Company opens up a path for organizations to use AI responsibly and broadly

LightBeam.ai, a pioneer in AI-powered automation, is announcing the industry's first CoPilot for data privacy, security and AI Governance to make the power of generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) broadly available across private, public and non-profit sectors.

Modern data infrastructures have become overly complex. With RESTful API access, more and more applications are connected to each other, exchanging information and data with little regard to the concomitant privacy, security and governance concerns. The advent of generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) and large language models (LLMs) have accelerated this issue from an area of concern to possibly an unmitigated impending fiasco. If rule-based approaches to data governance were already bursting at their seams earlier, now, they are woefully inadequate for even starting to handle AI governance issues.

While technology continues its inevitable march forward, left in the lurch are humans. From the data subjects whose data is being exchanged willy-nilly to the compliance teams who have the tiresome but crucial job of guarding privacy and maintaining governance, it has become infinitely harder to protect their own or their customers' privacy and data security.

It is in this context that LightBeam is introducing Spectra CoPilot for Privacy and InfoSec teams. Acting as a CoPilot, Spectra listens, learns and understands the requirements and policies of compliance teams and their organizations. With seamless connectivity to applications - structured and unstructured - LightBeam Spectra CoPilot understands the presence of sensitive data using its generative pre-trained transformer models. Deployed completely inside an organization's network, none of the organization's sensitive data leaves their networks thereby maintaining strict confidentiality and privacy for all parties involved - employees, partners, users and customers.

"I am personally involved in ensuring that our customer's data is secure, meeting and exceeding all compliance and governance requirements. This is an important element in winning and maintaining their trust," said Archana Srivastava, Head, Technology at Zinier, Inc. "I am delighted to see how LightBeam continues to execute on its vision of bringing automation for privacy, security and governance. Their approach to using AI as a CoPilot is exactly the right way to leverage a promising technology while still maintaining and respecting societal controls on human data. Highly recommend checking out CoPilot from LightBeam."

"AI and AI Governance have become the most popular conversation topics amongst CIOs. While there is an unmistakable curiosity about Gen AI, there are also concerns about potential misuse and sensitive data exposures," said Pierre Farley, Partner at EFICIO. "With Spectra CoPilot, LightBeam is demonstrating a way to use Gen AI with the right governance guardrails around using AI. Customers across a variety of sectors including finance, retail, healthcare, and manufacturing amongst others can start on their AI journey now with confidence."

The LightBeam Spectra CoPilot module brings data intelligence and insights to privacy, compliance and governance teams in the following ways:

• Privacy Aware LLM System (PALS) - Enterprise CTO and CIOs have been struggling to take advantage of their data warehouses and data lakes. By creating sanitized data pipelines, Spectra CoPilot enables them to train their large language models (LLMs) on their own datasets while respecting their privacy and governance commitments to their customers.
• Time Machine - Spectra CoPilot continuously connects to an organization's data estate across SaaS apps, public clouds and private cloud infrastructures, and keeps track of sensitive data provenance across all applications. This helps teams in not only being aware of an issue but also in understanding how the issue came about, thereby enabling them to take actions at the source.
• Right to Portability - Many existing and emerging privacy regulations mandate organizations to provide their data subjects a right to portability for their personal data. Spectra CoPilot helps organizations maintain an identity-centric comprehensive record for each individual (employees/customers/partners) which can be shared in industry-standard formats upon request and authorization.
• Automated Transfer Impact Assessments (TIA) - Instead of being a reactive process, CoPilot maintains ongoing continuous verification of all data stored internally and shared externally to ensure compliance and mitigation.

"Just like brakes, seatbelts and airbags help you go faster (not slower), an automated, always-on governance can revolutionize the use of AI responsibly to solve some of the biggest challenges facing us all," stated Priyadarshi Prasad, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at LightBeam.ai. "With Spectra CoPilot, we intend to enable every organization to leverage AI for their missions."

• Marqo is an end-to-end multimodal vector search engine for developers that includes all the infrastructure to enable AI-powered real-time search at scale.

• New funding will support Marqo to scale its existing cloud service and build search technology that learns from user engagement to continuously improve relevance.

Marqo, the startup enabling AI-powered search and discovery, has closed US$5.2million in seed investment. The investment, led by Blackbird Ventures, also includes the support of Creator Fund, January Capital, and Cohere's co-founders, Ivan Zhang and Aidan Gomez. The funds will be used to develop a new form of vector search technology that continuously improves based on user engagement, which differentiates it from existing vector databases.

Marqo was founded by Jesse Clark, formerly Lead Scientist at Amazon Robotics AI and Principal Scientist at StitchFix and physicist at Stanford and UCL, and Tom Hamer, a former Amazon Web Services (AWS) software engineer. The team has since brought in AI, engineering, and operations expertise from Amazon, Uber and Goldman Sachs.

Unlike traditional keyword search, Marqo uses machine learning models to return more accurate search results by understanding content and meaning. Users can search using text, images, or a combination of both. The technology initially targets end-user search (ecommerce, marketplaces) but has applications in generative AI, analytics and security. The new service, currently in closed beta, allows the machine learning models to automatically learn from user engagement and continuously improve the relevance of the vectors.

"Search is in desperate need of modernisation - the vast majority of search experiences are based on legacy keyword search systems, which provide poor results," said Marqo's co-founder, Tom Hamer. "Customers want search experiences that anticipate their needs, not just match keywords. This is especially important for businesses where the search bar is the core product, such as ecommerce. By automatically improving based on user interaction, Marqo provides highly relevant results, and increases customer conversion rate, order value, and revenue."

Marqo's mission is to democratise AI technology allowing transformative search experiences to be built with ease. "Despite many advantages, vector search remains challenging to implement especially for applications requiring real-time search," said Jesse Clark, Marqo's co-founder. "Vector search is rapidly becoming a must have for generative AI applications. We want anyone to be able to leverage the latest machine learning models, even if they're not an expert in this field."

"Vector search is a huge growth area. In addition to being at the core of AI search and recommendation systems - vector search has become a must have component of generative AI. Marqo is instrumental in making AI useful to businesses by enabling developers to use the best technology with little effort," said Aidan Gomez, CEO and co-founder of Cohere.

Blackbird Partner Nick Crocker added: "There is over 100 trillion gigabytes of data in the world, the majority of which is unstructured data such as text, images or video. With generative AI creating more content than ever before people, computers and companies need new ways to search. Marqo represents the next generation of search - hyper-relevant, AI-powered and based on human understanding. We are thrilled to be supporting this team!"

Marqo's belief in democratising AI technology fuels its decision to open-source the core Marqo code, meaning it is free and available for anyone to use. For customers who want a solution that is optimised for production without any operational overheads, Marqo offers a fully managed, serverless Cloud Service. Following a highly successful early access program the Cloud Service is now open to the public, allowing anyone to sign up and start using Marqo in a few clicks. The continuous-learning vector search service is expected to be released later this year as a part of Marqo Cloud.

Crossing Minds today announced the release of a new e-commerce data enrichment product that makes e-commerce products more intuitively discoverable to customers. The product uses generative AI to clean existing product data and add new, intuitive data labels based on product image and text data.

E-commerce businesses can immediately use the product to:

• Improve the site search function by adding intuitive new product properties, such as "Texture: Fuzzy" or "Motivation: Weight Loss."
• Vastly improve personalization effectiveness by expanding the breadth of data used to match customers with relevant products.
• Generate effective product SEO based on focus keywords through automated tagging of the most relevant, common search queries.
• Correct formatting, remove duplicates, and recategorize data through machine learning so all product data conforms to the same standard.
• Get data quality scores and proactive alerts when product data is missing, incorrect, or inconsistent.
• Reduce or eliminate human hours spent on tedious manual data input by relying on generative AI.

According to the Baymard Institute, 52% of e-commerce sites "fail to sufficiently post-process vendor-supplied data," leading to inconsistent attributes, abbreviations and jargon, and entirely missing product data.

"Poorly tagged product data prevents e-commerce teams from delivering exceptional shopping experiences," said Alexandre Robicquet, CEO and Co-Founder of Crossing Minds. "At the same time, customers are becoming less tolerant of flaws and inconsistencies in the shopping experience. Merchandisers need better tools to make product data usable and effective, without headaches. We're pleased to offer a solution that standardizes product data and adds new properties that enable customers to shop more naturally."

Crossing Minds' data enrichment product humanizes the e-commerce experience. Rather than making customers conform search queries to limited supplier data, merchandising teams can cater to the way customers think. Apparel brands can denote attributes like "Collar Style" or "Dress Length," while grocers can add "Dietary Restrictions" and "Bundle With" attributes. Intuitively tagged data improves every form of discovery: search, recommendations, filters, and SEO.

Crossing Minds' data enrichment solution is built on the same principles as its highly personalized product recommendations. Using machine learning techniques including deep collaborative filtering, embedding analysis, and deep content extraction, the AI platform takes raw data related to product attributes and customer attributes to enable lightning-fast product discovery.

IBM ,and the United States Tennis Association (USTA) today announced digital fan features to appear on USOpen.org and the US Open app, including Artificial Intelligence (AI) generated spoken commentary. Designed to give fans a more insightful and engaging experience when catching up on key moments from the tournament, IBM watsonx powered AI Commentary utilizes models built, trained, and deployed with watsonx, IBM's AI and data platform. Throughout the entire tournament, AI technology will automate the production of detailed audio narration and captions to accompany US Open highlight videos at unprecedented scale – for every match in the singles draw, across all seventeen courts.

To implement the IBM watsonx powered AI Commentary, experts from IBM iX, the experience design partner within IBM Consulting, worked with the USTA to leverage foundation models within watsonx to build and train AI models in the unique language of tennis. Operating across a hybrid cloud infrastructure enabled by Red Hat OpenShift, generative AI built on these foundation models was applied to produce commentary with varied sentence structure and vocabulary to make the clips informative and engaging.

"Fans accessing the US Open digital experiences this year will be able to experience every singles match, across all seventeen courts, with detailed audio narration and captions accompanying each video – thanks to the power of IBM's watsonx generative AI, specifically trained on the language of tennis," said Jonathan Adashek, Senior Vice President of Communications and Marketing at IBM. "The AI Commentary feature was developed based on the watsonx enterprise-ready data and AI platform, designed to enable businesses to accelerate generative AI work by leveraging foundation models and machine learning in one place, with their own data."

Also new at this year's US Open, the IBM watsonx powered AI Draw Analysis is a first-of-its-kind tennis statistic for the US Open that utilizes both structured and unstructured data from IBM Power Index & Likelihood to Win to project the level of advantage or disadvantage of all players in the singles draw. Each player will receive an IBM AI Draw Analysis at the start of the tournament, which will be updated daily as the tournament progresses and players are eliminated. Every draw is ranked, allowing fans to click into individual matches and see the projected difficulty of their draw and potential opponents.

"Delivering a digital fan experience that showcases every key moment and storyline from the US Open is always our top priority, and IBM's development leadership continually enables our fans to connect with the US Open in deeper ways every year," said Brian Ryerson, Senior Director, Digital Strategy, USTA. "We're particularly excited this year for fans to experience IBM's AI commentary with watsonx for all Singles Highlights, providing deeper insights into our video highlights than ever before. Additionally, with the watsonx powered AI Draw Analysis fans can easily visualize each player's potential opponents and highlight their complete path to the finals allowing greater insight into each round's potential match ups."

IBM has been the official technology partner of the USTA for more than 30 years. The introduction of these new fan features showcase how they continue to co-create world-class digital experiences that bring the drama and excitement of the US Open to more than 12 million people around the world each year. The watsonx powered AI Commentary and AI Draw Analysis join an already expansive suite of digital fan features including the IBM Power Index, Match Insights, and Likelihood to Win. The US Open's digital experiences are run on the USTA's flexible, open hybrid cloud platform, which integrates technology from dozens of partners, automates key business processes, and secures the entire world-class digital experience of the US Open. 

Persado, the Motivation Artificial Intelligence (AI) company, announced today the launch of Essential Motivation, a GenAI language hub for digital marketers across industries to rapidly create emotionally engaging messages that increase customer action and conversion. The new, self-service solution is the first of its kind grounded in a decade of understanding, analyzing, and catering to consumer emotions and behavior. Essential Motivation is the only solution designed to connect to a company’s marketing stack to deploy language, automatically achieve results, and learn what engages customers.

“The intuitive creative process responsible for developing customer-facing marketing programs needs to be faster, smarter, and (ultimately) cheaper. GenAI technologies are poised to revolutionize how marketing delivers more speed, scale, and precision. As this happens, brands and marketing providers must safeguard their executions from the shortcomings of nascent generative AI technology and prepare their teams for an AI-powered marketing future.” (Generative AI Unleashes Marketing’s Creative Renaissance, Forrester Research, Inc., 5/30/2023.)

With Essential Motivation, Persado makes available to organizations across industries a low-risk way to tap into the efficiencies and effectiveness of GenAI for marketing text. This capability leverages Persado’s large language models (LLMs), which are constantly trained on marketing messages, and their subsequent performance, enabling digital marketers to generate and improve–in real time–words and phrases proven to motivate consumers to convert.

Persado Essential Motivation is running within days, immediately delivering impactful marketing and advertising language, as well as brand compliance, through best-practice functions and workflow that modernize functionality for CRM teams, including:

• Real-time content generation — Generate unlimited copy options from scratch or improve existing messages for any digital channel: subject lines, full emails, web (landing pages and banners), SMS, mobile push notifications, and paid media, such as Google, social, or display ads.
• Content insights to use across all marketing campaigns — Gather actionable insights, within seconds, about your control creative and Persado AI-generated messages, including:
  • Predictive performance scores based on a message’s ability to drive customer action
  • Language and emotion attributes from the Persado knowledge base, built from a decade of real-world language experiments.
• Refine for your brand voice — Incorporate your brand voice by adding more prompts and inclusion words that support your brand style and campaign goals.
• Push content to marketing platforms — Once copy is approved, push chosen content to your delivery platform(s) for immediate use

Building on a Decade of AI Innovation

Unlike other large language models, such as ChatGPT, which pull and learn from the wide internet, the Persado Motivation AI platform is trained on a specialized dataset of real interaction and transaction data from 150 million U.S. consumers that measure and refine language, emotional response, and engagement.

Essential Motivation is an extension of Persado’s award-winning AI platform, which powers a suite of generative AI solutions for marketing. Additional solutions include:

• Elite Motivation – Leverages Motivation AI to conduct powerful machine learning experiments that drive superior performance and reveal deep language insights across email, web, SMS, and social. By accessing Persado’s patented predictive individual language profiles, brands across industries unearth valuable language insights, and achieve optimal marketing performance.
• Dynamic Motivation – Generate and dynamically personalize relevant marketing language that meets the moment in real time, based on consumer behavior—driving marketing performance across the digital journey, including landing pages, website banners and buttons, and email. When used at the online cart and checkout stages, the solution reinforces purchase decisions and reduces card abandonment, resulting in 3-5% increase in ecommerce revenue.

“Myriad content distribution plug-ins, such as CMS GenAI, DAM GenAI, and DCO GenAI, with no connection to each other, put brands at risk of exhibiting ‘multiple AI personality disorder,’ explained Vipul Vyas, SVP of Go-to-Market Strategy, Persado. “Essential Motivation enables control of language across channels and plug-ins. It unifies a brand’s values and voice to meet the moment and connect with each customer on stronger relational and transactional levels. In addition to the F500 companies already benefiting from Persado, mid-size e-commerce organizations can now turbo boost their marketing impact—from customer acquisition, to conversion, to brand loyalty.”

Integrations and Availability — Speed to Value

Persado Essential Motivation is available today in the U.S. through flexible plans, as well as a free 30-day trial, so brands may try the software at no risk.

The solution easily integrates with martech stacks, including Google and Adobe Analytics and more than 20 email service providers, for rapid speed to value. Brands can simply 1) select their content needs, 2) input their control copy—or opt to generate from scratch using keywords/themes, 3) generate content, 4) add any approvals required, and 5) push to their marketing delivery platforms. Campaign results can automatically flow back to the platform through Persado’s integrations to provide continuous learning. Brands are also able to easily deploy Essential Motivation on any web page using Persado's real-time API.

The new addition of ChatGPT powered Dynamic Query enables marketers to be self-sufficient, drive efficient decision-making processes and unlock the true potential of their data

AppsFlyer is launching dynamic querying capabilities for its Data Clean Room, enabling marketers and users with or without SQL expertise to effortlessly query data in the AppsFlyer Data Clean Room. The Dynamic Query is powered by OpenAI, and bridges the gap between technical complexities and business insight as it eliminates the need for SQL intermediaries, allowing for faster and easier adoption of Data Clean Rooms and its capabilities as a robust business intelligence (BI) tool.

With AppsFlyer’s Dynamic Query Engine, we aim to empower marketers and their counterparts by bringing logic to their data and give them a powerful, user-friendly tool to access marketing data,” said Edik Mitelman, GM of Privacy Cloud, AppsFlyer. "By removing the reliance on SQL experts and enabling marketers to query data in a conversational manner, we are eliminating barriers and accelerating the adoption of data clean room technology.”

Leveraging the full potential of a Data Clean Room currently requires the involvement of data engineers, analysts or individuals with SQL expertise, leading to bottlenecks and delays in obtaining crucial business insights. The new AI-based approach to the AppsFlyer Data Clean Room opens up a new era of accessibility and usability for marketing teams, enabling them to query data and ask vital business questions directly, without the need for technical support. This is crucial for marketers in the modern privacy era, as privacy-preserving measurement and ecosystem collaboration through Data Clean Rooms provides the holistic, multi-channel view to measure and optimize marketing activity more effectively and efficiently.

“With AppsFlyer’s Dynamic Query Engine, we were able to filter our DCR output and quickly focus only on the relevant data we need to make the best bottom-line decisions,” said Leif Meyer, User Acquisition Engineer of Hopper.

As ingesting data in BI is no longer a viable solution in the new privacy era, AppsFlyer's Dynamic Query capability brings the BI to the data and enables immediate access to enriched data sets, facilitating faster and better informed decision-making. This supports marketing teams with the ability to measure all aspects of their marketing data and avoid the need to move data and take privacy risks.

"AppsFlyer is one of the first advertising technology vendors to actually integrate a large-language model in their products," said Karsten Weide, Chief Analyst, W Media Research. “This means AppsFlyer's DCR can now be used by marketers that are not SQL experts, simply by using natural language in their queries."

AppsFlyer’s Data Clean Room, the first of many technological implementations within the AppsFlyer Privacy Cloud vision, enables app developers to privately and securely produce insights based on their first-party data, attributed marketing data, in-app events and third-party data in a privacy safe environment. As a result, app developers can accurately calculate and take better-informed actions on their marketing campaigns, thus increasing return on investment while simultaneously preserving customer privacy. This empowers marketing and business growth for both supply and demand and provides private data collaboration and actionable insights that impact the business’s bottom line.

— Nearly 7 in 10 IT leaders believe AI-enabled technologies will make teams more efficient, but 52% say their organizations don’t yet have needed IT infrastructure —

Today, AMD released the findings from a new survey of global IT leaders¹ which found that 3 in 4 IT leaders are optimistic about the potential benefits of AI — from increased employee efficiency to automated cybersecurity solutions — and more than 2 in 3 are increasing investments in AI technologies. However, while AI presents clear opportunities for organizations to become more productive, efficient, and secure, IT leaders expressed uncertainty on their AI adoption timeliness due to their lack of implementation roadmaps and the overall readiness of their existing hardware and technology stack.

AMD commissioned the survey of 2,500 IT leaders across the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Japan to understand how AI technologies are re-shaping the workplace, how IT leaders are planning their AI technology and related Client hardware roadmaps, and what their biggest challenges are for adoption. Despite some hesitations around security and a perception that training the workforce would be burdensome, it became clear that organizations that have already implemented AI solutions are seeing a positive impact and organizations that delay risk being left behind. Of the organizations prioritizing AI deployments, 90% report already seeing increased workplace efficiency.

“There is a benefit to being an early AI adopter,” said Matthew Unangst, senior director, commercial client and workstation, AMD. “IT leaders are seeing the benefits of AI-enabled solutions, but their enterprises need to outline a more focused plan for implementation or risk falling behind. Open software ecosystems, with high-performance hardware, are essential, and AMD believes in a multi-faceted approach of leveraging AI IP across our full portfolio of products to the benefit of our partners and customers.”

Future of AI-Powered Computing for the Enterprise

To ensure IT leaders have the best computing platform as they implement AI solutions, AMD is focused on developing cutting-edge solutions with AI capabilities across our product portfolio – from the cloud to the edge to endpoints – while working in close collaboration with open industry-standard software.

This year, AMD launched the first AMD Ryzen™ 7040 Series processors with select models featuring a Ryzen™ AI Engine with support for Windows Studio Effects, along with Ryzen AI developer tools – delivering unique experiences not currently available on other x86 processors² and paving the way for greater AI capabilities directly on laptops.

A dedicated AI engine for mobile PCs is complementary to cloud-based AI and essential to the adoption of AI applications in the workplace. It has the potential to:

• Enable more personalized, secure experiences for employees by running AI models locally.
• Enhance the laptop’s power efficiency, which means better employee productivity and connectivity.
• Increase the overall bandwidth for a business to run AI workloads by enabling the laptop to run next generation software.

For businesses that also want to run AI workloads in their on-premise data centers, having up-to-date infrastructure is critical. By upgrading a data center to modern AMD EPYC™ processors, customers could reduce the number of racks needed in their existing infrastructure by up to 70%.³

AMD also recently shared details about its AMD Instinct™ MI300X accelerator (192 GB) based on AMD CDNA™ 3 accelerator architecture, which will be the world’s most advanced accelerator for generative AI,⁴   and will provide the compute and memory efficiency needed for large language model training and inference for generative AI workloads.