J.Crew, L.L. Bean, and M·A·C Cosmetics are among many brands celebrating the givers in our communities – teachers, medical professionals, first responders, and more – with these amazing holiday deals

SheerID, the global leader in identity verification for commerce, used by hundreds of leading brands around the world, has partnered with more than 30 top brands that are making exclusive holiday offers available to millions of teachers, students, medical professionals, first responders, military members, and more, to thank the hard-working people who make our communities better places to live and work. SheerID is proud to partner with these organizations to reward these groups with special holiday offers.

“Brands that show they care about the people who work to make our communities better places to be - like teachers, medical professionals, first responders, military service members, and our future community leaders: students - by rewarding them with personalized offers, build strong connections with these valuable consumers who are proud of the work they do,” said Jake Weatherly, CEO of SheerID. “Recognizing the people who are the backbone of our communities builds trust, which helps companies gain and keep loyal customers.”

Military, Veterans, Teachers, First Responders, Healthcare Workers, Students, and More: Take Advantage of Exclusive Last-Minute Holiday Offers!

Teachers, students, medical professionals, first responders, military members, and more get access to unique deals from great brands and save money. The following brands have provided exclusive offers to reward and honor students and members of the helping professions in the areas of travel, lifestyle, apparel, news, and more, with the help of SheerID’s Verification Platform, ensuring that rewards are instantly and securely provided to these highly valued communities. For those who are eligible, no SheerID account or membership signup is required.

Last-Minute Holiday Shopping Offers:

• Adorama - Students can enjoy up to 15% off their purchases on select photo, video, computer gear, plus much more.
• Alterra Mountain Co - Licensed nurses, enrolled college students, plus active duty and retired military personnel in North America get exclusive discounts.
• Ashley - This holiday, active military and veterans, first responders, and medical professionals can enjoy 5% off their purchase on AshleyFurniture.com, with thanks for all they do.
• ASICS - First responders, military, and healthcare workers get 30% off qualifying full price items when they verify with SheerID. Teachers and students get 25% off qualifying full price items when they verify with SheerID.
• Aveda - First responders, military, veterans, teachers, healthcare workers, and students can take 20% off their next order of Aveda products.
• Bare Minerals - Through December 12, 2023, students and teachers get 25% off any order (calculated after any discounts and excluding gift card values, taxes, shipping and handling) on bareMinerals.com. Offer not eligible with Buy with Prime, holiday, or sale items.
• Bass Pro Shops and Cabela's - In addition to great holiday deals and savings, Bass Pro Shops and Cabela’s is proud to offer a 10% everyday discount to military, law enforcement, firefighters and wildlife agents.
• Bonobos - Military members, medical professionals, teachers, students, and first responders can take 20% off their purchase at Bonobos.com.
• Codecademy - Veterans and active-duty military, healthcare workers, and first responders in the US, UK, and Canada get 50% off Pro and Plus annual plans. Learn new skills and build your tech career today.
• CorePower Yoga - CorePower Yoga is sparking joy this holiday season; Teachers, students, military, seniors, healthcare workers, and first responders get 20% off All Access Membership or Class Packs.
• FOX Nation - FOX Nation is launching a special holiday promotion for $2.50/month for its annual plan.
• GolfPass -
  • First Responders: GolfPass honors and recognizes the sacrifice first responders make to keep us safe. To show our gratitude, these community heroes save 20% on a full year of golf benefits, including tee time credits, waived booking fees, curated instruction videos, and more.
  • Military and Veterans: Military members and Veterans save 20% on a full year of golf benefits like tee time credits, booking fees, and more!
  • Students: Students can unwrap savings this holiday season with 40% off a GolfPass+ membership. A GolfPass+ membership includes tee time savings on GolfNow, unlimited instructional videos from the pros, hundreds of hours of live golf event coverage, a $40 TaylorMade credit, and much more!
• J.Crew - Teachers, first responders, students, veterans, and healthcare workers get an additional 15% off purchases when they verify with SheerID.
• J.Crew Factory - Students, teachers, first responders, military, veterans, and healthcare workers can enjoy 15% off at J.Crew Factory.
• Kipling - Kipling is offering an extra 15% off sitewide for all teachers, students, first responders, healthcare, and veterans.
• Leatherman - First responders, military, veterans, teachers, students, and healthcare workers can enjoy 30% off multi-tools and customization at Leatherman.com.
• L.L. Bean - Students, teachers, medical professionals, veterans, and active-duty military and their families can enjoy 10% off at L.L.Bean - including sale items. Make a lasting connection this winter with our legendary all-weather boots, warm outerwear, rugged outdoor gear, and so much more.
• Lovesac - At Lovesac, we're committed to supporting everyone who has dedicated their lives to helping others. As our way of saying thank you, we are giving military personnel, first responders, healthcare workers, teachers, and veterinary professionals an additional 5% off.
• M·A·C Cosmetics - For a limited time only: Students, teachers, medical, military, and first responders can receive 25% off their next U.S. online order at M·A·C Cosmetics.
• Maxi Cosi - Maxi Cosi is offering 20% off for teachers, first responders, veterans, and healthcare workers this holiday season.
• Morningstar - Unlock Morningstar’s trusted research, proven ratings, and easy-to-use portfolio tools built to help investors succeed with Morningstar Investor. Students save 90%, teachers save 60%, and active military and veterans enjoy 30% off a yearly subscription.
• National Basketball Association (NBA) - The NBA is offering students an exclusive 40% discount on NBA League Pass to stream live games and studio shows. This promotion is available to all students attending accredited universities and colleges in the U.S. and in select international markets. Once verified, they will receive a unique promotional code to redeem for 12 months of discounted League Pass access.
• Origins - Teachers and students can enjoy 15% off consciously formulated skincare and body care at Origins.com.
• Paramount+ - Students get 25% off a Paramount+ Essential plan. That’s just $4.50/month!
• Paramount+ - Veterans and active military can enjoy 25% off any Paramount+ plan for the life of the subscription.
• Rothy’s - Teachers, First Responders, Students, Veterans, and Healthcare Workers can enjoy 25% off one pair of shoes annually at Rothy’s. Get verified and take advantage of this special offer before the end of the year. Comfortable. Washable. Stylishly Sustainable.
• Safety 1st - Safety 1st is offering 20% off for teachers, first responders, veterans, and healthcare workers this holiday season.
• ThriftBooks - ThriftBooks 4 Teachers provides educators with everyday benefits, including every 5th book free plus top tier Literati ReadingRewards status.
• Timberland - Teachers, students, and military - Get 10% off at Timberland.
• Too Faced - Students, teachers, healthcare workers, first responders, and members of the military, get 20% off Too Faced products! And during Pink Week, Dec. 11th-15th shop at Toofaced.com to get 40% off daily deals!
• Unity - Sharpen your real-time 3D creation skills this holiday season with the Unity Student/Educator Plan, free for students and educators at eligible institutions. The plan includes the Unity editor, a 20% stackable discount in the asset store, and early access to Unity Cloud with DevOps and version control.
• VIVAIA - VIVAIA is proud to offer teachers, students, healthcare workers, first responders, and military an exclusive 20% off discount for this holiday season.
• Willow - Willow is offering 25% off Willow wearable breast pumps and up to 20% off accessories.

Pipedrive, the easy and effective sales CRM for small businesses, today announced its Marketplace yearly results and most popular apps of 2023. Data shows that small businesses using software integrations to automate tasks across the revenue cycle win about 1.5 times more deals than companies that have not adopted any third-party tools.

“Building the right tech stack arms the sales team with the right tools to double down on innovation and discover unexpected growth opportunities. On average, customer-facing professionals spend only a third of their time engaging with customers. Automating everyday tasks has a lot of benefits. The right technology helps increase productivity, reduce manual errors, find more qualitative leads faster or enhance team collaboration, making a huge difference in sales. Instead of spending time on repetitive tasks, salespeople can focus on the creation of personalized and value-based customer journeys,” said Sean Evers, VP of Sales & Partner at Pipedrive.

With more than 400 integrations, the Pipedrive Marketplace enables customers to sync their data across systems all in one place and automate and optimize processes. “Pipedrive’s ecosystem is all about echoing our customers’ needs and amplifying the value of the core CRM platform. Using third-party integrations allows companies to break data silos and unify information across multiple applications, saving time, increasing productivity and expanding the overall revenue opportunity. By integrating Pipedrive with third-party apps, we can offer a complete and customizable tech stack to automate tasks across the entire revenue lifecycle and boost business growth,” said Evers.

Within the first 11 months of 2023, more than 134,000 users installed at least one app from the Pipedrive Marketplace. The most popular app categories, listed below, were messaging bots and communication tools, phone and video calls, marketing automation and lead generation. Other key findings that emerged:

• Companies leveraging integrations generate roughly five times more deals
• On average, 41% of all deals are facilitated through integrations
• The average win ratio for businesses utilizing integrations stands at 47%
• The adoption of integrations not only reduces the time spent on deals but also accelerates the winning process by 12%

Pipedrive Marketplace’s top 3 apps help to move data automatically between the core platform and other apps or enhance customer communication experiences thanks to video calling and messaging solutions.

1. Zapier
2. Google Meet
3. Zoom Meetings

To nurture leads, Pipedrive customers prefer the following apps for assigning leads, automating communication to leads, tracking lead behavior and warming leads up:

• Microsoft Teams
• Dealbot for Slack
• Pipechat

For Pipedrive customers, the top 3 apps for communicating with leads and scheduling demos are:

1. Google Meets
2. Zoom Meetings
3. JustCall

The most popular integrations to qualify leads, enrich lead data and research leads are:

1. Dealfront
2. Outfunnel
3. Fireflies.ai

Earlier this year, Pipedrive API was recognized as one of the most popular APIs for developers by Postman, a world-leading public hub for developers to design, build and test their APIs. Additionally, in the summer of 2023, Pipedrive’s Developers’ Corner was shortlisted for three categories at The DevPortal Awards, an awards program showcasing innovative leaders and their developer portals in the API and interface space. Pipedrive was shortlisted for Best New DX Innovation, Best Onboarding and Best API Reference Documentation.

New ad formats help live sports dominate Convergent TV ad engagement, driving business outcomes for retail brand advertisers

EDO, the TV outcomes company, reports new data detailing ad performance across live Thanksgiving weekend football matchups, including Amazon’s first-ever Black Friday game. EDO found that ads during live Thanksgiving and Black Friday NFL matchups outperform retail primetime ads by an average of 29%, and are 45% more effective than ad performance so far this NFL season.

The NFL’s first-ever Black Friday game served a strong start to the holiday shopping season thanks to new, innovative ad formats not previously seen in NFL broadcasts, especially for retailers. Consumers who saw a retail ad during the Black Friday game were 127% more likely to drive engagement than the retail primetime average.

Retail advertisers also saw success in live College Football matches. Ohio State vs. Michigan was the most effective Saturday College Football game for driving brand engagement for retail brands, with consumers 177% more likely to engage with brands compared to the retail primetime average, making it the top-performing game of the weekend at driving engagement for advertisers.

According to EDO’s TV outcomes data, the top brand advertisers, as measured by total TV-driven ad engagement indexed against the average brand’s ad impact during Thanksgiving and Black Friday NFL football broadcasts, were:

1. Walmart (49.4x*).
2. Dick’s Sporting Goods (42.7x*)
3. Toyota (19.7x*)
4. Meta (17.1x*)
5. Kohl’s (14.3x*)
6. Taco Bell (11.2x*)
7. Lowe’s (11.0x*)
8. Apple iPhone (10.7x*)
9. Target (10.5x*)
10. Verizon Wireless (10.5x*)
11. Acura (10.4x*)

*Brand drove “##” as much engagement as the average advertising brand during Thanksgiving and Black Friday NFL football broadcasts.

On CNBC Squawk Box, EDO President & CEO Kevin Krim spoke about the impact of Black Friday football. “The NFL owns Thanksgiving,” said Krim. “Now, with a partner like Amazon, it owns Black Friday, too. What’s most fascinating is the ad innovation Amazon has introduced to the NFL. While I think it’s taken longer than anticipated to come to life, I can’t wait to see where it goes next.”

Top creatives, as measured by total TV-driven ad engagement indexed against the average creative’s ad impact during Thanksgiving and Black Friday NFL football broadcasts, were:

1. Dick's Sporting Goods, Black Friday Starts Now ft. Kay Adams :15 (24.2x**)
2. Walmart, New Black Friday Deals :15 (22.1x**)
3. Acura, All-Electric ZDX - Unlock the Energy :30 (19.6x**)
4. Solo Stove, Giving Up Smoke ft. Snoop Dogg :30 (16.3x**)
5. Gillette, Gillette Labs with Exfoliating Bar :30 (15.9x**)
6. Old Navy, Toboggan Full of Buckaroonies ft. Natasha Lyonne :15 (15.6x**)
7. Porsche, The All Electric Taycan :15 (15.5x**)
8. Target, Holiday Deals Black Friday Bullseye :30 (14.2x**)
9. Walmart, 2023 Holidays - Find Your Thing V2 :30 (13.8x**)
10. Ray-Ban, Next-Gen Smart Glasses :15 (13.6x**)

**Creative drove “##” as much engagement as the average advertising brand during Thanksgiving and Black Friday NFL football broadcasts.

Live sports inventory is more valuable than ever. Hollywood strikes have driven more eyes to unscripted TV and live sports — the latter consistently ranking as TV’s most effective programming for advertisers. Last year, the NFL accounted for five of the top 10 TV broadcasts most likely to drive consumers to engage with advertising brands. Even the league’s pregame shows were 68% more likely to generate engagement than the broadcast primetime average.

Measuring this highly impactful programming is a must for results-driven advertisers, and EDO’s real-time engagement data empowers brand, agency, and network marketers to connect consumer behavior to business outcomes across their Convergent TV campaigns.

Krim continued, “NFL week 12 matchups highlighted the strength of retailers and automakers heading into the last weeks of 2023. Ads with discount messaging generated bigger engagement spikes than their typical promos in past years. Retailers Target, Walmart, Amazon, and Old Navy had the most innovative campaigns, while automakers such as Hyundai and BMW also experienced strong ad performance with Holiday Sales Event campaigns. And though it wasn’t a holiday-themed ad, Kia’s new three-row, all-electric SUV, the EV9, was electrifying as the second most impactful ad on Black Friday.”

Resemble AI, a leader in generative voice artificial intelligence, announced the release of its Deepfake Detection Dashboard, which uses Resemble AI's Detect technology to identify fakes from real audio in real-time.

Resemble AI, a leader in generative voice artificial intelligence, announced the release of its Deepfake Detection Dashboard, which uses Resemble AI's Detect technology to identify fakes from real audio in real-time.

With more than 1.5 million users and 35 years' worth of audio generated in the last 12 months, Resemble AI is leveraging its advanced knowledge and deep generative AI expertise to address AI fraud and safety concerns.

"Since our inception, Resemble AI has always prioritized safety and ethics when building generative AI and this year we have released several safeguards like our neural speech PerTh Watermarker and Resemble Detect," said Zohaib Ahmed, Co-Founder and CEO of Resemble AI. "This new real-time deepfake detection dashboard is another way we can empower our customers when it comes to combating AI-based fraud effectively and ensuring legitimacy."

This new Deepfake Detection Dashboard will give customers an comprehensive enterprise-grade solution to recognize deepfake audio across all forms of media just by simply uploading an audio file and letting the Resemble Detect solution do the work. Once the audio is uploaded, the data is then processed and run through a Deep Learning Model which is shared in an easy-to-read chart that provides a prediction score on the likelihood of it being a fake.

By leveraging Resemble's Detect solution, customers get benefits like:

• Scalability and Performance: Detect is able to handle large volumes of data and requests without significant delays. This scalability ensures uninterrupted performance even under the most demanding loads, vital for enterprise operations.
• Unparalleled Accuracy and Reliability: At the core of Resemble Detect is our advanced neural model, rigorously trained to distinguish between genuine and counterfeit audio with exceptional precision. Our continuous innovation in AI ensures that our model evolves alongside deepfake technology, maintaining high accuracy and minimizing false detections.
• Audio Upload: Users can upload their audio files directly onto the platform, supporting common formats such as WAV or MP3, making it accessible for a variety of audio content.
• Isolate Voice: The ability to isolate the voice while processing detect workloads improves accuracy and stability of the system. Voice Isolation is baked into Resemble Detect.

Explains why a platform & ecosystem approach is the answer to supporting an evolving, complex enterprise content ecosystem

Quark Software, the global provider of content automation, intelligence and design software, today announced an essential resource to help enterprises create the right content operations infrastructure to support their future content strategy. A new white paper, “The New Era of Enterprise Content Lifecycle Management Strategies,” assesses three technology operations approaches often considered: In-House Development, Hybrid Vendor / Best-of-Breed and Platform & Ecosystem. It peels back the layers to share how enterprises evaluate these options to support their current and emerging content strategies.

The paper elaborates on the benefits of using a centralized, single-vendor automation platform that supports both current and future low-code technologies. This approach is emerging as the most secure and efficient way to facilitate an organization's ability to build a global, customized ecosystem to meet the emerging content needs of internal and external stakeholders.

“Content is the lifeblood of an organization, and this white paper discusses the common operations infrastructure choices so businesses can make smart content Ops decisions that will scale to support their content strategies,” said Emerson Welch, Global Vice President of Marketing at Quark. “We’ve helped hundreds of global organizations across multiple industries address their complex content challenges, particularly when regulation, automation and compliance are critical. Our ECLM platform Quark Publishing Platform NextGen, which integrates with the Microsoft ecosystem, carries the heavy lift, automating each stage of the content lifecycle and providing scalability to simplify specific enterprise use cases that have board-level significance.”

A Forrester Research Trend Report noted that “digitization at scale is necessary for true resilience and converting manual business and tools into flexible software applications is absolutely crucial – and this means custom development on the underlying platform.”

The Platform & Ecosystem approach transforms the landscape for content automation processes and workflows, opening the door for future innovation and process unification. It supports cloud deployment and low-code development with APIs while allowing the platform vendor to future-proof and maintain the core system. Developer portals and configuration tools are available to tailor the solution to meet personalized needs.

Enterprises reap the long-term benefits of an automation platform at the operations core as it makes it simple to build an ecosystem and customize it to meet the unique needs of the business. It simplifies content complexities, streamlines processes, fosters collaboration, and supports an omnichannel output to meet customer content needs and digital preferences.

Quark has utilized its 40+ years of content experience to speak to customers and assess the market requirements when developing our ECLM tool. We have taken the time to consider the three strategic options and have aligned to invest and innovate in the platform & ecosystem strategy, with Microsoft integration playing a key factor in this decision. Quark Publishing Platform (QPP) NextGen is the platform at the core, offering the most extensible, scalable technology solution for today’s enterprises to digitally transform and achieve content maturity and return on investment on a global scale.

Payments, eCommerce, and video gaming platforms worst hit by alarming growth in fraud rates

Veriff, a global identity verification (IDV) provider, today announced the release of the Veriff Identity Fraud Report 2024. This analysis of global customer data presents a clear picture of the state of global identity fraud, including that overall fraud incidents are up 20% compared to last year's findings. This overall increase is a result of  the rise in impersonation fraud and the availability of more advanced attack methodologies and tools.

As more advanced technology becomes available to fraudsters, detecting and defending against attacks and infiltration attempts becomes more difficult. This is particularly true in the gaming, payments, and eCommerce industries, which each saw respective fraud increases over the past year of 47.5%, 54%, and 40.3% compared to data from 2022. 

"Fraudsters have more tools than ever, such as generative AI and deepfakes-as-a-service platforms, readily accessible to manipulate and steal someone's identity," said David Divitt, Senior Director of Fraud Prevention and Experience, Veriff. "Our defenses are advancing as well. By combining robust IDV technology with human expertise, we can beat fraudsters and build a secure, yet convenient, user experience. In fact, biometric authentication is one of the most vital tools available to us in this fight against fraud."

Identity fraud has been the most common type of fraud in 2023. According to Veriff's report, essentially 1 in 15 verification attempts (approximately 6%) was a person pretending to be someone else). Veriff's data also revealed that 85% of fraud was categorized as impersonation fraud, which includes the use of someone else's document or the person or document not being present for verification. The remaining 15% consisted of document fraud (13%) and digital and physical man-in-the-middle fraud (MITM) (2%). MITM involves coercing the victim to access accounts, make transactions, or even tech support scams.

Fraudsters are opportunistic and take advantage of the variety of tools at their disposal. They test out several methods on a target until they find a vulnerability, and then exploit that vulnerability until they are stopped.  Therefore, it is impossible to adopt a one-size-fits-all approach or to imagine that a growing company can deploy just one tool to tackle every type of fraud it faces across a complex global and sectoral landscape. Instead, holistic fraud prevention strategies featuring a flexible, multi-faceted approach that employs biometrics, IDV, crosslinking and more are required to successfully combat fraudsters.

Survey data reveals that the rise of retail media has caused a growing frustration between brands and retailers

Turbyne, the first solution built for retailers and designed to simplify retail media, today released a state of retail media industry report, “Retail Media Mirage: How the growing divide between retailers and brands threatens retail media’s potential.” The big takeaway: an in-depth survey of stakeholders on both sides shows a major disconnect between retailers and brands that needs to be resolved to ensure the channel meets the potential being forecast. The survey consists of over 300 retail media decision makers among brands and retailers.                         

“The cracks in retail media’s foundation have begun to show in a big way,” said Greg Stevens, Founder and President of Turbyne. “78% of brands surveyed said it is difficult or very difficult to justify increasing their investment. That’s a troubling statistic given that most brands work with just a handful of retail media networks; 40% of brands work with less than three retail media networks and another 42% work with four to six. The channel’s forecasted growth is dependent in part on brands expanding their spending to other retail media networks.”

Among a wide range of insights across multiple categories, the survey reveals that:                                          

There’s a massive gap between retailers’ perceptions of the value their retail media networks (RMNs) deliver and brands’ actual satisfaction with those same RMNs.

• Underwhelming Experience: Only 6% of larger brands ($500m+) would give their retail media experience an A, despite 65% of retailers stating they expected their clients would grade it an A.
• Exhaustive Partner Proliferation: Brands, on average, worked with 25 media partners, 22 media agencies and 23 ad tech platforms over the previous three months.
• Complex Buying Process: 40% of brands cited having to execute individual buys across each RMN as one of the top three barriers to increasing their retail media spend.
• Subpar Value Proposition: The net result is that 44% of brands do not see it as worthwhile to work with any new RMNs in the next 24 months.

Brands and retailers agree on the solution: Simplifying the buying and selling process is critical.

• Both brands and retailers individually said that the key to growth was the ability to buy (or sell) and execute retail media across multiple channels/tactics in a single location.
  • 47% of brands surveyed would spend budget with midsize retailers if they had the ability to buy and execute across multiple channels/tactics in a single location and 26% would do so if the platform offered an automated buying process.
  • 70% of brands would invest more in retail media if in-store tactics were able to be combined with digital into a single retail media offering.

Businesses overwhelmingly state the pervasive use of generative AI-driven automation will have the most impact on their organizations, and are responding to an AI world with increased focus on regulation and humanity

Alteryx, Inc., the Analytics Cloud Platform company, released independent research titled Defining the Enterprise of the Future. Using data from 2,800 IT and business decision-makers globally, the study reveals the three-year roadmap for how enterprises will operate in an era of AI-delivered intelligence.

As businesses prepare to navigate future challenges, embracing the power of accessible AI technology (and regulations) will help enterprises reinfuse transformations that shape the future, take the lead, and never look back. Results show that organizations have a strong appetite for policies and governance that regulate the use of responsible AI for this increasingly complex, data-driven future.

• 82% say that AI is already impacting what their organization can achieve, while 52% state they will invest in advanced technologies such as AI to respond to the changing market environment.
• 57% cite that AI uptake will become pervasive across all sectors and business functions, and 48% are excited about the combination of automation and AI in data analysis.
• 89% believe that regulations and standards around AI usage (including the use of generative AI) should be developed within their sector as it transforms the business landscape.
• 91% say that such policies would help businesses implement AI responsibly, and 49% cite the possibility of legal and ethical consequences from not having an ethical AI framework in place.

While the current AI landscape may fill the present employment market with fear and uncertainty, a ray of optimism emerges when envisioning the skills and talent needed to create the future workforce. There is a growing appreciation for prioritizing skills that are seen as distinctly human.

• 72% state that it is more important for their employees to be multi-skilled than specialized in a specific area. 61% named "creativity" the skill humans will contribute in a market environment shaped by AI, followed by "emotion" and "critical thinking".
• No singular technical skill emerged as the most important for the future workforce, but expertise in emerging technologies such as AI (28%) followed by computer software knowledge, data analysis and data mining top the list. Creativity and digital literacy are considered essential future professional skills.
• Surprisingly, 62% believe the advanced tech talent landscape will be characterized by a talent surplus over the next three years.

When envisioning the future, most organizations advocate for the pervasive use of AI to predict and react to change, but longer-term risks stemming from the evolving business landscape loom. While many identify AI as a key potential tool for success, it requires a combined approach of people, policies, and culture rather than technology alone to enable enterprises to plan, navigate, and overcome the unknown to thrive in an ever-changing business landscape.

• 51% list cybersecurity and data privacy threats, 43% globalization challenges, 41% high inflation and interest rates, and 35% changing consumer behavior as the market factors expected to most impact businesses.
• Ultimately, technology alone will not drive future success. 42% will invest more in understanding customer needs to make relevant offers, while 34% cite their organizations' need to demonstrate better ethical practices and environmental responsibility.

"While the future tech stack will require many emerging technologies, it will only be as good as your workforce's ability to use and benefit from it," said Trevor Schulze, CIO at Alteryx. "There is no one-size-fits-all solution to help businesses understand customer needs, drive efficiencies, and find their competitive edge. Only by empowering the entire workforce to take full advantage of the technologies to harness the data, compute, and automation resources available will you unlock full ROI potential and business value."

To be prepared for this increasingly complex, data-driven future, companies need to establish three key characteristics: ensure their journey to digital transformation strategies surrounding AI is successful, build a multi-skilled workforce capable of delivering business value from technology, and be able to leverage customer and market insights to pivot business strategies and operations to respond to external factors.