Adyen's latest product is already helping global fashion group AWWG (Pepe Jeans London, Hackett and Façonnable) improve its customer loyalty programs & Salesforce has built an integration to offer payments-enriched profiles to its customer base

Adyen (AMS: ADYEN), the global financial technology platform of choice for leading businesses, announces the launch of Data Connect for Marketing, a new product enabling omnichannel retailers to leverage payments data to improve marketing initiatives and provide an enhanced understanding of customers. Unique profile identifiers can link previously unidentified in-store transactions to shopper profiles, unlocking a breadth of analytics-driven use cases. Equipped with stronger customer understanding, businesses can reward customer loyalty, tailor shopper experiences, and drive value for existing customers. 

With a majority of transactions (82%) occurring in physical stores but lacking customer identification, retailers face a significant "blind spot" in understanding their customers' preferences. Data Connect for Marketing removes this by providing a structured data set that integrates easily into a business' external tooling, with use cases ranging from Customer Data Platform (CDP) or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. Salesforce is one of the first players to build this integration to offer payments-enriched profiles to their customer base. 

"Understanding the customer journey has been a major hurdle for omnichannel retail businesses," says Brian Dammeir, Global Head of Unified Commerce at Adyen. "With Data Connect for Marketing, Adyen is bridging the gap between in-store and online experiences by connecting our wealth of data to single customer profiles. This means we can support businesses to build customer loyalty, and unlock new customization and advertising opportunities through their existing Adyen integration."

Rather than relying on third-party data sources in an attempt to understand their customers, Data Connect for Marketing means businesses can now leverage their own first-party payments data to build a comprehensive customer view. This capability presents a large opportunity for businesses to enhance their loyalty offering, as Adyen's data reveals that 68% of consumers report they would like to see more personalized discounting from the retailers they shop most regularly with. Likewise, nearly half (48%) of consumers prefer retailers who remember their preferences and previous shopping behaviors to create more tailored shopping experiences.

"Our top priority is gaining a deeper understanding of our customers," commented Angel Vázquez Cabezas, Group Head of Customer Care for AWWG. "Data Connect for Marketing helps us to identify individual shoppers who make purchases with us across multiple channels, sometimes with different registrations. It means we can better communicate with individuals, with really relevant, timely experiences." AWWG is the fashion group behind global brands like Pepe Jeans London, Hackett and Façonnable.

"Harnessing the power of payments data is a game-changer for businesses to create a comprehensive customer 360 view," said Brian Landsman, Executive Vice President, Global Technology Partners at Salesforce. "Thanks to Data Connect for Marketing, teams can offer exceptional customer experiences using our Salesforce Commerce Cloud applications." 

Enabling Joint Customers in the Experience Economy to Thrive with Comprehensive Technological and Service Innovations

SANDSIV, a leading provider of CX and Voice of Customer technology, has established a strategic partnership with Island Analytics & Marketing (IAM), a company focused on customized data-driven solutions in the Caribbean.

In today's intricate business landscape, enterprises face the pressing challenge of declining customer loyalty and satisfaction, leading to diminished profitability. To flourish in this environment, organizations must prioritize the delivery of exceptional experiences while optimizing resources. By cultivating people-centric interactions that genuinely understand and prioritize customer needs, businesses can gain a competitive edge.

Through the seamless integration of SANDSIV's advanced CX and Voice of Customer technology, sandsiv+, with IAM's expertise in Customer Experience services, this partnership aims to provide affordable, innovative, and personalized solutions to organizations across the Caribbean. With sandsiv+ enhanced capabilities in real-time listening, prediction, engagement, and optimization, businesses can optimize customer experiences and drive business growth.

Furthermore, IAM's profound understanding of the Caribbean's unique cultural, socio-economic, and policy landscape empowers them to offer diverse data-driven solutions. From customized polling and interviews to focus groups, market analysis, and comprehensive customer experience services, IAM delivers tailored approaches that cater to entities of varying sizes operating or seeking investment opportunities in the Caribbean.

By combining their strengths and expertise, SANDSIV and IAM are poised to revolutionize the CX landscape, providing enterprises with the tools they need to thrive in today's competitive market.

Discover how SANDSIV and its partners are revolutionizing CX worldwide by visiting https://sandsiv.com/partners/.

Flash quotes:

Commenting on the alliance, Alejandro Conejero, Global Partnership Manager of SANDSIV, said: “This new partnership marks a significant step forward in our dedication to support organizations throughout the region. By providing access to an end-to-end technology solution that enables authentic customer connections at scale, we are thrilled to embark on this journey together. Anticipating a wealth of opportunities, we are poised to deliver unparalleled benefits and cultivate lasting customer trust and loyalty.”

Richard Dorsey, CEO of IAM, added: “We are incredibly excited for this alliance: excited for the empowerment of our customers; excited about expanding our capabilities with a tier 1 solution in the VoC space; and excited to better fulfill our mission to improve Caribbean Customer Experience and provide the data to make doing business in the Caribbean a paradise.”

Protect sensitive data stored in vector databases with encryption you won't even notice, unless you're a hacker.

In response to mounting risks facing software companies with AI solutions, IronCore Labs announced a beta signup today for a first-of-its-kind product called Cloaked AI.

Cloaked AI is an encryption-in-use solution that allows the AI memory – the vector embeddings – to be used fully without loss of functionality while also protecting the privacy and security of that data no matter who holds it. Only those with the key can meaningfully query the data and derive meaning from it.

Companies with AI tools store personal, sensitive information in unprotected databases
It's fairly well known that a handful of AI models like OpenAI and ChatGPT now power thousands of AI products built by software companies across the globe. What's less well known is that advanced AI features require long-term memory – a place to store context, history, customer information, and other remembered impressions of data. This information then gets stored in a vector database.

Vector databases now hold the crown jewels
AI products have access to all kinds of private data, from chat history to medical diagnoses to proprietary company information, which is represented by vector embeddings and stored in these new vector databases. While these vector embeddings aren't understandable to humans, much like other machine representations of data, they hold a ton of meaning for AI and a savvy hacker can easily extract highly sensitive information from them for mischief or profit.

An encryption solution that won't disrupt your business, but will disrupt a hacker
Protecting AI data stored in vector databases is critical to securing AI systems, ensuring trust with customers or vector database vendors, complying with global data privacy regulations and avoiding privacy and security breaches.

Thanks to the advanced encryption-in-use technologies at play in Cloaked AI, all major operations like nearest neighbor searches, clustering, anomaly detection, and more, work over all known vector databases including those from Pinecone, Weaviate, Elastic, and AWS OpenSearch.

Cloaked AI is built to be invisible to you but impenetrable to attackers. You continue business as usual. Your customers get the privacy protection they want. Hackers get nothing.

Fujitsu, a leading provider of IT products and services, has announced the opening of its House of Modernization, a center of excellence (CoE) focused on application modernization for its Continental Europe region (CE) powered by CAST software intelligence technology. This CE CoE is a response to the growing demand for accelerated transformation at scale and Fujitsu's commitment to providing innovative solutions to their customers.

According to Helmut Sturm, Business Owner Modernization at Fujitsu Continental Europe, "The CE Modernization CoE is an exciting development that will help our customers to innovate and stay ahead of the curve in today's fast-paced digital landscape. We are thrilled up our transformation game and enable our customers to further modernize their applications while improving business processes."

The collaborative effort will provide a range of services including application modernization, performance optimization, and cloud migration. Fujitsu's customers will benefit from CAST's unique software intelligence technology that ‘understands’ how custom-built applications work and automatically provides insights into their inner workings.

"Our partnership with Fujitsu is a great opportunity to help organizations achieve their digital transformation goals safer and faster," said CAST Senior Vice President and DACH General Manager Houssem Ben Abderrahman. "We are excited to be part of this new initiative to help Fujitsu's customers modernize their applications and achieve greater agility and efficiency."

Located in Munich, Germany, the CE Modernization CoE will be staffed by a team of experts in software modernization and performance optimization and provide training and support to help Fujitsu's customers improve their application development processes.

• D-ID's Creative Reality^TM Studio updated to give avatars emotions and elevates user interaction

• Chat.D-ID first app enabling natural face-to-face chats using conversational AI, enhanced with customizable avatars

• Company sees demand for its generative AI text-to-video tech skyrocket with new signup every 3 seconds

D-ID, a world leader in Generative AI and creative media, today announced significant new Creative Reality^TM Studio capabilities, including a new UI, as well as the ability to add facial expressions to avatars and digital people. D-ID also announced an upgrade to its chat.d-id, giving users the ability to upload any image to 'talk' in real time face-to-face with a generative AI of their choice.

D-ID is consistently improving and advancing its multimodal platform to create the best user experience of its Creative Reality^TM Studio for brands, corporations, creators, marketers, digital artists and more. This next-generation Studio is evidence of D-ID's commitment to its users and to the creator community, offering a simplified approach and more control over their avatars' voices and more realistic expressions.

Subscribers will have the option to upgrade to the new Creative Reality^TM Studio version which includes:

• Facial expression selection: Select an expression for your avatar to add more emotions and set the tone of your video. Users will be able to choose from a variety of expressions with additional expressions to be released in the near future. Richer expressions are also available via D-ID's API.
• Canvas Layout Selections: Tailor the shape of your story with wide, square, or vertical video formats, with more expected in the near future.
• Layers: Add depth to your creativity by managing foreground and background elements.
• Positioning: Precisely place and align your content to optimize visual impact.
• Transparency: Fine-tune the visibility of your elements for a layered, immersive effect.

Creative Reality^TM Studio is the first multimodal platform to combine text-image-video generation on one platform. Since its launch in the second half of 2022, D-ID's Creative Reality^TM Studio's popularity has exploded, signing a new subscriber every three seconds, with 150 million videos generated from the technology. D-ID's live-streaming capability and its API, launched in March 2023, boast a new developer generating an API key every four minutes. 25,000 API keys have already been generated with one million developers signed to get additional API keys. Both the Creative Reality Studio and chat.D-ID, which gives ChatGPT a face and voice, have millions of unique visitors per month. Recently, D-ID enabled users to add faces of their own choosing to chat.D-ID, as well as a text prompt to fine-tune their avatar's personality and characteristics.

"Human imagination is limitless as we have seen from the millions of videos already created with our self-service studio," said Gil Perry, CEO and Co-Founder of D-ID. "We are excited to be launching the next-generation studio, giving users even more control over avatars' expressions and further enabling thousands of businesses to become prolific creators with scalable personalization."

D-ID's Creative Reality Studio^TM enables AI-generated customized video narrators in 119 languages. The platform radically reduces the cost and hassle of creating video content by combining the company's deep learning technology together into one offering alongside other AI-generative technologies. Brands, corporations, marketers, creators, digital artists, filmmakers, advertising agencies, illustrators, storyboard artists, music video producers, and game developers can easily create compelling videos using a single image – effectively bringing the image to life. D-ID's Generative AI-powered video technology is available to both enterprise clients and individuals, and is also available to Microsoft PowerPoint, Canva users and additional applications.

chat.D-ID, the world's first app enabling natural face-to-face conversations using ChatGPT and other large language models, now allows users to upload their own avatar for D-ID's generative AI to animate and create video responses. Users can select an avatar and voice, as well as provide a brief character description. Along with using their own photos, users can upload an image of a historical, fictional, or AI-generated figure and can instruct the app to answer as if they were that person, 'in character' allowing for a myriad of natural interactions. The technology will be used for many purposes including training, education, AI assistance, customer support, companionship, and entertainment and chat.D-ID showcases the API's live streaming capability.

74% of executives believe the benefits of generative AI will outweigh the associated concerns

70% of executives believe that generative AI will enable organizations to widen the scope of the roles of knowledge workers.¹ Nearly all executives (96%) recognize that generative AI is a key topic in the boardroom, with the majority confirming that their leadership are strong advocates. This is according to Capgemini Research Institute’s latest report, ‘Harnessing the value of generative AI: Top use cases across industries’, which examines the transformative force of generative AI for innovation across enterprises.

Organizations see generative AI as an opportunity to drive revenues
Despite apparent risks, such as copyright infringement or cybersecurity, 74% of executives believe that the benefits posed by generative AI outweigh the associated concerns. While 21% anticipate a disruption in their industries, 40% of organizations across industries have already established teams and budget for the technology, with a further 49% contemplating doing so within 12 months.

The research also found:

• Organizations believe that the most relevant generative AI based platforms or tools for their industries are chatbots for automating customer service and improving knowledge management (83%) and designing, collecting, or summarizing data (75%)
• Most executives believe that generative AI will make product and service design more efficient (78%) and accessible (76%)
• They also said it will make customer experiences more interactive and engaging (71%) or improve customer service with automated and personalized support (67%).
  
  

A range of further benefits within three years
Within three years’ time, and following the successful implementation of generative AI, executives foresee a range of benefits. They believe that its integration will lead to an 8% increase in sales and a 7% decrease in costs. Alongside this, those surveyed indicated that they could expect to see a 9% improvement in both customer engagement and satisfaction, and operational efficiency.

“Generative AI is a transformational force for innovation in organizations, accelerating industry specific use cases to create value, and it’s no surprise that it’s already at the top of the agenda of virtually every large organization,” comments Franck Greverie, Chief Portfolio Officer and Group Executive Board Member at Capgemini. “While generative AI can enable numerous benefits for businesses and employees alike, adopting a human-centric approach while scaling the technology and implementing necessary guidelines will be key to fostering trust in the workplace. As businesses accelerate their generative AI journeys, they must prioritize implementing it sustainably across the organization.”

The high-tech industry is leading the way in generative AI integration
Executives in the high-tech industry are the ones most convinced (84%) that the overall impact of generative AI will be positive. Nearly 70% of executives in that industry said their organizations have generative AI pilots underway, and 18% state that they have already implemented generative AI across some locations or business functions. The top two use cases are 3D modelling for detailed shapes and predictive maintenance.

The majority (67%) of executives across sectors see the most potential for generative AI in the IT function – this is particularly true within the high-tech sector which holds the largest percentage of executives (86%) saying their organization is using or plans to use generative AI in IT. Other areas where executives see generative AI driving value are sales (54%), and marketing and communications (48%).

The rise of generative AI will create new roles and will require investment in upskilling
According to 69% of businesses, generative AI will begin to provide concepts and initial designs for projects and, as such, employees’ roles will shift away from ideation and creation, to review and refinement. This sentiment was also echoed by consumers, with 70% saying that they believe generative AI will make them more efficient at work, free them from routine tasks and enable them to explore more strategic aspects of their job.²

The research reveals that 69% of executives believe generative AI will lead to the emergence of new roles such as AI auditors and AI ethicists. With the introduction of new generative AI-based roles, 68% of executives believe that integration of the technology into the workforce will require significant investment in upskilling and cross-skilling of talent.

Most organizations understand the need for sustainable generative AI
Nearly 80% of organizations understand the criticality of implementing and scaling generative AI sustainably. Alongside this, 78% of enterprises understand that generative AI can have a larger carbon footprint than traditional IT programs. However, out of the organizations that plan to train their own models (8%), roughly half have taken steps to mitigate their environmental impact, highlighting the need for more concrete efforts towards sustainability.

Methodology  
For this report, the Capgemini Research Institute surveyed 1,000 organizations interested in exploring generative AI across 13 countries across the US, Europe, and Asia Pacific: UK, US, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, Spain, and Sweden. Alongside this survey, they conducted in-depth interviews with 10 industry executives. The vast majority (99%) of organizations surveyed had annual revenue of over $1 billion, and over half (55%) had revenue over $5 billion.

Firstlogic customers can now leverage the benefits of address geo-location data enrichment enabled by the company’s Geocode IQ® product.

Firstlogic has announced the release of their new software product, Geocode IQ®. With Geocode IQ, organizations can efficiently add geocoding information to their address data.

Geocode IQ allows users to configure and execute batch jobs for converting address data into precise latitude and longitude coordinates, opening up new possibilities for location-based insights and enhanced decision-making. Geocode IQ can also append US Census data to addresses based on ZIP code. This unlocks added geographic/regional information including Census Tract/Block, Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), Legislative/Congressional District, and County subdivision.

As with other modules in the Firstlogic family of software, Geocode IQ is self-managed server software that is available for direct integration into customer applications via an optional SDK. Customers can run the product in an on-premise environment or deploy the software to a cloud provider. Firstlogic makes Geocode IQ licensing simple by providing an annual license subscription and charging no usage fees. Annual subscriptions to Geocode IQ include the software license, maintenance, technical support, and unlimited usage. The company provides the software, directories, and assistance to help customers install and manage the software within their own operating environments. Customers appreciate the ability to keep their data securely within their control. In an on-premise installation, Geocode IQ processes all records offline, making it easy to comply with privacy standards and regulations.

Geocoding connects a postal address to a physical point on the planet. Adding this information to a corporate database enables business leaders to do many things they cannot do with addresses alone. Geographic data enables businesses to acquire more customers by implementing a more targeted sales and marketing approach. By adding this information to their corporate databases, companies can also create user-friendly tools that make it effortless for customers to locate their nearest service center or retail location, enhancing the customer experience and driving foot traffic. Data-driven organizations also use this data to invest in appropriate locations for company offices, warehouses, retail stores, service centers, and more.

A variety of industries use geocode data, including healthcare, finance, public safety, and insurance. In the insurance sector, geocoding techniques are relied upon to help set premiums and make underwriting decisions based on the physical location of insured properties. Geocoding provides critical information for risk assessment, enabling insurance companies to offer tailored coverage based on specific geographic factors such as environmental risks, crime rates, and proximity to fire stations or flood zones.

M-Files, a global leader in information management, announced today that the company has been recognized by customers on Gartner Peer Insights™ as a Strong Performer in the June 2023 Gartner Peer Insights ‘Voice of the Customer’: Content Services Platforms report. M-Files is one of four vendors in the report to receive a Strong Performer distinction. The company is recognized as a Strong Performer overall as well as the only vendor in this category for both the North America and Midsize Enterprise segments.

"Customer satisfaction plays a crucial role in fueling our growth, as evidenced by our recent Centaur status marking the achievement of $100M in annual recurring revenue (ARR)," said Antti Nivala, founder and CEO, M-Files. "Our Strong Performer recognition reflects our commitment to the M-Files guiding principles of "Make It Happen," "Help Others," and "Love Customers." "We are honored by this distinction which signifies our customers' passion for the M-Files platform and reaffirms our ability to deliver exceptional customer experiences."

Gartner Peer Insights ‘Voice of the Customer’: Content Services Platforms report rates vendors based on the following categories – Product Capabilities, Sales Experience, Deployment Experience and Support Experience. Gartner Peer Insights include some the following responses for M-Files:

“Secure and intuitive tool for document management. It's an excellent information organization tool that will always find where the right content is, regardless of file systems and locations, helping to improve the way files are stored, improving productivity." – Data Research Analyst, IT Services [read full review]

"Great Product For Managing Company Processes And Documents. We've been a long time user of M-Files. It's a multi-purpose tool that has helped us to manage company processes, document approval and also integrate to our other systems." - IT Manager, Manufacturing [read full review]

"A Great Product For Managing Enterprise Content! M-Files is a great tool for managing our company records. Users love the ease of searching for content in the system, allowing them to retrieve documents quickly. Additionally, the M-Files services team has been stellar. They have consistently been a solid partner - responsive and proactive to our needs." - Associate Director, Cloud Solutions, Finance (non-banking) [read full review]

"M-Files Changes The Way We Work For The Better. This is the best vendor I have worked with in more than 25 years in the business" - Associate Director, Data Enablement, Healthcare and Biotech [read full review]

"Most Suitable And Comprehensive Content Services Platform. This tool automates document management workflows to optimize output and deliver better business outcomes. It is simple and fast to share documents and files with this tool. It is possible to search and locate documents and files quickly." - Director of Operations, Consumer Goods[read full review]