understand the structure of their environments and help them take action safely,” said Jennifer Mercer, CEO of Metazoa. “The Intelligent Assistant helps teams investigate issues, launch analysis, and execute remediation steps inside the platform.”

Salesforce AppExchange, a leading enterprise marketplace for partner apps and experts, empowers companies, developers and entrepreneurs to build, market and grow in entirely new ways. Since its launch in 2006, the platform has grown to include more than 9,000 apps and experts, with over 14 million customer installs. AppExchange connects customers of all sizes and across industries to ready-to-install or customizable apps and Salesforce-certified consultants to solve any business challenge.

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

GMB Management Software for Multi Location Business

Globe Newswire

April 6, 2026

GBPPromote, a fast-growing Google Business Profile (GBP) management software, is gaining strong traction among agencies, franchises, enterprises, and individual businesses looking for a simpler and more scalable way to manage their local presence on Google.

Adopted widely by franchises, agencies, and enterprise teams for multi-location GMB management, the platform is built to handle the kind of operational work that usually takes hours — from updating multiple listings and managing reviews to posting content and tracking performance — all of which can now be done in minutes through a centralized system.

Following its launch, GBPPromote attracted over 1,000 users within its first month and has now grown to 2,500+ users, with a significant portion coming from agencies managing multiple client locations.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Miguel Lopes, CPO @ TrafficGuard

This growth reflects a clear shift in how businesses approach local SEO. Instead of juggling separate tools for rankings, reviews, posting, and reporting, teams are moving toward a single platform that brings everything together.

GBPPromote is built around that exact need.

One Platform to Manage, Optimize, and Scale Your Google Business Profiles

GBPPromote is built to simplify how businesses handle their Google presence — whether it’s a single location or thousands. With a centralized dashboard, everything is managed from one place, making day-to-day operations faster, more organized, and easier to scale.