Publisher-first approach aims to deliver safe inventory while providing a path to quality

Sovrn, a publisher technology platform that helps content creators remain independent and thrive on the open web, today announced its "publisher first" approach to tackling made-for-advertising (MFA) sites in its inventory, effectively ensuring that all private-marketplace deals transacted through the Sovrn Ad Exchange are 100% MFA free.

Working with Chris Kane, Founder of Jounce Media, Sovrn created a framework to audit and assess its publisher inventory on an ongoing basis to dynamically pinpoint and remove sites that meet Jounce's MFA classification criteria. These changes assure media buyers that their ad spend through Sovrn's private deals deliver a better return on investment against key business outcomes and confirms its commitment to solving for sustainability and quality while eliminating waste and inefficiency. Furthermore, Sovrn's attention-based deals allow advertisers to target highly engaged inventory, resulting in a three times higher response rate.

"Sovrn's decision to block MFA inventory by default from all private marketplaces does not just serve buyer interests. It also rebalances revenue toward the most premium publishers," said Chris Kane, Founder of Jounce Media. "The long-term durability of the open internet requires ad tech platforms to create incentives that financially reward the highest quality content creators, and this is exactly what Sovrn is doing."

In addition, Sovrn has built into its framework a way to identify former MFA publishers who are making investments to rebuild their businesses around organic traffic. Rather than enacting a ban on sites identified as MFA, Sovrn is committed to providing programmatic tools and data insights — including ad performance and CPM data, benchmarking analytics, and audience engagement — that deliver an objective view of the opportunities and incentives for publishers to reconsider their business practices.

The release of ANA's supply chain transparency study has shone a spotlight on how suspect inventory can hijack and divert targeted media spend by taking advantage of the complexity of the open web programmatic marketplace. Not only does an unnecessarily complex system that relies on trading and reselling ad space, rather than on transparency and directness, drain revenue from publisher pockets, it decreases advertisers' return on spend — and most of all — makes the consumer experience miserable. However, since establishing direct relationships with every ad buyer isn't feasible for all but the largest open web publishers, Sovrn is focused on creating a more transparent system that delivers the right checks and balances for buyers while ensuring independent publishers drive value from their most important asset: their content.

"Our goal at Sovrn is to add value to the advertising supply chain for both sellers and buyers," said Walter Knapp, CEO of Sovrn. "Sovrn takes a long-term approach to building and developing relationships and making sure that independent publishers thrive by providing tools, support, and data to help them better monetize their quality supply."

Kyndi 6.0 includes new features and enhancements that accelerate knowledge creation and enhance end user experiences

Kyndi, the Answer Engine company, today announced the immediate availability of its latest Generative AI Answer Engine, Kyndi 6.0. The latest release introduces several new features that address the need for more effective knowledge management and AI transparency. Integrated into Kyndi's award-winning Platform, the new features expand on the existing generative AI use cases for enterprises looking to optimize their knowledge management process and the information retrieval experiences for the end users.

The current content and knowledge management process is manual and time-consuming for enterprises. Worse, building a comprehensive, agile knowledge base that consistently provides accurate and timely information for business users is a huge endeavor, given the wealth of information organizations create and maintain today.

Using Kyndi 6.0, content leaders can leverage a new generative AI-enabled feature called "Topics" which empowers them to curate, validate, and manage knowledge bases in under one hour while ensuring the correct and relevant answers are always available to the end users. Another capability is the new generative AI-enabled user interface called "Citation", which presents end users with the citations of the content sources for enhanced AI explainability. Users can also copy the citations for future references and continued research. 

Key features of the Kyndi Version 6.0 include:

• Topics - Content and knowledge management teams can leverage generative AI to auto-generate suggestions of both Topics and related Question-Answer pairs anchored in trusted enterprise content. Using the Topics feature, content and knowledge management leaders can build a knowledge base in as little as an hour, saving internal teams significant time and resources from manually organizing and creating content while optimizing the outputs.
  
  
• Citation - A new end user interface powered by generative AI that serves up both curated and auto-generated answers. Citation targets use cases like blog sites, online publishers, and research sites, offering a citation section that lists the sources of the content that contributed to the concise summary presented to the end user. The user can also copy their query, the auto-generated answer, and all the relevant citations for easy reference later.
  
  
• End-user Feedback - Facilitates feedback on the results users receive. Kyndi 6.0 supports "like/dislike" feedback and allows users to provide detailed insights on unsatisfactory answers. This comprehensive feedback system captures user sentiments at various levels, guiding content teams to fine-tune the knowledge base to meet their customers' content needs.
  
  
• Query Export - Enables content and knowledge management leaders to easily export query history from Kyndi's Analytics tool and import it into Kyndi's Forecasts tool to tune and optimize the system performance easily.

"While many organizations were initially swept up in the hype of GenAI, they soon witnessed deal-breaking issues from inaccurate answers due to hallucinations, difficulty in incorporating domain-specific information, lack of explainability, and security challenges," said Ryan Welsh, CEO and Founder of Kyndi. "As an end-to-end enterprise solution, Kyndi 6.0 addresses these challenges by bringing new capabilities that enhance relevancy, AI transparency, and automation to organizations looking to modernize the way their users find critical business information."

New enterprise generative AI service helps organizations automate business processes, improve decision-making, and enhance customer experiences

Oracle CloudWorld -- Oracle today announced the limited availability of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Generative AI service. The new generative AI service will support large language models (LLMs) to help organizations automate end-to-end business processes, improve decision-making, and enhance customer experiences, while keeping their data secure and private.

Built on OCI in collaboration with Cohere, the leading AI platform for enterprise, the OCI Generative AI service is a managed service that enables users to integrate LLMs in their own applications through an available API. Once generally available, this service and Cohere models will work seamlessly with AI Vector Search, a feature of Oracle Database 23c that provides retrieval augmented generation (RAG), a generative AI technique that combines pretrained LLMs and proprietary business data to deliver responses with higher accuracy. This service will also form the basis for generative AI capabilities embedded across Oracle's suite of SaaS applications, including Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite, Oracle NetSuite, and industry applications such as Oracle Cerner.

"Oracle's unique industry knowledge has enabled us to create state-of-the-art generative AI services for organizations to automate their processes, make better decisions, and improve the experiences they deliver to customers," said Clay Magouyrk, executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. "Through our partnership with Cohere, customers will be able to embed generative AI easily and securely into their technology stack with full confidence that our solutions align with their most stringent data security and privacy requirements. Our approach further enables organizations to refine these models using their own data—so the models will understand their internal operations like no one else."

With its low-cost, secure, high-speed AI infrastructure, OCI will enable customers to use Cohere's models as a managed service specifically targeted for enterprise use cases. Customers using the OCI Generative AI service run their workloads in a dedicated infrastructure on Oracle's unique AI Supercluster architecture. This enables customers to control their specific cost and throughput requirements, whether they are fine-tuning models with their own data or deploying their custom models.

The new OCI generative AI service includes the following models:

• Command: This model takes a user's prompt and generates text. Available in two different sizes, Command is highly customizable for business use cases, including text generation, text summarization, RAG, and chat.
• Summarize: This model does abstractive summarization of the text and enables the user to configure the results with a variety of parameters to support unique use cases. For example, summarizing complex documents for legal teams, technical support documentation for customer service representatives, and long email chains for busy employees.
• Embed: This text representation model translates text into numerical vectors that models can understand. It provides industry-leading English and multilingual models (100+ languages) for a range of use cases, including semantic search, text classification, search engine for RAG and legacy search improvement.

"Oracle and Cohere center our enterprise AI offering on the principles of data security, model customization, latency, and helping companies quickly, meaningfully, cost-efficiently, and responsibly deploy AI technology," said Martin Kon, president & COO, Cohere. "We are working closely together with Oracle to enable enterprises to supercharge their businesses with AI, with a data security and privacy-first approach."

"Oracle has been a valuable partner for Altair and with Altair's focus on computational science and artificial intelligence, Altair has begun integrating large language models into our solutions because of their transformative promise," said Sam Mahalingam, chief technology officer, Altair. "We believe generative AI will transform the way we work. For example, customers will be able to describe the desired outcome in natural language format and an LLM will automatically produce solutions. In data analytics, customers will no longer need to code for machine learning but simply ask for the predictions. In engineering, customers can describe product properties and the models will do the design. The applications are limitless."

In addition to the OCI Generative AI service news, Oracle AI has continued to add enhancements to existing services with multiple limited availability programs, including:

• Oracle Digital Assistant: Adds generative AI features to allow customers to integrate LLMs and other generative capabilities into their digital assistants. In addition, developers can use generative AI to build digital assistants more quickly and efficiently.
• OCI Language Healthcare NLP: Adds healthcare insights with natural language processing. This new feature of the OCI Language service helps better process language in the medical domain. New models will help recognize medical terms, relationships and entities in records such as clinical trials notes, patient progress notes, and electronic health records.
• OCI Language Document Translation Experience: Adds new document translation feature to support a wide range of formats – Word, PPT, HTML, JSON, and Excel – ensuring content remains intact and translated across diverse file types.
• OCI Vision: Adds Facial Detection, gaining the ability to recognize faces and facial features in images, and expanding the number of OCI Vision use cases.
• OCI Speech: Adds diarization, allowing the service to embed speaker information into transcribed sections of audio. Diarization makes OCI Speech a valuable tool for organizing, analyzing, and extracting meaningful information from spoken interactions.
• OCI Data Science: Adds Feature Store, a central repository used to manage features developed by data science teams. Feature Store provides a cohesive framework where features are meticulously documented, shared, stored, and served in a streamlined manner.

"The OCI Generative AI service is the first generative AI cloud service to deliver enterprise-level security, flexibility, and user tuning that the market has been demanding. It provides tight security and governance of users' proprietary data, and models that limit its use and visibility to only that customer," said Marc Staimer, senior analyst, Wikibon. "Just as importantly, customers can control their dedicated OCI Supercluster AI infrastructure to meet their specific cost and throughput requirements as they fine-tune their models or deploy their custom models. The OCI Generative AI service is a winning combination of enterprise capabilities and cost-performance."

Productsup joins network of companies certified to help businesses implement GS1 standards

Productsup, the leading Product-to-Consumer (P2C) software company, has become a gold member of the GS1 US Solution Partner Program, a designation signifying a commitment to delivering services and solutions that enable quick, efficient, and accurate GS1 Standards implementation.

GS1 US® is an information standards organization that brings industry communities together to improve supply-chain business processes through the adoption and implementation of GS1 Standards. The GS1 System of Standards, the most widely used information standards in the world, uniquely identifies products, services, assets, and locations worldwide to support supply chain visibility and efficiency. The GS1 US Solution Partner Program facilitates the implementation of GS1 Standards by connecting users with solution providers that have proven standards expertise.

"The GS1 System of Standards is the most widely-used framework in the world, and the need for a universal standard for data quality is only becoming more crucial for brands and retailers," said Rick Hultermans, Director of Data Services at Productsup. "Increasing consumer demand and tighter regulation for more transparency and traceability in the supply chain have required businesses to make significant improvements to the caliber of their product information. By streamlining the GS1 certification process, companies can speed up their time-to-market, avoid regulatory fines, and strengthen brand loyalty."

Real-time Visibility and Cloud-native Detection Among Missing Links for Cloud Defense

MixMode, the leader in delivering generative AI cybersecurity solutions for real-time threat detection and response at scale, today released its annual State of Cloud Security report along with the availability of MixMode Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) for AWS in the AWS Marketplace. The report provides sobering statistics on the gaps enterprises face in securing multi-cloud and hybrid environments and provides insight into how Generative AI can deliver real-time threat detection to help close the cloud security gap. 

The MixMode survey with Cybersecurity Insiders reveals that most organizations must adopt multi-cloud strategies with adequate visibility, controls, and data security capabilities tailored to cloud platforms. Key findings include:

- 75% are extremely or very concerned about cloud security.
- 40% have hybrid cloud environments, while 38% have multi-cloud - increasing complexity.
- 70% still rely on traditional security tools rather than cloud-native controls.
- 77% use at least 3-point products to manage cloud security, indicating a need for unified cloud security.

"The report signals a troubling disconnect between accelerated cloud adoption and the readiness of security technologies to protect these environments," said John Keister, MixMode CEO. "Legacy tools are fundamentally limited in securing cloud workloads and data at scale. Companies need cloud-native real-time threat detection to ensure their environments are secure."

MixMode Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) for AWS, now available on the AWS Marketplace, provides unified visibility and cloud-native real-time threat detection across cloud and hybrid environments and network infrastructures. MixMode CDR for AWS enables:

• Real-time Threat Detection: Cloud-native threat detection for novel and known attacks.
• Unlimited Scalability: Easily monitor large volumes of data within your AWS environment.
• Increased Efficiencies: Uplevel existing investments, reduce costs, and gain increased visibility.

"MixMode CDR gives customers the cloud-native security capabilities needed to match the complexity of their cloud environments," Keister continued. "Together with the State of Cloud Security report findings, we aim to drive awareness around the future of cloud security and deliver our advanced cybersecurity platform via the AWS Marketplace to meet the rising demand for scalable cloud detection and response."

MixMode's State of Cloud Security 2023 report and CDR solution for AWS equip companies to securely advance cloud adoption. Click to download the report.

A breakthrough self-service platform enabling retailers and advertisers to launch dynamic product ads for commerce media in three easy steps.

Jivox, the personalized dynamic creative technology leader, today introduced Jivox IQ DaVinci, a new product for commerce media set to spark a renaissance in the commerce media market. Giant Eagle's newly formed retail media platform, Leap Media Group (Leap), is among a select group using IQ DaVinci to launch new or scale existing offerings. With a fully automated, self-service platform, Jivox empowers the media teams of CPG brands to activate and optimize ad campaigns with speed and ease. Specifically, IQ DaVinci's predefined creative and campaign templates with built-in decisioning logic and integration with first-party product data require only three simple steps to launch a commerce media campaign, instantly removing the need for creative or data skills that have been a major hurdle for advertisers looking to invest in commerce media.

In 2022, commerce media worldwide skyrocketed to $114 billion according to Statista, citing a GroupM report. Commerce marketing has evolved from just product listing and search ads to today's powerful, data-driven dynamic product ads. Jivox DCO and automation technology has been a key success driver for these dynamic product ads through the delivery of significantly higher media performance. Jivox allows retailers to rapidly scale the adoption of their commerce media networks by enabling brand media teams to activate self-service campaigns in three simple steps, eliminating the expensive margin-destroying manual processes being used today.

"Commerce media has the potential of becoming the third largest media format after search and social media. And, Jivox IQ DaVinci is one of the most exciting products we have launched. It is a game changer for retailers and brands looking to scale their commerce media programs," said Diaz Nesamoney, Founder & CEO of Jivox. "We are thrilled to have Giant Eagle as a partner, working side by side in an automation journey to scale personalized experiences for brands and their consumers."

Leap allows brands to leverage the unique and impactful insights garnered through one of the industry's richest loyalty programs to reach consumers during key decision-making moments. After more than 30 years of delivering world-class loyalty for the business and value for its customers, Giant Eagle's loyalty platform remains an innovative and dynamic tool for the company and now external partners can tap into that value.

"First-party data-driven media is so important to the future of high-performing digital advertising in a privacy-first world. Yet, many retailers today find it difficult to scale up this revenue stream due to the challenges posed by building personalized creative with products and offers relevant to individual consumers," said Joell Robinson, Giant Eagle Senior Director, Leap Media & Sales. "Jivox IQ DaVinci is helping Giant Eagle scale our retail media network offering in three ways: A self-service activation portal for advertisers that allows personalized dynamic creative campaigns to launch quickly and easily; sophisticated feed management that enables advertisers to add product assets, offers, and pricing to ads dynamically in real-time; and AI-Driven optimization algorithms that use first-party data to deliver performance."

Strategic Partnership will Enhance Service Delivery, Speed Digital Transformation and Provide Greater Efficiency

 ibex (NASDAQ: IBEX), a leading global provider of business process outsourcing (BPO) and customer engagement technology solutions, today announced a partnership with Genesys®, a global cloud leader in AI-powered experience orchestration, to offer next-generation omnichannel customer experience (CX) and contact center solutions.

This collaboration will enable both companies to enhance and expand their CX and contact center offerings. ibex’s award-winning Wave X technology platform will integrate with Genesys Cloud CX®, an all-in-one, composable contact center as a service and employee experience solution, to deliver expanded services and capabilities to enterprise clients.

As a modern, API-first experience orchestration platform, Genesys Cloud CX enables organizations to coordinate every interaction and touchpoint through a full suite of omnichannel options, built-in employee experience, turnkey AI and end-to-end journey optimization.

“We are delighted to partner with Genesys to offer the most comprehensive range of next-generation CX solutions to our growing roster of blue chip and digital-first clients,” said Jim Ferrato, Chief Information Officer, ibex. “Leveraging Genesys Cloud CX as part of our enterprise services will allow ibex to drive greater automation, which will improve our employee experience and create unified interfaces for all channels and solutions. It will also offer enhanced flexibility and customization options to tailor solutions to meet specific enterprise needs.”

Wave X is ibex’s AI-enabled technology platform designed to improve the employee experience for agents, contact center performance, and CX outcomes. Wave X delivers a complete CX performance solution set, designed for the contact center, by the contact center experts.

“Combining the revolutionary experience orchestration capabilities of Genesys Cloud CX with ibex’s cutting-edge AI-enabled Wave X platform will allow organizations to deliver effortless, connected experiences for customers and employees,” said Brian Bischoff, SVP and General Manager, Genesys Cloud CX. “We are looking forward to partnering with ibex to enable businesses everywhere to scale empathy and drive trust and loyalty.”

Later today, Genesys and ibex will host a webinar focused on the impact of the cloud contact center on EX and CX performance. Join experts Michael Thigpen, Jawad Abid, Jeff Wise, Chris Becker, and Vince Montelione today at 2 pm ET for a deep-dive on the topic with key takeaways for taking the next key step on your CX journey.

Alliance Harnesses Data Insights and Cloud Power While Boosting Performance and Responsible AI Impact

 Aporia, the leading Observability platform for AI products, today announced a partnership with Snowflake, the Data Cloud company, designed to enhance performance by providing AI models and data observability in the cloud. Integrating Aporia's ML observability platform with the Data Cloud not only promotes the efficiency and effectiveness of data science, but also helps to expand the adoption of responsible AI.

Aporia’s observability platform now seamlessly integrates with Snowflake, enabling users to monitor their data and production machine learning (ML) models at scale. The integration extends to features within Snowflake such as Snowpark, the runtimes and libraries that make deployment and processing of non-SQL code in Snowflake simpler, faster, and more secure. Together, joint customers can monitor billions of predictions to uncover insights from production data and improve their ML models' performance. In addition, Aporia’s privacy-first mode ensures that no sensitive data leaves a user’s Snowflake environment. Aporia supports all AI/ML use cases and every model type including Tabular, NLP, LLM, and Computer Vision within the Snowflake platform.

In sensitive domains, gaining insight into the reasons behind specific predictions made by AI projects and the ML models driving them is critical. However, the lack of explainability can hinder the identification of biases, the assurance of fairness, and establishing trust in models. Aporia’s integration with Snowflake addresses these concerns by enabling users to monitor ML models within minutes. It facilitates near real-time detection for issues like AI hallucinations, drift, bias, data integrity issues, model decay, and performance degradation.

Aporia's platform centralizes model management, equipping teams with the tools to effectively monitor each of their models and quickly investigate any production alerts. Teams are also able to utilize customizable dashboards and metrics to gain a clear view of their model's health. Additionally, Aporia facilitates prompt resolution of production issues and AI hallucinations through collaborative analysis and provides diverse analytics for a more nuanced understanding. The company offers an all-in-one root cause analysis tool that provides data scientists, ML engineers, and analysts with a seamless and easy to navigate digital environment for real-time data analysis, root cause investigation, and deep insights within a unified monitoring platform.

“As we continue to enable organizations to champion responsible AI and unlock its full potential with unparalleled insights, enhanced performance and monitoring capabilities, we are thrilled to announce our partnership with Snowflake,” said Liran Hason, CEO of Aporia. “By combining Aporia's advanced AI observability into Snowflake's secure, scalable infrastructure, we are not only addressing the crucial need for model observability to the Data Cloud, but also helping data-driven organizations accelerate their impact on data science, achieve new heights in performance, and drive overall business success.”

“We are thrilled to partner with Aporia to bolster the capabilities of the Snowflake Data Cloud and provide joint customers with advanced AI observability,” said Torsten Grabs, Senior Director, Product Management, Snowflake. “By equipping users with powerful tools to fully leverage their efforts and promote responsible AI usage, we are collectively advancing data science, leading to increased effectiveness, efficiency, and trustworthiness.”