Omnisend’s latest survey of 170 U.S.-based SMB ecommerce owners paints a blunt picture of selling online in 2025: rising tariffs are hitting small retailers where it hurts—already razor-thin margins—and forcing moves that shoppers will feel almost immediately.

More than half (54%) of respondents say tariffs have pushed them to make “significant changes” to their businesses. Those changes aren’t subtle. Nearly four in ten (39%) have raised retail prices, 29% have switched suppliers, and 19% have cut down their product selections. It’s the kind of belt-tightening that larger retailers can often buffer with volume or cash reserves, but SMBs simply can’t.

Most Retailers Went Straight to Price Hikes

Among the retailers who’ve already adjusted their prices, the increases reflect a spectrum of necessity rather than strategy:

• 27% raised prices by up to 5%

• 52% raised prices by 5–10%

• ~20% raised prices by more than 10%

For many small ecommerce brands, absorbing rising import costs just isn’t an option. Consumers are already noticing higher price tags and fewer perks, while retailers quietly prune slow-moving SKUs to keep margins alive.

“Tariffs are coming on top of already higher costs for shipping, labor, and marketing, and most online retailers don't have the same cushion big-box chains do,” says Marty Bauer, ecommerce expert at Omnisend. In other words: when the pressure hits, SMBs don’t get to play defense for long—they have to move.

If Costs Rise Again, Most Expect Shoppers Will Pay

Omnisend pushed the scenario further by asking how businesses would handle a sudden 10% increase in costs—a realistic possibility given ongoing tariff swings and unpredictable global supply chains. The resulting picture is even starker:

• 46% would raise product prices

• 16% would increase shipping fees

• 16% would cut discounts

• 10% would reduce product variety

• Only 5% would consider layoffs

About 78% of SMB retailers would make shopping more expensive before touching staff or operations—proof that for many small ecommerce companies, labor isn’t the first lever to pull; pricing is.

This lines up with broader ecommerce trends over the past two years: customers are becoming increasingly price-sensitive, brand loyalty is thinning, and marketplaces like Amazon continue to condition shoppers to expect rock-bottom prices and fast delivery. That makes any increase—no matter how justified—feel riskier for independent retailers.

“When prices keep moving, shoppers change how they buy,” Bauer explains. “They switch to whoever offers the best value at that moment. That puts smaller retailers in a tough spot—they have to raise prices to stay alive, but every increase makes it harder to keep customers.”

The Broader Implication: Flexibility Is Now a Survival Skill

For SMB ecommerce operators, this environment demands real-time adaptability—dynamic pricing, diversified suppliers, and tighter product curation. The rise of AI-driven forecasting tools may offer some buffer, but the fundamental truth remains: tariffs and cost spikes don’t hit everyone equally, and smaller players are absorbing the hardest blows.

As tariff policy continues to evolve through 2025, the competitive gap between big-box giants and independent merchants could widen even further. If the market doesn’t stabilize soon, expect more retailers to cut down on SKUs, restructure fulfillment perks, or rethink their sourcing entirely.

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Omada A/S, one of the long-running specialists in Identity Governance and Administration (IGA), has rolled out a major enhancement to its platform: Access Intelligence, an upgraded capability that blends role intelligence, role visibility, and advanced analytics into a single operational loop. For organizations drowning in scattered identity data and inconsistent access models, it’s a timely update—and one that pushes IGA further toward a continuous, data-driven discipline rather than a periodic checkbox exercise.

This move lands squarely in the middle of a shifting identity security landscape. Enterprises have spent the last decade layering SaaS apps on top of cloud identities on top of HRIS directories, often creating a labyrinth of human and machine identities. Each system interprets “identity” differently, leaving security teams wrestling with conflicting entitlements, stale roles, and governance bottlenecks. Omada’s new upgrade aims to cut straight through that complexity.

The Identity Data Problem: Too Many Silos, Too Little Insight

If you ask any cloud-first enterprise to map all the systems that manage identity, access, or entitlements, you’ll probably get a deep breath and a whiteboard full of arrows. HR systems store core identity attributes, AD and Azure AD maintain corporate identity and access, SaaS tools create their own permissioning layers, and cloud infrastructure introduces yet another way to define privileges.

This sprawl translates into what security analysts politely call “governance challenges.” In reality? It’s blind spots. Lots of them.

Omada says Access Intelligence consolidates identity and entitlement data from all connected sources into a single correlated view, giving teams a full picture of:

• Who has what access

• Where machine identities intersect with human roles

• Which entitlements are dormant, risky, or redundant

• Where historical access changes have created privilege creep

In the IGA world, this level of correlation is table stakes—but actually achieving it is another story. Many vendors promise visibility; few deliver it without drowning security teams in dashboards no one has time to interpret. Omada’s pitch is that the visibility is not just centralized—it’s contextual, actionable, and continuously updated.

Analytics That Go Beyond “Who Has Access to What”

Traditional IGA tools tend to excel at certifications and provisioning workflows, but often struggle with the ongoing pattern recognition that identifies access drift. Omada is pushing harder into analytics that surface emerging problems, not just those that already triggered alarms.

Access Intelligence applies analytics to uncover issues that a periodic review simply wouldn’t catch:

• Dormant entitlements never used but still active

• Privilege drift where users accumulate access over time without governance approval

• Hidden dependencies that complicate role cleanup

• Policy vs. practice gaps where entitlements don’t match intended role definitions

• Anomalous access patterns detected in real time

That analytic layer matters. As identity-based attacks continue to dominate breach reports, security teams increasingly need tools that interpret access behavior rather than just catalog roles. Microsoft, Okta, and SailPoint have all invested heavily in AI-powered identity risk scoring. Omada’s move keeps it competitive in a market where the winners will be the ones that can turn identity data into business-ready intelligence, not just dashboards.

Keeping Role Models Honest—and Up to Date

One of the most overlooked challenges in IGA is keeping roles accurate. What starts as a clean, well-designed role model often mutates over time: a few entitlements added here, a set of emergency privileges forgotten there, a reorganization that changes business needs but not governance structures.

Access Intelligence tracks this drift and flags when:

• Existing roles become too broad

• Roles overlap or become redundant

• Entitlements no longer match job needs

• Business shifts require role restructuring

Instead of waiting for an annual audit—or the next breach—organizations can adjust their role models proactively.

This is where Omada’s approach mirrors broader industry momentum. The market has moved from “build a good role model once” to “treat role models as living structures.” Continuous governance is the new baseline, and Omada’s update squarely aligns with that shift.

Turning Insight Into Action: Continuous Correlation and Remediation

All the visibility and analytics in the world won’t help if remediation requires manual sifting and endless approvals. Omada ties its new intelligence engine directly to remediation workflows. That means a governance team can move from detection → analysis → corrective action inside one system, without bouncing between tools.

The platform supports:

• Real-time anomaly detection

• Embedded remediation workflows

• Continuous hygiene checks

• Automated suggestions for role refinements

For organizations struggling to shrink their attack surface without slowing down the business, this triad—visibility, analytics, remediation—can be a difference-maker.

“Access Intelligence bridges the gap between IGA and business-driven security needs,” says Michael Garrett, CEO of Omada. “By unifying visibility, analytics, and remediation, it enables organizations to shrink their attack surface, maintain compliance, and support business agility.”

Translated: companies don’t just want to stay compliant. They want governance that keeps up with hybrid work, continuous SaaS adoption, and evolving cloud architectures. The old quarterly-review model simply doesn’t cut it.

How This Stacks Up Against the Market

Omada is entering a fast-accelerating race among IGA players to tame identity complexity. SailPoint has made aggressive AI investments, Okta is pushing deeper into identity threat detection, and Microsoft continues to weave identity risk scoring into its cloud ecosystem. What Omada brings to the table is focused depth: tight integration between role modeling, analytics, and remediation, without the bloat of broader security platforms.

For mid-to-large enterprises that aren’t ready to adopt entire identity security suites—or don’t want to lock themselves into a single vendor stack—Omada’s Access Intelligence upgrade offers a more modular path to modern governance.

Why This Matters for 2025 and Beyond

Identity remains the modern enterprise’s weakest link, and attackers know it. With machine identities exploding, SaaS permissions multiplying, and employees working across more systems than ever, governance fatigue is a real risk. Continuous, analytics-driven IGA isn’t just a “nice to have”—it’s the only way to keep access aligned with real-world business needs.

Omada’s latest enhancement doesn’t reinvent IGA, but it does refine it. By unifying identity visibility, analytics, and remediation, Access Intelligence helps reduce risk while giving governance teams something they’ve desperately needed: clarity.

As organizations continue accelerating digital operations, identity sprawl will only get messier. Vendors who can simplify that complexity without slowing the business will define the next era of identity governance. Omada clearly intends to be one of them.

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Oracle is doubling down on multicloud—this time in Canada. The company has officially launched Oracle Database@Google Cloud in the North America-Northeast 1 (Montreal) and North America-Northeast 2 (Toronto) Google Cloud regions, giving Canadian organizations a direct path to run Oracle’s flagship AI-driven database services inside Google Cloud while keeping data local for sovereignty and compliance needs.

It’s a strategic expansion that brings Oracle’s high-performance Exadata platforms, Autonomous AI Database, and Autonomous AI Lakehouse into Google Cloud’s backyard, building on the unusual but increasingly valuable partnership between the two tech giants. For Canadian enterprises—especially those in regulated sectors—this move delivers something they’ve been demanding for years: true multicloud optionality without awkward networking workarounds or cross-border data risk.

Why This Matters: Multicloud, But Without the Multicloud Headaches

For years, multicloud has been the strategy companies talk about more than they execute. Oracle and Google Cloud are trying to change that by offering something rare: native Oracle database services running on OCI hardware inside Google Cloud regions, with low-latency integration to BigQuery, Vertex AI, and Gemini.

For customers, that means:

• Oracle databases stay on Oracle’s optimized infrastructure

• Applications stay on Google Cloud

• Data stays in-region to meet strict Canadian compliance rules

• Partners can resell and integrate the offering directly through Google Cloud Marketplace

In practical terms, enterprises get Oracle’s database performance and reliability combined with Google Cloud’s AI ecosystem—without juggling cloud networking gymnastics or sacrificing sovereignty. It’s a direction the industry is increasingly warming to, as workloads become more distributed and AI ambitions grow.

“As more organizations in Canada embrace multicloud architectures, this provides the industry-leading reliability and performance that is required,” said Vijay Bangaru, VP of Multicloud at OCI. Google Cloud echoes the sentiment: Canadian organizations want AI-powered modernization, but they also want optionality.

What’s Available on Day One

Canadian customers can now run a suite of Oracle’s top-tier database technologies inside Google Cloud regions:

Oracle Exadata Database Service on Dedicated Infrastructure

Designed for heavy-duty workloads—AI, analytics, OLTP—Exadata X11M support and Oracle RAC provide the performance and uptime that traditional enterprise systems live and die by.

Oracle Autonomous AI Database

This fully managed, AI-infused platform automates patching, tuning, scaling, backups, and threat detection. With built-in ML capabilities and support for more than 48 billion queries per hour, it’s built for organizations that want high performance without high overhead.

Oracle Autonomous AI Lakehouse

Built on Apache Iceberg and integrated with Oracle AI Database 26ai and Exadata, the Lakehouse extends analytics and AI across Google BigQuery and BigLake. The cross-platform flexibility is a notable win for teams dealing with large, scattered data estates.

Oracle AI Database 26ai

Packed with more than 300 new features, including Hybrid Vector Search and JSON Relational Duality Views, the new release strengthens Oracle’s pitch that AI-first database design is the next frontier. Integrations with LLMs mean organizations can blend private enterprise data with public models to surface richer insights.

Oracle Zero Data Loss Autonomous Recovery Service

Real-time protection with sub-second recovery points gives customers the ability to withstand outages and ransomware attacks without losing critical transactions. Automated validation, immutable backups, and incremental-forever architecture reduce operational risk.

Multicloud Gets a Partner-Friendly Boost

Alongside the Canadian launch, Oracle and Google unveiled an industry-first partner program that lets Google Cloud and Oracle partners purchase and resell Oracle Database@Google Cloud through Google Cloud Marketplace. Deloitte Canada has already thrown its support behind the initiative, framing it as a major accelerator for multicloud modernization.

To participate, partners must belong to both Google Cloud Partner Advantage and Oracle PartnerNetwork—another sign the companies want their ecosystems tightly aligned as demand scales.

A Growing Global Footprint

The new Toronto region joins an increasingly long list of supported Google Cloud regions offering Oracle Database@Google Cloud, spanning Europe, Asia-Pacific, North America, and Latin America. More locations are scheduled over the next year, including Seoul, Osaka, Delhi, Madrid, Paris, Milan, Turin, Dammam, Mexico, and Santiago—mirroring Oracle’s aggressive global push to make AI-enabled multicloud more accessible.

This expansion underscores a broader trend: customers want cloud choice, performance guarantees, and region-specific compliance—all at the same time. And vendors are finally aligning with that reality.

Canadian Enterprises Get What They’ve Been Waiting For

With this launch, enterprises in Canada—financial institutions, public sector agencies, healthcare networks, and more—can now keep sensitive data within borders while tapping into Oracle’s database performance and Google Cloud’s AI capabilities.

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Channel99—the self-described AI-powered decision engine for B2B marketers—is rolling out new functionality that taps its industry-leading account identification to build smarter, higher-performing audiences and activate them across multiple channels. It’s the latest move in the company’s push to simplify B2B targeting, eliminate wasted spend, and tighten the connection between brand investments and measurable pipeline results.

For marketers frustrated by fragmented intent signals and inconsistent audience quality, this update aims to close the loop from awareness through revenue by unifying channel data, applying AI recommendations, and delivering clearer attribution than most ABM platforms traditionally offer.

A Smarter, AI-Driven Approach to B2B Audience Building

Channel99’s new capabilities let marketers create precise B2B audiences using straightforward rules that map to the entire funnel:

• Top-of-funnel: Build target account lists for awareness and early-stage programs.

• Mid-funnel: Create buyer-group segments designed to accelerate pipeline.

• Bottom-of-funnel: Zero in on the exact influencers and decision-makers tied to active deals.

AI then recommends the best-performing channels for each audience—reducing the guesswork that typically leads to wasted budget on poorly matched platforms.

Founder & CEO Chris Golec frames it as a fix for one of B2B’s biggest inefficiencies: “Leveraging AI to recommend which channels make the most sense for a particular audience and desired outcome eliminates a lot of the financial inefficiency that exists in B2B today.”

One View of Intent: Web Activity, G2, LinkedIn and More

Channel99 ingests engagement signals not just from first-party website activity, but also from high-value intent sources like G2 and LinkedIn. This consolidates a notoriously scattered signal ecosystem into a single source of truth.

In September, Channel99 expanded its LinkedIn integration to measure view-through attribution—connecting both organic and paid social touchpoints directly to pipeline activity. For B2B teams accustomed to murky attribution models, this level of clarity is rare.

Tealium’s Director of Marketing Operations, John Flesher, says the difference is tangible: “That clarity helps us improve the ROI of our digital investments, double down on key programs, and drive efficiency.”

Activation Across Today’s Most Critical B2B Channels

The platform now supports audience activation across:

• LinkedIn

• Google

• Microsoft

• Facebook

• YouTube

• Audyence

And more are coming this year, including integrations with G2, TechTarget, The TradeDesk, NetLine, StackAdapt, and Reddit. The expansion indicates Channel99’s ambition to become a neutral, cross-channel intelligence layer sitting above the entire B2B media ecosystem.

Audyence CEO Karl Van Buren calls the partnership a long-awaited shift: “Connecting and converting brand investments into top-of-funnel sales activity and pipeline has been a dream for way too long—now it is not only possible, but fully automated.”

Built for the Modern B2B Stack

Marketers can get started with a free account and connect CRM systems, media channels, and intent providers in minutes. AI-native dashboards deliver recommendations on campaign mix, audiences, and performance optimizations. For teams with more mature data practices, Channel99 exposes its data for ingestion into CDPs and warehouses.

The bigger picture is clear: B2B revenue teams are hungry for better signal quality, stronger attribution, and smarter targeting. Channel99 is positioning itself as the connective tissue among disconnected platforms, helping marketers move beyond last-click metrics and gut-feel channel planning.

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eclicktech, the Shenzhen-listed MarTech company accelerating its cross-border reach through AIGC innovation, arrived at Affiliate World Asia (AWA) 2025 in Bangkok with unmistakable momentum. Across two packed days, the company debuted upgraded AI solutions, released a forward-looking global white paper, and gathered over 150 industry leaders for a high-profile networking event that explored the next phase of AI-driven marketing transformation.

For an industry racing to adopt agentic AI workflows, tighter automation, and more intelligent global growth strategies, eclicktech used AWA 2025 to make its case: the future of cross-border performance marketing isn’t incremental—it’s algorithmic, predictive, and increasingly autonomous.

AI Spark Night: Where Global Tech Leaders Compared Notes on 2025 and Beyond

On opening night, eclicktech hosted AI Spark Night, a gathering that quickly became one of the most talked-about side events at AWA. With more than 150 partners from platforms including Google, Tencent Cloud, Qpon, Alibaba Cloud, and Taboola, the evening functioned as both a pulse check on where the global advertising industry is heading—and an unofficial preview of where the next year of AI investment may concentrate.

William Liu, General Manager of Yeahmobi (an eclicktech brand), set the tone early. He underscored the industry's acceleration toward intelligence-led operations and emphasized how eclicktech’s 2022 IPO (301171.SZ) has fueled deeper investment in AI product R&D.

“The global advertising industry is shifting faster toward intelligent and data-driven operations,” Liu said. “eclicktech will keep empowering partners to achieve stable, sustainable growth across diverse markets.” It was less a statement of intent and more of a strategic thesis: the companies that thrive in the next three years will be those that operationalize AI at every stage of the funnel.

Major Release: The “2026 Global AI Marketing Trends and Value White Paper”

The centerpiece of AI Spark Night was the early release of “2026 Global AI Marketing Trends and Value White Paper,” a research project co-developed with Alibaba Cloud and shaped by contributions from Google, PubMatic, and BigoAds.

If the AI-powered marketing category is entering what many analysts call the Agentic AI era—where systems can act, optimize, and reason with minimal human intervention—eclicktech’s white paper positions itself as one of the first roadmaps for brands navigating that shift.

The document focuses on:

• How agentic AI is reshaping cross-border advertising models

• What new data pipelines are required for intelligent audience orchestration

• The rise of hybrid decision systems blending AIGC with human oversight

• Increasing automation in creative production, media buying, and analytics

• The speed at which AI is reducing time-to-market for emerging brand categories

In many ways, the white paper attempts to capture the inflection point global advertisers find themselves in: AI is no longer an optimization layer. It’s becoming a foundation for market entry, operations, and growth strategy.

AI Drive 2.0: eclicktech’s Next-Gen Intelligent Digital Marketing Stack

AWA attendees spent much of the exhibition floor huddled around eclicktech’s AI Drive 2.0, the company’s upgraded intelligent digital marketing solution. Positioned as a full-funnel AI growth engine, AI Drive 2.0 brings together AIGC-powered creative generation, dynamic optimization algorithms, and automated traffic orchestration.

Across verticals—DTC, finance, gaming, and mobile apps—marketers explored several standout elements of the updated platform:

1. Full-Funnel AI Traffic Synergy

AI Drive 2.0 promises to unify performance signals across awareness, acquisition, and retention channels. Instead of optimizing campaigns in isolation, the platform uses a shared intelligence layer to reshape creative, audience targeting, and budget allocation in real time.

2. AIGC-Backed Creative and Localization Engine

Global brands often cite creative localization as a bottleneck. The new system allows rapid generation of compliant, culturally aligned creative variants, cutting production cycles dramatically.

3. Predictive Cross-Border Insights

Drawing from multi-market intent signals, eclicktech aims to forecast growth opportunities—helping brands enter new markets with more confidence and less blind spend.

4. Agentic Optimization

AI Drive 2.0 takes steps toward automating cross-channel execution, adjusting campaign parameters based on performance context, seasonality, and competitive shifts.

Together, these capabilities positioned eclicktech as one of the standout exhibitors, not just showcasing tools but framing how cross-border marketing may evolve in the next 18 months.

Riding the Wave of Global AI-Driven Marketing Expansion

eclicktech’s strong presence at AWA 2025 mirrors a broader industry reality: cross-border commerce continues to surge, but the operational complexities of global marketing require more automation, tighter intelligence, and real-time adaptability.

Across markets with fast-moving consumer behaviors—Southeast Asia, LATAM, India, and the Middle East—brands are under pressure to scale faster while reducing inefficiencies. Agentic AI and AIGC tools promise to do exactly that.

From attribution to audience modeling to creative iteration, the next wave of marketing innovation is rooted in intelligently reducing friction. eclicktech is positioning itself at that intersection: a platform not just for activation, but for end-to-end AI-driven decisioning.

Strategic Signal: eclicktech Is Building a More Global, More Open Ecosystem

The company closed its AWA appearance with a clear message: its future is increasingly international, collaborative, and ecosystem-driven. With deeper investment in AI following its IPO, and continued partnerships across cloud, adtech, and data intelligence providers, eclicktech is laying groundwork for what it calls a “smarter, more open, mutually beneficial global marketing future.”

AWA 2025 served as a proof point. The firm wasn’t simply attending the conference—it was shaping the narrative around how global performance marketing is being rebuilt through AI.

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Rivergate Marketing one of the few agencies dedicated exclusively to control system integrators and industrial automation companies—is expanding its consulting portfolio with a new two-day Go-to-Market (GTM) Strategy Workshop, built to give technical organizations the clarity and strategic foundation they need before launching into execution.

The move comes as more engineering-driven firms realize that marketing tactics aren’t effective without a well-aligned strategy beneath them. Rivergate says demand is rising among system integrators and automation firms seeking a unified direction, consistent messaging, and focus areas that match real market opportunities.

Why This Matters: Automation Firms Want Strategy Before Tactics

Marketing within industrial automation is notoriously complex. Technical firms often juggle niche service offerings, long sales cycles, and specialized buyer personas that don’t respond to generic messaging. Rivergate’s team—after sixteen years of exclusive focus on this sector—has seen the same gap repeatedly: companies want growth, but lack clarity on how to position themselves or where to invest.

That demand helped shape the expanded offering. Rivergate points to a recent engagement with a major North American control system integrator where its team facilitated an on-site, two-day workshop to unify strategy, build a messaging foundation, and create a complete GTM plan within ten weeks. The success of that engagement helped formalize the framework now available to the broader market.

“Every company has its own strengths, challenges, and opportunities—and its own vision for growth,” said Georgia Whalen, President of Rivergate Marketing. “Our workshop is built around each client’s unique situation. It’s a highly collaborative process that brings clarity to leadership teams and sets the stage for confident execution.”

Inside the Two-Day GTM Strategy Workshop

Rivergate’s workshop is designed as a structured, fast-moving strategic process. Over 48 hours, the team leads leadership groups through exercises and analyses that translate technical capabilities into commercial strategy.

The workshop includes:

• Competitive landscape analysis

• Market and vertical prioritization

• Buyer persona development

• Value proposition creation

• Messaging and positioning frameworks

• Campaign roadmapping

• KPI and success metric definition

The result is a complete, customized go-to-market plan tailored to the company’s industry, capabilities, buyers, and competitive pressures—not a recycled template.

Christine McQuilkin, Vice President at Rivergate, says that specificity is exactly what technical organizations need: “This workshop distills everything we've learned from years of partnering with system integrators and industrial automation companies. What we deliver is not generic. It’s specific to the client’s offering, their team, and their market environment.”

A Strategy-First Approach for a Market in Transition

Industrial automation is experiencing rapid change—digital transformation, reshoring, workforce shortages, and the rise of smart manufacturing are all reshaping market dynamics. As integrators transition from project-driven operations to more scalable solutions or managed services models, marketing strategy becomes a differentiator instead of an afterthought.

That’s where Rivergate’s specialization stands out. Unlike broad B2B agencies, Rivergate speaks the language of integrators, understands the complexity of automation projects, and knows how technical buyers evaluate risk, reliability, and expertise.

With dozens of system integrator clients over more than a decade and a half, the firm has built a repeatable—but always tailored—framework designed to give industrial players something many have lacked: a clear, confident path to market.

The Bigger Picture

The expanded GTM consulting offering signals Rivergate’s intention to move deeper into strategic advisory. For technical organizations that rarely have internal marketing strategists—or who struggle to align leadership around a unified growth direction—this kind of structured, high-touch workshop may become more of a necessity as competition intensifies.

For an industry built on engineering precision, Rivergate is betting that equal precision on the marketing side will give automation firms a strategic edge.

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Profound—the AI marketing platform built to help brands understand and shape how they appear across AI ecosystems like ChatGPT—has launched the public beta of Workflows, a new automation layer designed to solve one of marketing’s most urgent challenges: producing human-grade, AI-optimized content at scale without slipping into generic “AI slop.”

If the past decade was about optimizing for search engines, the next one belongs to Answer Engines—AI systems that provide direct, synthesized responses instead of links. For many brands, this shift has triggered a scramble to decode visibility inside models that don’t follow the rules of traditional SEO. But even with the right insights, turning analysis into action has required juggling data sources, manually building content, and hoping the work aligns with how AI systems interpret and surface information.

Profound Workflows is the company’s answer to this complexity—a single operational hub that streamlines insight gathering, content generation, approval routing, publishing, and ongoing performance measurement.

Tackling the AI Content Quality Problem

“The problem we are addressing is that marketers want to use AI to create marketing, but are understandably terrified of creating ‘AI slop,’” said James Cadwallader, Co-founder and CEO of Profound.

Cadwallader’s core thesis: AI content quality is determined by context, not creativity. The richer and more accurate the inputs, the more reliable and human-like the outputs. Profound says it has the largest dataset of real user prompts, deep visibility into AI citations, and proprietary optimization models—allowing Workflows to feed AI systems the context they need to generate meaningfully better content.

The goal is not just faster production, but aligned production—content that matches how AI models interpret topics, entities, and brand signals.

Built on AEO Data, Not Automation for Automation’s Sake

The company’s roots are in Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), a field that barely existed two years ago but is now driving marketing roadmaps at major brands. Profound’s infrastructure includes:

• The industry’s largest corpus of real AI prompt data

• Deep visibility into how models cite and reference brand content

• Proprietary models that predict and optimize for AI visibility

• Analytics tracking how often brands appear in AI-generated answers

Workflows layers automation on top of this foundation, turning insight into production. Marketers can:

• Aggregate data across platforms

• Conduct deep competitive and topic research

• Scrape top-performing pages

• Auto-generate briefs based on AI preference patterns

• Create content with AI, fueled by performance data

• Route drafts through approvals

• Push final content directly to CMS platforms

• Track AI and Answer Engine visibility in real time

The platform effectively unifies what used to be a fragmented stack—analytics in one system, content in another, production scattered across docs and spreadsheets.

“Profound Workflows has allowed us to thoughtfully incorporate AI search into our content optimizations,” said Sarah Shaffer, Organic Growth Specialist at Plaid.

Closing the Loop: From Insight to Impact

One of the biggest problems in AI-era marketing is measurement. Traditional analytics answer questions about traffic and search rankings—not how often or in what context your brand appears in AI responses.

Because Workflows integrates directly with Profound’s AI agent traffic analytics, marketers can see how content adjustments affect AI visibility, brand perception, and answer share. Optimization recommendations update automatically as models evolve.

“Profound Workflows opens up powerful automation possibilities that enable our SMEs to focus on the innovative work that truly requires human attention,” said Fiona Erickson, SEO Lead at MongoDB.

This closed-loop feedback cycle is the cornerstone of Workflows: strategy, production, and performance all inform one another in real time.

A New Standard for AI-Era Marketing Infrastructure

Profound’s move comes as AI search reshapes the digital landscape. Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE), OpenAI’s ChatGPT Browsing, and Anthropic’s Claude Answers are already shifting user behavior away from traditional web search. Companies that once lived and died by SEO now face a fragmented, model-driven content economy where visibility is harder to track, measure, and influence.

By bundling insight, automation, and analytics into a unified system, Profound is positioning Workflows as the control center modern marketers increasingly need—especially as Answer Engines become the default discovery layer for consumers and B2B buyers alike.

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ZS is deepening its long-standing partnership with Salesforce by integrating its ZAIDYN® intelligence platform directly into Salesforce’s Agentforce Life Sciences, beginning January 2026. The collaboration is designed to elevate commercial and medical performance across the life sciences sector through advanced omnichannel orchestration, smarter field execution, and AI-powered recommendations.

The integration brings ZAIDYN’s life-sciences-native intelligence into Salesforce workflows, enabling teams to accelerate therapy delivery and operate with greater precision.

Three Core Capabilities Delivered Through the Integration

1. Personalized, Compliant HCP Engagement

ZAIDYN Customer Engagement will embed rich, life-science-specific HCP insights directly within Salesforce. Reps and marketers can access context-rich intelligence to drive more personalized and compliant interactions, improving relationship quality and commercial impact.

2. Stronger Field Effectiveness and Measurable Performance

With ZAIDYN Field Performance connected to Salesforce, organizations can optimize territory coverage, leverage dynamic deployment models, and build performance-driven incentive plans. Field teams will have clearer visibility into results, enabling them to address care gaps more effectively.

3. Agentforce Expanded with Life-Sciences-Trained AI Agents

ZAIDYN enhances Agentforce with domain-trained agents that automate and recommend next best actions. Capabilities include:

• HCP targeting and suggestions

• Personalized content selection

• Dynamic audience prioritization

• Predictive next best actions

This empowers teams to anticipate needs, act faster, and scale decision support.

Flexible Integration Options

The rollout will support multiple approaches, including:

• APIs

• MuleSoft integration

• Data Cloud packages

• Agent deployments through AgentExchange

This ensures organizations can adopt the intelligence layer using their preferred technical model.

Leadership Commentary

“ZS’s ready-to-use data and intelligence engine acts as an extension of Agentforce Life Sciences, allowing Salesforce users to seamlessly access deep industry insights from ZAIDYN,” said Tara Helm, VP Agentforce Life Sciences Strategy, Salesforce.

Jaideep Bajaj, Chairman Emeritus and head of ZS’s platforms and products business, added:
“When Salesforce is the chosen platform, ZS makes it work for life sciences. With ZAIDYN intelligence, we can strengthen field planning with the intelligence and orchestration of a life-sciences-native system.”

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