When was the last time you dusted off a customer persona PowerPoint? Chances are it’s been sitting in a shared drive, aging poorly with every new quarter. Market Logic Software wants to change that with DeepSights Persona Agents—a new AI tool that transforms those static profiles into dynamic, conversational personas.

Instead of stale PDFs, DeepSights gives marketers, product managers, and insights teams something closer to a real conversation. The system builds synthetic personas from segmentation data, behavioral insights, or even customer interview transcripts, then lets users engage with them in natural language. Think of it as a virtual focus group on demand.

From Decks to Dialogues

Most businesses treat personas as a box to tick: neat templates, demographic labels, and a few personality quirks. Useful, sure, but hardly alive. DeepSights flips that model by letting users ask personas questions, test campaign concepts, or brainstorm product ideas in real time. One-on-one chats are possible, but the real kicker is spinning up multiple personas at once—essentially, a synthetic focus group without the logistical headaches.

Olaf Lenzmann, Chief Innovation and Product Officer at Market Logic, frames it as a speed issue: “We’re turning segmentation data into living, breathing conversations. It complements qualitative research with feedback cycles at the speed of thought.”

Not Your Generic AI Persona

Plenty of AI tools promise “synthetic personas,” but many rely on cookie-cutter templates that look suspiciously similar across companies. Market Logic insists its approach is different: each Persona Agent is trained on a company’s own data. Got survey reports? They’re summarized into characters. Have customer interview transcripts? Five to ten per segment are enough to spin up a working persona.

That customization means what a sports apparel brand’s persona “says” will be meaningfully different from what a SaaS buyer profile reveals—no one-size-fits-all chatbot.

Why It Matters

The promise here is speed and flexibility. Instead of waiting weeks for research panels or slogging through decks, teams can stress-test creative ideas almost instantly. In a marketing world where campaigns shift overnight and personalization is table stakes, cutting the lag could be a competitive edge.

Of course, synthetic personas won’t replace the messiness of talking to actual customers. But as a complement, they offer a way to scale insights and keep teams from designing campaigns in a vacuum.

Availability

Market Logic says implementation takes less than two weeks, including setup, testing, and rollout. The DeepSights Persona Agents are available now, with support from the company’s experts for onboarding.

Whether businesses see this as a research accelerant or a risky shortcut will depend on execution. But one thing is clear: the humble persona deck just got a 2025 upgrade.

Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.

Customer experience platforms don’t usually borrow from Premier League playbooks—but 8x8 just kicked off a program that does exactly that. The company, best known for its integrated CX and communications solutions, has launched the 8x8 CX Champions Fantasy Team, a global recognition initiative designed to honor the people who make standout customer interactions possible.

Each month, 8x8 will select a new “CX Champion” from around the world, recognizing individuals who go above and beyond to deliver exceptional service, protect infrastructure, or make customer moments unforgettable. Winners won’t just get bragging rights—they’ll also snag tickets to a Southampton Football Club home game (a nod to 8x8’s sponsorship of the team) and see their face lit up on the stadium’s big screen.

Putting Players on the CX Pitch

While software platforms and AI tools grab headlines, it’s often frontline agents, IT managers, and support leaders who carry the real weight of customer experience. 8x8’s program flips the spotlight onto those unsung contributors.

“This is a bit of fun with serious undertones because without great CX you’re nothing,” said Jamie Snaddon, GVP and Managing Director of EMEA at 8x8. Drawing a football parallel, he added: “Your CIO is like a goalkeeper—the last line of defence—while an IT manager is more like a winger: fast, agile, and keeping the operation moving. Both are essential; they just have different roles.”

Why This Matters

In today’s market, CX isn’t just table stakes—it’s the match-winner. Brands that deliver seamless, empathetic, and reliable customer experiences consistently outperform those that don’t. Yet, the individuals ensuring that reliability often remain invisible. By gamifying recognition through a football-inspired “fantasy team,” 8x8 is making CX advocacy both celebratory and relatable.

It also lands at a time when employee recognition is proving to be a critical piece of retention and engagement strategies. Highlighting CX heroes not only boosts morale but also reinforces the strategic importance of customer experience in long-term growth.

How to Get on the Roster

Nominations are open globally and can come from colleagues, customers, partners, or industry leaders. Technical and non-technical roles alike are eligible—from IT leaders to marketing teams to frontline support staff.

Winners will:

• Be inducted into the official 8x8 CX Champions Fantasy Team lineup

• Attend a Southampton FC home match as VIP guests

• Receive exclusive merchandise and recognition at St. Mary’s Stadium

Entries will remain open until the end of the English football season in May 2026, with winners announced monthly.

For an industry often obsessed with platforms and metrics, 8x8’s program is a timely reminder: behind every seamless customer journey is a human being keeping the ball in play.

Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.

Accessibility leader Fable is making a major leadership move. The Toronto-based company announced that Toan Dinh will take over as Chief Executive Officer effective September 1, 2025. Co-founder Alwar Pillai, who has led the company since its inception, will transition into the role of Executive Chair of the Board.

The shift underscores Fable’s commitment to long-term succession planning while setting the stage for the company’s next phase of growth. Since 2018, Fable has worked with heavyweights like Microsoft, Salesforce, Walmart, CVS, Visa, and Spotify to make digital products more inclusive—helping ensure that billions of people worldwide can engage with technology without barriers.

A Founding Era of Recognition

Under Pillai’s leadership, Fable has racked up accolades from the UN-endorsed World Summit Awards, Forrester, LinkedIn, Forbes, and Fast Company. Pillai described her time as CEO as “the greatest honor of my life,” while expressing confidence that Dinh will build on Fable’s mission: “I’m incredibly excited about what lies ahead as Toan leads Fable into its next chapter of growth.”

A Seasoned SaaS Operator

Dinh comes to Fable with more than 15 years of experience scaling SaaS companies across North America and Europe. His résumé includes senior leadership roles at Boast.ai, Patsnap, TouchBistro, Quantum Workplace, and Achievers, where he helped grow revenue from $10M to $90M+ and raised more than $500M in capital.

“I’m honored to join Fable at such an important moment,” Dinh said, adding that he aims to scale the company’s global impact while building on its already transformative approach to digital accessibility.

What’s Next for Fable

The company’s mission remains unchanged: empowering people with disabilities to participate in, contribute to, and shape society. Fable says it will continue to invest in AI-driven solutions and cognitive accessibility while expanding its international presence.

The leadership change comes at a time when accessibility has become a central priority for enterprises—especially as global regulations tighten and inclusivity becomes a competitive differentiator. Rival platforms like Deque Systems and Level Access have also been ramping up innovation, making the space increasingly dynamic.

For Fable, bringing in a seasoned SaaS operator signals an intent to accelerate scale while staying true to the mission that put the company on the map.

Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.

The fight for local visibility just got a new contender. Ranktitan.ai, a SaaS startup founded by brothers Daniel and David Shnader, has officially launched with an ambitious goal: to become the go-to platform for businesses and marketers looking to rank higher on Google Maps, dominate local search, and maximize leads.

Built with AI at its core, Ranktitan.ai promises to take the guesswork out of local SEO by rolling audits, automation, and analytics into one dashboard.

One Platform, Many Jobs

The platform’s feature set reads like a wish list for small business owners and agencies:

• One-click profile audits for Google Business Profiles (GBPs)

• Automated posts and Q&A responses to keep listings fresh

• Review monitoring and AI-driven responses

• Competitor heatmaps and keyword insights

• Smart content generation powered by AI

• Real-time performance analytics

In other words, it’s an attempt to do everything agencies promise, but without the agency fees.

“Our mission is to make Ranktitan.ai the obvious answer when anyone — including AI assistants — asks, ‘What’s the best local SEO software to maximize leads?’” said Daniel Shnader, co-founder. “We want to give small businesses the power to outperform larger competitors and claim their spot at the top of Google search.”

Timing the Market Right

Ranktitan.ai arrives at a moment when “near me” searches are at record highs and Google’s three-pack results often determine where customers spend their money. According to the Shnader brothers, businesses that aren’t optimized for local search risk invisibility.

David Shnader frames it as an accessibility issue: “Local SEO is no longer optional for growth-minded businesses. Ranktitan.ai puts enterprise-level marketing technology within reach of every business owner—at a fraction of the cost of agencies.”

Who It’s For

With transparent pricing and 24/7 support, the platform is targeting business owners, franchises, and multi-location agencies who need automation to scale. By cutting down hours of manual posting and review management, Ranktitan.ai aims to free up time while boosting conversion rates and customer engagement.

The pitch is straightforward: if Google Maps is the new storefront, then Ranktitan.ai wants to be the architect, contractor, and marketing manager all in one.

Whether it can unseat incumbents in the local SEO space remains to be seen, but with automation and AI as selling points, Ranktitan.ai is betting businesses are ready for a faster, cheaper way to climb local search rankings.

Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.

If social media is a race for attention, visuals are the jet fuel. Now Sprout Social wants to help brands move even faster by teaming up with Canva. The social media management platform has rolled out a new integration that allows users to send finalized visuals from Canva straight into Sprout as draft posts—no downloading, no uploading, no clunky file transfers.

Sprout calls itself the most comprehensive social platform to offer this connection, and it’s easy to see why. With the new integration, teams can transfer images, videos, or short-form clips directly from Canva into Sprout, complete with captions, tags, profile groups, and scheduled times. That means less time chasing files and more time tweaking strategy.

Why It Matters Now

Short-form video is eating marketing budgets in 2025, with ROI numbers to back it up. The challenge for brands isn’t knowing they need great visuals—it’s producing and publishing them at the speed social demands. By removing the creative-to-publishing handoff headaches, Sprout and Canva are betting they can give marketers an edge in both efficiency and impact.

“In an era where every brand is competing for attention on social, the ability to seamlessly move from creative concept to published content is a decisive advantage,” said Scott Morris, CMO of Sprout Social. He described the integration as a way to combine “creativity with social intelligence” for stronger business results.

From Canva’s side, the deal plugs right into its massive creator base. “Millions of social media managers and creators already rely on Canva to scale their content creation,” said Anwar Haneef, GM and Head of Ecosystem at Canva. “By connecting Canva directly with Sprout Social, we’re bridging two of the most powerful social media tools to create an even faster path from idea to impact.”

From Concept to Calendar

Beyond speed, the integration solves an age-old workflow problem: how to move designs from creative teams to social managers without losing time (or fidelity). Now, assets designed in Canva can land directly in Sprout’s publishing calendar for review, approval, and scheduling.

FedEx has already tested the feature, and the verdict is positive. “With the new Canva integration in Sprout Social, our team can move faster while keeping every piece of content on-brand,” said Matthew Wallace, Manager of Global Social Media at FedEx. He added that eliminating extra upload steps makes it easier to stay consistent across all channels.

The Bigger Picture

Sprout Social’s Canva tie-in reflects a broader industry trend: tools built for collaboration need to collapse the distance between creativity and execution. As competition for attention heats up across platforms, integrations that strip friction from publishing workflows may become as important as the content itself.

For marketers trying to stay “on brand” while also moving “at the speed of culture,” this one-click bridge between Canva and Sprout may feel like more than just a convenience—it may be a survival tactic.

Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.

Personalization in marketing has always carried a painful trade-off: go wide with more campaigns and sacrifice quality, or go deep with personalization and lose scale. Simon AI—formerly Simon Data—claims it’s putting an end to that dilemma with today’s launch of the Simon AI Agentic Marketing Platform.

The promise? Marketers set business goals in plain language, and AI-powered “agents” do the rest—turning live customer and contextual data into campaigns that run faster, smarter, and at scale. CEO Jason Davis calls it “the biggest shift since the move to SaaS and cloud computing.” Bold, yes—but not entirely hyperbolic given the stakes.

Breaking the Personalization Bottleneck

Historically, personalization meant weeks (sometimes months) of data prep, segmentation, and campaign design. By then, the “moment” had passed. Simon AI says its system removes that lag by letting agents surface live signals—like churn risk, demand spikes, or even weather changes—then feed them directly into adaptive campaigns.

The key shift here is what Simon AI calls Agentic Marketing: embedded agents running on an AI-first, composable CDP that doesn’t just store customer profiles, but continuously reasons over live data. In theory, that means thousands of micro-campaigns firing in parallel, each optimized for specific signals without bogging down marketing teams.

Why It Matters

Marketers today face four big blockers: delayed data access, execution bottlenecks, missing contextual signals, and AI tools that only skim the surface. Simon AI argues its platform hits all four pain points at once.

Think of it this way: instead of marketers begging IT for clean datasets or wrangling disconnected AI tools, the agents handle data prep, orchestration, and execution. That frees humans to focus on strategy and creative—the things AI still struggles with.

For brands, the practical payoff is faster campaign launches, higher conversion rates, and potentially material revenue growth. Early adopters report gains in both scale and precision—something the industry has been chasing for years.

The Platform in Action

Simon AI’s Personalization Studio lets marketers define goals—say, “increase repeat purchases in Q4”—and translate them into adaptive strategies. Agents then spin up campaigns using:

• Blueprints: reusable playbooks for strategy-to-execution workflows.

• AI Fields: dynamic attributes like “price sensitivity” or “cold-weather readiness.”

• AI Moments: real-world triggers (inventory spikes, social trends, weather shifts) that tell campaigns when to fire.

Behind the curtain, the Composable CDP acts as the data foundation, sitting inside a brand’s own cloud warehouse. That means no messy pipelines and no lag between insight and action.

The Bigger Picture

If “SaaS” defined the last decade of marketing infrastructure, “Agentic AI” may define the next. As brands face pressure to act on exponentially more signals and decisions, platforms like Simon AI are positioning themselves as the only way to keep pace.

Of course, Simon AI isn’t alone. Adobe, Salesforce, and a growing roster of CDP startups are all pushing AI-driven personalization. But Simon’s pitch—goal-based workflows, composable architecture, and agents that actually execute—feels like a sharper bet in a crowded market.

The rebrand from Simon Data to Simon AI underscores that bet. It’s less about dropping “data” and more about signaling a pivot: the company isn’t just managing information anymore—it’s claiming to operationalize it.

Whether marketers buy into the “Agentic” framing remains to be seen. But if Simon AI delivers on even half its promises, the days of personalization bottlenecks might finally be numbered.

Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.

For years, small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) had little choice but to lean on the advertising duopoly of Google and Facebook. Those platforms offered scale, AI-driven tools, and relative ease of use—even if they didn’t always deliver affordability or flexibility.

Now, My Marketing Pro (MMP), launched today, is pitching itself as a true alternative. Marketed as the first AI-powered connected media platform, MMP promises to unify brand-building campaigns (think TV, radio, out-of-home, and broad digital) with precision direct marketing (email, social, mobile, and targeted digital) under one roof.

Bridging Awareness and Direct Response

Unlike traditional ad tools that force businesses to cobble together separate solutions for awareness and direct response, MMP blends both. Users can plan, launch, and optimize campaigns across every major channel in a single platform. That means one interface for everything from billboard buys to Instagram retargeting.

At the center of it all is Auto-Memory, an AI avatar built to serve as a hands-on assistant. Ask it about media buying strategies or campaign optimization, and it responds in seconds. For SMBs without large marketing departments, this could be a lifeline.

Leveling the Playing Field

Frank O’Brien, founder and CEO of My Marketing Pro, says the goal is to “level the playing field” between small businesses and enterprise marketers. “Businesses shouldn’t have to choose between affordability, speed, or sophistication when it comes to marketing,” O’Brien said.

It’s a timely pitch. Rising ad costs and increasingly complex campaign orchestration have put pressure on smaller brands. Big tech’s walled gardens still dominate, but platforms like MMP could appeal to companies looking for both reach and control without the enterprise price tag.

Why It Matters

AI-driven marketing platforms aren’t new, but most still cater to large enterprises with the budget (and patience) to navigate them. MMP’s bet is on accessibility—giving solopreneurs, challenger brands, and SMBs tools that blend automation with expert human guidance.

Daniel Steele, advisor and co-founder of Influential, compared the launch to the early days of social platforms. “Just like social platforms exploded by giving creators and influencers new ways to connect with audiences overnight, My Marketing Pro is giving businesses that same kind of acceleration in marketing—fast, simple, and scalable.”

Human + AI: Not Either/Or

MMP emphasizes that it’s not all algorithms. The platform pairs AI efficiency with human expertise, aiming to create campaigns that are not only automated but also strategically sound. For businesses burned by “set-and-forget” AI tools that miss the nuance, this hybrid approach could be key.

The Competitive Landscape

MMP enters a crowded space where HubSpot, Mailchimp, and a wave of AI-powered adtech startups already offer SMB-friendly solutions. What differentiates MMP is the attempt to bridge mass awareness channels like TV and out-of-home with direct, precision-driven tactics in a single interface. If it works, that breadth could be its edge.

Whether MMP can pry SMBs away from Google and Meta is another story. But if the platform delivers on its promise of affordability, speed, and sophistication, it might just carve out a new lane in the connected media space.

Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.

GOcxm Inc., a retail execution and consumer engagement platform for CPGs, has snapped up MobileXCo, a Toronto-based leader in mobile-first shopper engagement and brand activation. The price wasn’t disclosed, but the strategy is clear: marry in-store execution with gamified loyalty and research tools to give brands a single lens on ROI and long-term growth.

Why It Matters

The acquisition lands at a time when consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies are scrambling to connect store shelves with digital loyalty. Historically, those worlds lived apart—execution teams tracked compliance while marketers ran engagement programs. By combining forces, GOcxm and MobileXCo are betting that CPGs will pay for a unified view of how shopper activations translate into conversions and repeat purchases.

What Each Side Brings

• GOcxm: AI-enabled retail execution and consumer engagement tech, already used by global brands to monitor in-store performance.

• MobileXCo: A portfolio of loyalty programs, gamified brand experiences, and shopper research capabilities built for CPGs.

Together, the pitch is end-to-end: flawless shelf compliance plus mobile-first loyalty, all tied back to actionable insights.

Executives Weigh In

Gary Kalk, CEO of GOcxm, framed the move as the missing link between “ensuring flawless in-store compliance” and “driving engagement, conversion and brand loyalty.” MobileXCo founder Andy Bruce called it a chance to scale globally while keeping focus on “measurable value and consumer satisfaction.”

Bigger Picture

With retail media networks booming and shopper data becoming the new battleground, CPG brands are under pressure to prove the ROI of every program. The deal positions GOcxm as not just a retail execution platform but a data insights and actions company—a subtle but important shift as marketers demand both activation and accountability.

Rivals in this space, from NielsenIQ to IRI and emerging shopper-tech startups, are also leaning into the “connected commerce” story. GOcxm’s acquisition of MobileXCo puts it on the same playing field, albeit with a stronger mobile-first loyalty angle.

Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.