Triton Digital, the global technology and services leader in the digital audio, podcast, and broadcast radio industries, announced the acquisition of Sounder, an innovative audio intelligence platform. As part of Triton Digital, Sounder will continue to provide advanced contextual targeting solutions, brand suitability, and cutting-edge podcast promotional tools.

This acquisition combines Triton Digital's renowned audio streaming and podcasting technology and expertise with Sounder's best-in-class brand suitability solutions and industry-leading AI-powered podcast understanding. The combination will enable a more seamless, practical, data-driven advertising experience for brands, agencies, publishers, and podcasters.

"We are thrilled to welcome Sounder to the Triton Digital family," said John Rosso, President and CEO of Triton Digital. "The Sounder team are visionaries in audio intelligence, and their technology adds an essential layer to our offerings. This acquisition empowers us to deliver more value to advertisers and publishers with highly targeted, contextually relevant, and brand-suitable audio advertising solutions. Looking ahead, we are excited to leverage our combined strengths to drive innovation and growth in the digital audio marketplace."

“Becoming part of Triton Digital is a significant milestone for Sounder, giving us the ability to accelerate our growth and innovation while continuing to work across the entire podcast landscape," said Kal Amin, CEO and co-founder of Sounder. “Our AI-powered content analysis enables Triton to bring unprecedented insights, targeting, and promotional capabilities to the audio marketplace."

Key Benefits of the Acquisition:

1. Best-in-Class Contextual Targeting: Sounder's top-tier contextual targeting tools ensure advertiser alignment with relevant content, elevating campaign effectiveness. Triton Ad Platform will deliver a more robust targeting capability with scale, transparent reporting, and forecasting.
2. Premium Brand Placement: Sounder's brand-suitable solution is unmatched in the industry. Sounder offers brands peace of mind and ensures advertisers’ messages are placed in a suitable listening environment.
3. AI-Powered Promotional Tools: Triton publishers will have access to Sounder’s AI promotional tools. The intersection of GenAI and large language models with Sounder's natural language processing technology creates unparalleled promotional opportunities for the audio marketplace.

New “Agency + AI” model hailed as the future of marketing

Media Shower, a leading innovator in digital marketing, is proud to announce the launch of its revolutionary AI platform designed specifically for marketers. This first-of-its-kind platform combines the efficiency of artificial intelligence with the creativity of humans, offering an end-to-end solution for creating high-performing marketing materials. 

The platform contains several dozen AI “assistants” that help marketers draft a wide array of marketing materials, from blog posts to marketing plans and beyond. Then marketers can easily send these AI drafts to an award-winning creative team who turn them into polished, professional marketing materials. Unlike the AI-only tools popular in the market today, this blend of “AI + humans” fuses the potential of AI with the process of human creativity.

Using the platform is simple: after directing the AI assistants to create a draft, marketers click “Place Order” to send the draft to the Media Shower creative team – editors, designers, and videographers – who finish it into beautiful marketing materials. With this platform, a single marketer can direct an entire team, greatly increasing their productivity and power.

"Our approach has been to see AI not as a replacement for human creativity, but as a powerful tool to enhance it," said John Hargrave, CEO of Media Shower. "Even this press release was drafted using our AI marketing platform, then punched up by our human team. AI is an accelerating technology, helping marketing managers level up their efforts."

By using the platform for its own marketing campaigns, Media Shower has witnessed a staggering 500% increase in organic search results and lead volume, proving the platform's potential to change the game for marketing managers.

As AI continues to evolve, Media Shower's platform is poised to redefine the marketing landscape, showing that the future is not “marketers vs. AI,” but “marketers who use AI” vs. “marketers who don’t.”

Avaya Enables Customers to Choose Their Journey by Delivering Exceptional Employee Experiences across On-Prem, Private Cloud and Public Cloud Environments

Avaya, a global leader in customer experience and communications solutions, today announced the Avaya Communication and Collaboration Suite. This suite of solutions delivers customers with seamless communication and collaboration experiences where they can connect with people and tools all in one place: Meet, call, chat, share files, manage tasks, and more. 

Avaya’s strategy is to give customers the ability to choose their path that fits their organization whether in the public cloud, private cloud, or on-prem. By offering these robust communications solutions that can be deployed on-prem, in a private cloud, or via the public cloud, customers can choose which one works best for them and their employees.

“Our ‘Innovation Without Disruption’ strategy continues to resonate exceedingly well with our customers,” said Alan Masarek, CEO at Avaya. “We’ve listened closely to their needs and have built our Avaya Communication and Collaboration Suite to provide our customers with the flexibility and agility they need to meet the ever-changing demands of their employees.”

In the Avaya Communication and Collaboration Suite, customers can choose their employee experience path through:

• On-Prem: Avaya remains committed to Avaya Aura and Avaya IP Office, enabling customers to continue to strengthen and maintain their advanced communication systems. Bolster your advanced communication systems on-prem with steadfast reliability, maintaining seamless connectivity and enhancing operational continuity.

• Private Cloud: With Avaya Enterprise Cloud™, harness the strength of a fortified, managed communication cloud on Microsoft Azure, ensuring heightened security and efficiency for your business operations. Enjoy the benefits available with Avaya Aura in a private cloud environment.

• Public Cloud: Avaya Cloud Office by RingCentral empowers organizations of any size to enhance their employee experiences, leading to improved customer experiences with simplicity, ease of use, and a customized solution. As part of the strategic partnership between Avaya and RingCentral, Avaya Cloud Office by RingCentral is Avaya’s exclusive UCaaS solution in geographies where available.

Innovation Without Disruption

With the introduction of the Avaya Communication and Collaboration Suite, Avaya customers receive additional value from their communications solutions through integrations with the leading collaboration platform of their choice. By integrating new technologies such as enhancing team connectivity and incorporating AI for more efficient operations enterprises can deliver innovative solutions without disrupting the technology they already have in place.

• Collaboration Platform Integrations: Customers can recognize additional value from their existing investments by integrating industry-leading collaboration solutions with Avaya's communications portfolio for enhanced productivity and to streamline workflows. Microsoft Teams Integration is available for all the solutions in the Avaya Communication and Collaboration Suite.

As part of Avaya’s Collaboration Platform Integrations, today Avaya announced a new partnership with Zoom’s forthcoming AI-powered collaboration platform, Zoom Workplace. The Zoom Workplace will be integrated with Avaya’s Communication and Collaboration Suite, providing customers with a new streamlined way to manage their communications environments and workflows. Zoom Workplace will include core Zoom collaboration products like Meetings, Team Chat, Scheduler, Whiteboards, Spaces, and more, providing customers with a streamlined way to manage their communications environments and workflows. Existing Avaya customers will be able to retain their investments in Avaya’s private cloud or premise-based solutions and devices while benefiting from Zoom’s AI-powered collaboration platform, Zoom Workplace. This partnership was forged to deliver a joint solution that provides an enhanced collaboration user experience for Avaya customers.

“The unveiling of the Avaya Communication and Collaboration Suite marks a significant step forward, combining market-leading solutions from Avaya and their strategic partners that deliver on the promise of innovation without disruption,” said Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst at ZK Research. “In an era where workers spend many hours each day on video calls, often across multiple collaboration solutions, the Avaya Communication and Collaboration Suite emerges as a beacon of integration and efficiency. By streamlining their UC offerings into a single suite, Avaya not only addresses the evolving demands of customers and their employees but also offers a unique solution that simplifies the complex digital workspace. This consolidation is poised to redefine how organizations foster collaboration, ensuring seamless interaction across diverse collaboration solutions and enhancing productivity in the virtual workplace.”

Brand assets created via new "Orb Foundry" set the stage for marketers to meet the moment with visual inspiration, content and branding 

• Today, Deloitte Digital is unveiling its global rebrand powered by Generative AI, inviting the industry to witness first-hand how they put the technology into action and how GenAI can be used for inspiration, branding and content creation on a global scale. 
• Deloitte Digital is introducing its "Orb Foundry," allowing teams across 30 international markets to generate fully rendered brand compliant 3D brand assets; these assets are now live on the Deloitte Digital website, social channels and at Adobe Summit.
• This week, Deloitte Digital will debut the Orb Foundry live at the Adobe Summit in Las Vegas (March 26-28) where their new Firefly-accelerated visual identity will be on display and each visitor will be able to create their own personalized Deloitte Digital-branded orb.

Leveraging GenAI for dynamic content creation

Deloitte Digital is unveiling its global rebrand powered by Generative AI, inviting the industry to witness first-hand how they put the technology into action and how GenAI can be used for branding and content creation. Like many others in the industry, Deloitte Digital grappled with one of today's biggest content challenges: rapidly proliferating channels and campaigns.

Historically, adding new supplemental brand assets to visual identity systems was a complex and labor-intensive process, often taking more than two months from initial ideation to completed brand asset. Deloitte Digital needed a simple, practical way to create bespoke brand imagery on demand and at scale.

Accelerating creative outputs with new technology

Deloitte Digital's new "Orb Foundry," allows teams across 30 international markets to generate fully rendered 3D brand assets. Tools like the Orb Foundry can help to democratize the accessibility of bespoke brand assets for a variety of needs and enable designers and non-designers to easily create a unique asset that is both customized for the conversation and brand compliant.

The Orbs are emblematic of the sophisticated tools needed to meet the demand for personalized, timely, and relevant content and visual branding. Many creatives and marketers know the challenge of reinventing brand imagery over and over again to meet a variety of needs, while always following specific brand guidelines; the Orb Foundry simplifies that process. Deloitte Digital's research reveals the demand for marketing content grew by 1.5 times in 2023, but marketing teams were only able to meet that demand 55% of the time. Many brands and marketers are ready to take the next step in their GenAI journey to meet this need but case studies on executing branding via GenAI are limited.

Tools like the Orb Foundry are not just fun experiments, they can position marketers to stay ahead of rapidly multiplying content demands.

Embracing symbolic innovation

The concept began in June 2023, when Deloitte Digital experimented with how to harness the power of using GenAI to accelerate their creative outputs — understanding this was one of the biggest opportunities facing the industry. This led to the creation of a series of orbs that burst with color, personality and movement. Inspired by Deloitte's signature "Green Dot," the orbs became a symbol both internally and externally for Deloitte Digital, signifying ingenuity and transformative thought.

Key quotes

"Every brand leader is presented with the same challenge. How do you refresh your brand, democratize it, but also maintain a level of consistency and control? By leveraging GenAI in brand personalization, Deloitte Digital is reimagining content creation while freeing up creatives to do deeper, more innovative work. We're showing exactly how we are using it on our own brand, to help others imagine how they can use it for theirs."

— Mark Singer
U.S. CMO, Deloitte Digital

"This rebrand marks a significant leap for us and the brands we serve. Deloitte Digital's dedication to pushing the boundaries of Generative AI will open a whole new world of creative possibilities across industries. We're proud to lead this transformation and provide brands and marketers with the tools they need to accelerate growth in the digital world more easily."

— Barbara Venneman
Global Head of Deloitte Digital

"Innovation in GenAI, embodied in our unique 'Orb Foundry,' equips us with a compelling value proposition that has the potential to transform not only marketing, but also sales, communications, and other functions of business. It paves the way for the customization of assets and the realization of personalization at scale across the entire business, marking a transformative shift."

— Christina Bieniek
Deputy Chief Executive Officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Company reinforces its focus on the enterprise in a step to build an all-in-one platform for every type of designer

Canva, the world’s only all-in-one visual communication platform, today announced the acquisition of Affinity, the award-winning creative software suite for professional photo editing, illustration, graphic design and page layout. 

The acquisition significantly bolsters Canva’s vision to build the world’s most comprehensive suite of visual communication tools. While the last decade has seen rapid growth for Canva amongst the 99% of knowledge workers without design training, the integration of Affinity’s professional design software now unlocks the full spectrum of designers at every level and stage of the design journey.

As visual communication becomes the status quo in teams and organizations around the world, the acquisition also accelerates Canva’s enterprise ambitions, unlocking a future where professional designers can craft designs and templates with Affinity to scale across organizations with Canva.

“Visual communication is now ubiquitous in the workplace and investing in strategies that enhance our B2B offerings is core to the future of our business," said Canva co-founder and COO, Cliff Obrecht. “From sales and marketing, to brand and creative teams, the need to create effective and engaging visual content is on the rise. The Affinity team comes with an incredible caliber of talent and technology and we're delighted to welcome them to Canva as we enter our next phase together.”

Empowering professional designers

Affinity stemmed from a vision to empower designers to produce high quality content in an effective and affordable way. In 10 years, the Affinity suite of creative products has become beloved and renowned for delivering powerful experiences for professional designers. This includes offering extremely fast and highly responsive tools which deliver on all the photo and vector editing tasks required by professionals.

Today, more than 3 million users around the world trust Affinity to create everything from complex multi-layered graphics to detailed technical diagrams, art and illustration, logos, mockups, documents, magazines and much more.

Designed for the latest hardware and packed with features to simplify real-life professional workflows, Affinity’s all-inclusive photo editing, graphic design and desktop publishing products serve as a powerful, cost effective and subscription-free solution for photographers and designers requiring versatility and precision.

Their core products - Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo and Affinity Publisher - have been lauded for their lightning-fast performance and seamless cross-platform compatibility across macOS, Windows and iPadOS. To date, Affinity has won a number of industry awards, including an Apple Design Award, Apple App of the Year for Mac and iPad and the Microsoft Application Developer of the Year.

Canva growth surge continues

Now entering its second decade, Canva has pioneered the model for simple and effective design and is now used by more than 175 million people across 190 countries and in more than 100 languages. As visual communication becomes an imperative for every kind of industry and organization, the last few years has seen Canva make significant strides in this arena, bolstered by the introduction of Canva’s Visual Suite in September 2022.

Since then, the company has added more than 90 million new users, experiencing nine years’ worth of growth in just 18 months. The acquisition of Affinity will increase Canva’s offering of design tools by expanding into the professional design market.

Canva will continue to invest in the Affinity suite to ensure it not only meets the needs of professional designers, but also enhances their experiences and empowers them to do their best work. Together, Canva and Affinity will be a powerhouse combination built to supercharge the goals of every type of designer.

“Since the inception of Affinity, our mission has been to empower creatives with tools that unleash their full potential, fostering a community where innovation and artistry flourish," said Ashley Hewson, CEO of Affinity. “We've worked tirelessly to challenge the status quo, delivering professional-grade creative software that is both accessible and affordable. Canva’s commitment to empowering everyone to create aligns perfectly with those values. We couldn't be more excited about becoming part of the Canva family and can't wait to see what we will achieve together.”

Europe Based Acquisitions Continue To Fuel Canva’s Product Strategy

Acquisitions from Europe’s startup ecosystem have elevated Canva’s technology and continue to play an important role in expanding the company’s physical presence in the region. Over the years, Canva has found high caliber talent and compatible technology in Europe with a number of acquisitions that have become key to the company’s product strategy. Affinity marks Canva’s latest Europe-based acquisition, joining Flourish (2022), Kaleido (2021), Smartmockups (2021), Pexels (2019) and Pixabay (2019). Canva opened their first European HQ in 2023, based in London.

New Generative AI media intelligence and natural language tool enables democratization of data exploration and activation to provide value from content investments

Veritone, Inc., a leader in designing human-centered AI solutions, today launched Ask Veri, a new conversational intelligence solution that empowers Veritone Digital Media Hub (“DMH”) users to quickly extract actionable insights and execute dynamic workflows from their media archive data through a generative AI-enabled, chat-based tool. Ask Veri is an integrated solution on Veritone’s aiWARE platform, and soon will be available across the majority of Veritone’s commercial and public sector applications. 

An enhancement for DMH, Veritone’s award-winning media asset management and monetization tool, Ask Veri leverages generative AI to swiftly respond to queries and can provide customers with in-depth analysis, insightful summaries, and key findings for their digital media collection. With Ask Veri, customers can formulate their own questions, such as “What is the trend of monthly user activity,” or “Source all available footage of Caitlin Clark during the NCAA tournament,” or use the interface’s intuitive, suggested queries to remove guesswork and provide a starting point for gathering the right content insights.

“With content production and consumption at an all-time high, media professionals face the overwhelming challenge of organizing and activating an abundance of data. Ask Veri leverages Veritone’s industry experience and extensive knowledge base to provide both open-ended and template query prompts for DMH customers,” said Sean King, General Manager for Veritone Media and Entertainment. “For media professionals who aren’t sure where to start in their content journey, Ask Veri’s versatility in query type can help them quickly make sense of their media asset data and help them stay ahead in the market.”

Ask Veri comes at a time when one of generative AI’s most prominent use cases is content creation. Gartner® Emerging Tech: Tech Innovators for AI Generated Content (published September 6, 2023) notes that “By automating the process of generating natural language descriptions of data, organizations are saving time and resources while still gaining valuable data insights.”¹

Ask Veri streamlines the overall content experience for DMH customers – including TV networks, studios, production companies, and film and studio archivists – by eliminating the need for multiple data analyst resources or reporting tools. As a result, customers can quickly make informed decisions to highlight high-performing content, optimize engagement, and drive value from existing media assets.

King continued, "In today’s fast-paced media landscape, where the content lifecycle is shrinking, Ask Veri is a valuable data exploration and activation ally for media professionals, enabling them to explore, analyze, and comprehend their report data more effectively, identify patterns in media usage, and recognize engagement trends among media buyers.”

Veritone will showcase Ask Veri during the 2024 NAB Show in Las Vegas from April 13 to 17, in Booth #W1642 in the Las Vegas Convention Center West Hall.

Ask Veri will be commercially available in the second quarter of 2024.

Breakthrough CX AI solution leveraging unique LLM deep data memory to drive hyper-personalized journeys

NICE today unveiled NICE Enlighten XM (Experience Memory), the latest advancement to NICE’s CX AI solution, Enlighten, that leverages large language models’ (LLMs) deep data memory to hyper-personalize customer journeys. NICE Enlighten XM ushers in a new era of CX by introducing fully contextualized journey management. NICE Enlighten XM provides brands with an unprecedented ability to understand, remember, and dynamically adapt to each customer's unique needs and preferences. These capabilities are made possible by LLMs enriched with the industry's most extensive set of CX-specific AI models from NICE Enlighten and equipped with a holistic customer data memory. 

NICE Enlighten XM enables NICE CXone customers to deliver seamless, context-rich interactions that effortlessly resume where previous interactions concluded, given its advanced capability to hyper-personalize the conversation in real-time. By leveraging a comprehensive memory of all critical data points that distinguish each customer interaction, NICE Enlighten XM provides instant access to historical interaction insights for both self-service and employee-assisted interactions.

The AI-powered technology constructs an all-encompassing memory of each customer's journey, including their sentiment, behaviors, and interaction history across all touchpoints. NICE Enlighten XM demonstrates a remarkable ability to harness data from a wide range of sources within an organization’s CX ecosystem, enabling it to gain a deeper understanding of the intricate nuances that define each brand-customer relationship on an individual, real-time basis. By equipping CX AI with contextual memory, Enlighten XM enables brands to deliver hyper-personalized, relevant, and impactful interactions that cultivate stronger relationships at every stage of the customer journey.

“Personalized experiences have been a holy grail for organizations, but most have struggled to deliver due to technological limitations," said Barry Cooper, President, CX Division, NICE. "NICE Enlighten XM shatters those barriers, empowering brands to deliver on the promise of true personalization finally. With NICE Enlighten XM, brands can build stronger relationships, drive unparalleled customer satisfaction, and lead the way in the future of customer experience. We're excited to make this vision a reality for our NICE CXone customers."

Key benefits and capabilities of NICE Enlighten XM include:

• 360-Degree Customer Insight: Combines interaction data, metadata, and analytics from the entire CX ecosystem to provide an unparalleled understanding of a customer's history and preferences, driving more impactful and personalized interactions.
• Individualized Memory Graph: Creates a unique memory graph for each customer, ensuring every interaction is tailored to their specific needs with full context based on a multi-dimensional historical record.
• Continuous Conversational Sync: Seamlessly resumes interactions exactly where they left off, regardless of channel or device, enabling asynchronous bot-and-agent-led interactions to instantly understand and address customer needs.
• Adaptive Personalization Engine: Dynamically determines the optimal next action, response, or activity in real-time based on past performance, leveraging LLMs’ deep data memory and the brand's knowledge base to create an evolving, customer-centric interface.

“Enterprise decision makers are overwhelmed with options to apply large language models and Generative AI to improve their customers’ experience,” explains Dan Miller, Lead Analyst at Opus Research. “Instead of approaches that employ an ocean of undifferentiated data, they need ‘CX AI’ that is trained on company and customer-specific data that can drive personalized, effective outcomes. Investing in this approach now is foundational to any strategy that differentiates their brand in the Conversational AI era and future-proofs their business operations for years to come.”