Avaya, a global leader in customer experience solutions to enhance and simplify communications and collaboration, today announced its reimagined professional services: Avaya Customer Experience Services (ACES), formerly Avaya Professional Services. The enhanced approach leverages integrating artificial intelligence (AI), cloud, and digital technologies to drive improved business outcomes to customers.

Today’s businesses acknowledge the crucial roles that AI and cloud technology play in optimizing their operations and enhancing their customer experiences. However, the shortage of specialized talent required to integrate these technologies, coupled with the rapid pace of AI advancements, often delays the decision to deploy these technologies or hinders their successful deployment.

ACES accelerates the cloud journey by enabling clients to innovate without disruption. ACES helps clients navigate their digital transformation journeys by maintaining existing voice-based customizations while concurrently delivering the full value of AI and cloud-based capabilities. ACES further enhances Avaya channel partners and systems integrators by offering a globally available, expert-led and innovative suite of AI, cloud, and digital services.

The ACES team works with some of the largest and most complex contact centers in the world integrating the latest technologies into existing customer experience workflows. ACES provides AI automation services that yield business efficiencies and enable exceptional customer experiences. For cloud evolution services, ACES provides seamless workflow migration and hybrid cloud services designed to prioritize customer and employee satisfaction.

"In an increasingly CX-focused business environment, it's clear that customers are not solely interested in purchasing technology; they are investing in outcomes," said Blair Pleasant, President & Principal Analyst of COMMfusion and a Co-Founder of UCStrategies. "With its reimagined ACES division, Avaya professional services offers more than just advanced AI, cloud, and digital solutions, but also the promise of tangible results—enhanced customer experiences, improved operational efficiency, and ultimately, greater business success."

ACES also enables customers to easily add capabilities from Avaya’s technology partners. For example, ACES leveraged Avaya's partnerships with Calabrio, a customer experience intelligence company, to help Canada's largest propane supplier, Superior Propane, improve customer retention and reduce average call handle times. Superior Propane leveraged Calabrio's desktop and speech analytics capabilities to get an in-depth understanding of current processes, and as a result, they reduced average call handle time by 30 seconds per call.

“ACES represents Avaya's unwavering dedication to its customers by delivering transformative technology through AI, cloud, and digital solutions that create personalized experiences,” said Emir Susic, Global Vice President, Avaya Customer Experience Services. “By meeting customers exactly where they are in their cloud migration, Avaya reinforces its commitment to guide organizations through their digital transformation journey.”

GreenPlaces’ platform translates sustainability into ROI, making it possible for the everyday business leaders to reduce emissions and increase their bottom line, a strategy previously reserved for corporate giants

GreenPlaces, an all-in-one sustainability platform, today announces $13M Series A, led by Redpoint Ventures along with Felicis, Tishman Speyer Ventures, and Bull City Venture Partners. This investment fuels GreenPlaces on its mission to bring sustainability to the mass market where over 83% of global emissions, or an estimated 39 billion tonnes of CO2e, live.

Business leaders today are under an enormous amount of pressure, facing declining profitability, rapidly evolving regulation, and an ever-more environmentally conscious consumer and workforce. Despite rising requirements and expectations, most sustainability teams and budgets are small and increasingly squeezed as businesses are forced to make cuts and focus on the bottom line. GreenPlaces understands that businesses desperately need a practical, straightforward sustainability solution, and in order for it to work for the mass market, it has to be good for business and the planet.

“I empathize with business leaders. On one side you’re facing declining profitability, and on the other you’re staring down ESG requirements and climate regulation. Not to mention, topline pressure as customers shift their spend to reflect values,” says Alex Lassiter, Founder & CEO of GreenPlaces. “We built GreenPlaces to tie business and sustainability objectives together, making it easy for businesses to reduce their carbon footprint and increase their bottom line.”

Industry giants like Meta, Microsoft, and AT&T today practice a “good for business, good for planet” approach to sustainability–investing heavily in experts and custom-built tools to tackle their carbon footprint, and benefit their bottom line. GreenPlaces is helping the mass market adopt this approach, to move beyond viewing sustainability as a cost center, reframing it as a smarter way to do business–translating sustainability into ROI.

“We realized that businesses like Amazon, Starbucks, and Meta were achieving sustainability goals while also saving millions in operational efficiencies,” says Lassiter, “Shouldn’t every business have access to these sustainable strategies?”

GreenPlaces makes sustainability possible for all businesses–connecting the dots between business benefit and climate impact. Practical and easy to implement, the all-in-one solution is purpose-built for business leaders who need to adopt sustainability practices, but lack the resources and expertise of corporate giants.

GreenPlaces’ platform marries customer’s operational data with sustainability benchmarks–through integrations with thousands of existing business tools (such as utilities, HR, and accounting platforms) – to create visibility into their carbon footprint, as well as actionable insights to reduce emissions and achieve cost savings. The platform also includes templates and tools such as an ESG policy library and a branded sustainability website, making it easy for customers to reach compliance and share their story.

GreenPlaces supports fast growing businesses across a range of industries–from restaurants and hotels to tech companies and more traditional businesses like law firms and service providers. Leading brands including bartaco, Graduate Hotels, Zuora, Salesloft, and Network Wireless Solutions (NWS) choose GreenPlaces as their trusted sustainability partner.

“In our minds, if you want to work with large corporations in any sort of commercial capacity moving forward, you are going to need to both track and report on your emissions footprint and sustainability practices. We believe that similar to what we’ve seen with other compliance trends like GDPR and SOC II, the vast majority of the market needs a simple, prescriptive, set-it-and-forget-it solution for sustainability – and that’s what GreenPlaces offers,” says Meera Clark, Principal at Redpoint Ventures. “Alex and the GreenPlaces team have shown unparalleled customer empathy, which we believe to be a huge competitive advantage in meeting the needs of a customer set who has historically been misunderstood and ignored by Silicon Valley.”

“We are so excited that companies of all sizes are turning to GreenPlaces to drive sustainability efforts and improve their bottom line,” says Viviana Faga, General Partner at Felicis. “Environmental standards are fast becoming a norm, and GreenPlaces is the perfect integrated platform to reduce the complexity for organizations. Their customized reporting and tailored carbon reduction playbooks are features that every modern company needs. We're thrilled to support Alex and the team in their efforts to create a world where all businesses prioritize sustainability with GreenPlaces.”

LG Ad Solutions, a global leader in connected TV (CTV) and cross-screen advertising, today announced a strategic partnership with leading customer intelligence company, Acxiom. The collaboration maximizes brands' data strategies, empowering advertisers to reach millions of high-value LG TV households by seamlessly activating their connected TV campaigns in as little as 24 hours, minimizing waste.

As CTV continues to evolve into a powerful platform for advertising innovation and content promotion, challenges with scalability, reach, speed, and efficiency remain. This integration effectively addresses these issues by combining Acxiom's premier, privacy-compliant marketing data with LG Ad Solutions' proprietary ACR data, achieving highly accurate matching across the LG CTV universe at scale. As a result, brands can accurately identify and understand audiences to deliver meaningful messaging that foster long-term customer connections within the Smart TV ecosystem.

“CTV advertisers can now reach their desired audience more accurately and efficiently, and at scale. This game-changing collaboration combines LG Ad Solutions' Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) viewership data with Acxiom's broad cross-industry audiences taxonomy, giving advertisers from all sectors a new level of incremental reach based on exceptionally high match rates without compromising flexibility or scale," said Alistair Sutcliffe, head of product at LG Ad Solutions.

Conor Burgess, Vice President, Business Development at Acxiom, adds, "Our partnership with LG Ad Solutions has yielded a unique opportunity to drive CTV platform growth while simultaneously addressing a major pain point in CTV activation for brands. This collaboration sets a new industry standard for onboarding first- and third-party data with unparalleled precision. By significantly boosting match rates and enhancing speed and efficiency in CTV advertising, we can provide better advertising experiences without additional data delivery costs."

Email security leader unveils Themis Co-pilot for Microsoft Outlook: The first ICES solution with a fully generative AI phishing model, PhishLLM

IRONSCALES, the leading enterprise cloud email security platform protecting more than 10,000 global organizations worldwide, today announced the Beta launch of Themis Co-pilot for Microsoft Outlook, a GPT-powered chat assistant for self-service threat reporting. Powering Themis Co-pilot is PhishLLM, a cutting-edge large language model (LLM) hosted within the IRONSCALES infrastructure, which is the first in the IRONSCALES suite of generative AI apps for email security.

The announcement comes at a time when rates of BEC and other advanced phishing attacks are climbing exponentially as they expose vulnerabilities in traditional email security solutions with social engineering tactics. A recent report from Osterman Research revealed that large organizations are expecting a 43% increase in BEC attacks in the next 12 months.

In addition, cybercriminals specifically target the human element as it offers a convenient means of gaining unauthorized access to sensitive information, with phishing being one of their primary tactics. According to the 2023 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), 74% of breaches involved a human element.

To combat the exponential rise in phishing, Themis Co-pilot, the first in a suite of generative AI apps, was designed to empower humans to be a critical cybersecurity defense. Built on top of PhishLLM, a proprietary, patent-pending large language model, these ground-breaking capabilities will allow enterprises to become more cyber resilient by enabling end-users, regardless of role, skill, or level, to detect sophisticated attacks.

Unleashing Generative AI for Email Security

Currently available through a public Beta, Themis Co-pilot for Outlook enables IT and security admins to:

• Empower end users and democratize email security: Mobilize your employees as a critical line of defense with the ability to question suspicious emails and gain real-time actionable insights to confidently report threats and take a more active part in threat hunting.
• Reduce noise: Reduce the number of user-reported false positives and free up the security team for other important business initiatives.
• Automatically stop emerging zero-day threats: As end-users leverage Themis Co-pilot to report emerging threats, proper classification will automatically remediate similar threats across the environment and train the IRONSCALES machine learning element to look for these threats in the future.

Generative AI and the IRONSCALES Difference

Generative AI is changing the cybersecurity landscape, both in the volume and velocity of phishing attacks, but also in the way organizations can leverage it to make more informed decisions regarding emails.

IRONSCALES developed the industry’s first AI-powered security analyst, Themis AI, which utilizes the data from millions of security events from users, devices, and threat intel signals, in a continuous reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) cycle. Adding to this powerful data set is the human insights collected from every mailbox user and 20,000+ security analysts across the IRONSCALES network of global admins. This massive dataset of human intelligence is used to stop breaches in real time. Only IRONSCALES brings this continuous feedback loop of AI and human insights together into the most powerful email security solution on the market.

“IRONSCALES has pioneered the use of artificial intelligence in email security to detect and remediate sophisticated phishing attempts. With the introduction of Themis Co-pilot, we’re delivering the next innovation that will help end users, of any skill level, improve their ability to stop attacks without adding additional cost or complexity to the organization,” said Eyal Benishti, CEO of IRONSCALES. “Our unique approach of combining AI and human insights is transforming email security. We believe our continuous feedback loop between our AI, human insights, and SAT capabilities is the most comprehensive approach to email security and remains unmatched by other vendors in the industry.”

Insights GPT empowers customers with deeper context and new ways to deliver faster, trusted insights from vast volumes of publicly and commercially available information

Babel Street, the world’s leading data-to-knowledge company, today announced the launch of Insights GPT. This generative AI tool delivers critical analysis from publicly and commercially available information (PAI/CAI) at an unprecedented speed. Babel Street is piloting the new technology with select customers this summer.

With access to over 500 petabytes of open source and dark web data, Babel Street has nearly 3X the reach capabilities of leading search engines. The Babel Street Insights Platform also includes the most robust cross-lingual support available, sourcing information in more than 200 languages from news and media reports to social network and public forum posts.

Insights GPT further capitalizes on Babel Street’s powerful and intuitive interface that empowers organizations to rapidly unlock the most insights that matter. Insights GPT provides a new layer of essential analysis for teams that require contextual understanding and rapid response. The conversational AI delivers a collaborative approach that harnesses the power of generative AI alongside human expertise that significantly accelerates critical insights for companies and government agencies.

“Incorporating generative AI is a significant milestone in data analytics and decision intelligence,” said Michael Southworth, CEO of Babel Street. “Insights GPT serves as a force multiplier for public and private sector organizations worldwide by dramatically improving speed to insight. In tandem with AI, analysts can more quickly detect patterns and have the context they need to make the most informed critical decisions.”

The new Insights GPT tool offers a tailored and controlled experience, enabling users to refine their input sources using various filters based on their specific needs for verification and authority requirements. By leveraging the Insights document library, users can access a wealth of analysis-ready data, facilitating the rapid discovery of focused and prioritized information. Insights GPT ensures continuous and persistent context understanding throughout the ongoing analysis process. This effortless tool empowers users with more control over the data they analyze and boosts trust in their findings.

Examples of Insights GPT’s key features include:

• Effective human-machine teaming: combines human expertise with AI to develop insights, recommendations, and visualizations based on the analyzed data, offering collaboration that produces superior insights
• Entity based summarization: delivers concise, quickly formatted summaries, insights, and analysis of key people, organizations, and locations delivering an easy-to-understand format for efficient decision-making
• Pre-filtering capabilities for trusted data: enables tailored data pools for specific needs, giving users control and trust in the output, accuracy, and reliability
• Sentiment analysis: analyzes PAI to identify and analyze the sentiment, opinions, and emotions expressed within the gathered information which can be especially important in market research, brand management, political analysis, and more
• Precision intelligence: returns direct responses, rather than results, for naturally formed questions making the tool user-friendly and efficient
• Streamlined sharing: makes sharing your formatted analysis within your organization simple and intuitive, fostering broader collaboration and accessibility
• Accurate translation: facilitates natural language understanding and generation to create conversational results for summaries, insights, and analysis in more than 200 languages enhancing global understanding and comprehension

Insights GPT is among the latest new features for the Babel Street Insights platform and part of a growing suite of solutions for organizations that require advanced analysis for threat intelligence, identity resolution, and risk mitigation. Insights GPT will be available for select customers through a pilot period of the new technology, with planned broader availability later this summer.

Ecosystem of digital marketing tools built on top of the Privacy Sandbox mechanisms starts to kick-off. PrimeAudience launches as the first to satisfy behavioural targeting use cases.

 RTB House announces the launch of PrimeAudience, the first company dedicated to utilising Chrome’s Protected Audience API and Topics API to provide advertisers with advanced behavioural targeting capabilities. As the deadline for the deprecation of third-party cookies on Chrome approaches, PrimeAudience offers a unique solution to brands and a new revenue stream for publishers.

PrimeAudience’s potential is already recognised by a number of launch partners including; OptAd360, a major European yield monetisation partner and US-based Raptive, formerly known as CafeMedia and AdThrive.

Robert Dyczkowski, RTB House CEO comments, “The launch of new marketing APIs by Chrome has allowed us to create a completely new product category which we’ve coined as ‘protected audiences advertising network’. We wanted to separate an entity that is supposed to provide state-of-the-art behavioural targeting capabilities in the future environment, as this is an extremely important use-case for a wide range of advertisers. Cookieless changes completely redefine technical possibilities of providing it. For years advertisers have been using DMPs in which case specific audiences were nothing more than just lists of single user IDs, which could be imported to any DSP for targeting. Not only has it been convenient from the business perspective but also technically possible to decouple users data from inventory purchase. As the Privacy Sandbox enforces several technical restrictions on the whole process, in particular, limited possibility to exchange user lists between different companies, from an engineering standpoint DSP and DMP solutions will have to be more integrated. As a consequence, with the demise of third-party cookies the industry has no choice but to make it more integrated also from a business side. PrimeAudience by design fits perfectly into the new order.”

To accurately segment users, PrimeAudience will be utilising precisely processed publishers’ first-party data enriched with other signals, such as Topics API and display ads to the user groups via Google Chrome’s Protected Audience API. The benefit is that this technology doesn't rely on any cross-site ID mechanisms, future-proofing it against any tightening technological and regulatory environments around these solutions, with transparency at the core.

Mateusz Rumiński, PrimeAudience VP of Product said, "The $700 billion digital advertising industry is being disrupted by the deprecation of third-party cookies in Chrome in 2024. We are proud to introduce a brand-new, cookieless behavioural targeting approach that will ease the transition for advertisers and publishers alike. After proving the concept, we are ready to scale up in upcoming testing phases of the Privacy Sandbox.”

PrimeAudience will allow advertisers to buy ads directly or in a self-service model through Adlook Smart, an outcome oriented buying platform. The next stage of scale growth is expected to begin in summer, during General Availability of Privacy Sandbox APIs.

The Market's First Industrial RTLS Analytics Solution with ChatGPT

Inpixon®. a leading provider of real-time location systems (RTLS), today announced the integration of ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence (AI), into Inpixon's RTLS solution. This innovative integration expands the capabilities of Inpixon's RTLS, enabling rapid, AI-assisted insights as well as interactive discussions in a conversational medium. Operations managers in production and logistics, in particular, stand to benefit from this transformative development. 

"We believe Inpixon is one of the first companies, if not the first, to announce an industrial RTLS analytics integration with OpenAI's ChatGPT," said Nadir Ali, Inpixon's CEO. "In leveraging artificial intelligence and natural language processing for RTLS analytics, we're continuing our leadership in innovation for Industry 4.0 and in helping businesses unlock the full potential of digital transformation."

The utilization of AI, particularly ChatGPT, offers numerous benefits for Industry 4.0 applications in logistics and production. Some of the key advantages include:

• Enhanced data insights: The AI can uncover patterns, trends, and relationships within the data, and can present written insights about data with context. Rather than just viewing graphical representations or data tables, users can receive deeper insights and better understand the interconnections within their data.
• Conversational user interface: The integration of ChatGPT enables interactive, natural language discussions. Users can pose questions, receive information and recommendations, and ask follow-up questions in a back-and-forth manner similar to an exchange between two humans. This provides for fast and effective communication with the data analytics system.

By leveraging real-time location data and analyzing it in the context of other operational data, businesses can identify opportunities to streamline operations, reduce delays, optimize material flows, and minimize waste. This can not only lead to cost savings but also to improvements in overall operational efficiency, customer satisfaction, and competitive advantage.

Ersan Guenes, Inpixon senior vice president, IIoT solutions, noted, "By delivering conversational AI in manufacturing and other industrial environments, Inpixon can empower users to communicate with their data stores in a natural language manner, using their own words. In addition to uncovering unique insights from the collected location data, when additional data sources are added, such as, ERP, WMS, MES, economics, weather and more, the results can be tremendously powerful. We look forward to field deployment of the new AI-powered features in the third quarter of this year."