The popular global instant messaging platform, imo, has set a new standard for privacy and security with its groundbreaking feature, Global Web Call. This innovative addition was launched worldwide on September 20, 2023, empowering users to communicate seamlessly across all messaging platforms while safeguarding their personal information through a universally accessible call link.

To harness the potential of this feature, users simply need to navigate to the Contacts tab and click 'Global Web Call.' Within moments, a unique, shareable link is generated, enabling anyone, user or not, to initiate a call. This transformative feature circumvents revealing personal information or phone numbers, making it a vital asset for individuals who prioritise their privacy.

This feature is an invaluable tool for travellers such as Hajj and Umrah pilgrims. It allows them to establish and maintain connections with new and old acquaintances and service providers without divulging personal social media information. 

Notably, this technology holds vast potential for business applications. It is poised to become the go-to communication solution for platforms like Careem and Noon, facilitating seamless interactions between users and businesses. Business owners can create dedicated call links for their enterprises, effectively segregating personal and professional conversations while ensuring customer privacy.

Global Web Call supports up to nine simultaneous callers per link, offering a user-friendly solution for friends to engage in cross-platform conversations. Real-time interactions have never been more straightforward, whether enjoying multiplayer games or simply catching up. imo will continue to enhance this feature, with a new video calling experience and support for over ten callers to be introduced.

Mehran Kabir, Business Director of imo, said, "In an era of numerous communication platforms, consolidating conversations and ensuring privacy can be challenging. Global Web Call simplifies this by enabling users to use one link for all their conversations while preserving privacy."

Study by ContentDetector.AI reveals that 51% of the top 100 consumer Generative AI applications are bootstrapped. Furthermore, while a significant number of these companies originate from the US, a substantial 42% hail from other parts of the world.

ContentDetector.AI has done a detailed study of the top 100 consumer AI applications and here are some interesting insights.

Key Highlights:

• 51% of the top 100 AI applications are bootstrapped
• 41% of the AI companies are not based in the U.S.
• 9% of the top 100 Consumer AI companies have women founders/co-founders. Only AskYourPDF boasts a black co-founder.
• Image Utility, Chatbots, and Art Generation emerge as the most popular Generative AI categories among consumers.
• 9 products have already been acquired.
• 7% of these Gen AI tools were flagged for NSFW content, indicating a need for robust content filters.
• AI websites pull in a median traffic of 4.97 million visits monthly, with an average of 29.02 million.

Rokt's AI technology to deliver more relevant experiences for consumers in Klarna app

Rokt, the leading ecommerce technology company using AI to make transactions more relevant to each shopper, today announced its partnership with Klarna, the AI powered global payments network and shopping assistant. Through the partnership, Klarna will leverage Rokt's advanced technology to unlock new marketing solutions for retailers and drive even more relevant experiences for consumers on Klarna's AI-powered shopping app.

Rokt's ecommerce solution enables companies to unlock additional revenues, acquire consumers at scale and deepen relationships with their existing ones. The company uses advanced machine learning to present highly relevant offers to each shopper in the final stages of an ecommerce transaction, when they are most likely to convert.

"We are thrilled to partner with Klarna, which has been such a trailblazer in payments and is well known for engaging consumers in a meaningful way," said Elizabeth Buchanan, Chief Commercial Officer of Rokt. "By delivering relevant offers to shoppers on Klarna's shopping app, Rokt will expand Klarna's marketing solutions across all categories, create deeper consumer connections and drive incremental profit."

Klarna and Rokt's partnership offers brands the ability to target consumer segments by demographic and location, ensuring ads shown are relevant and compelling to the shopper. This new offering also allows Klarna shoppers to access valuable and relevant offers from brands such as Hulu, HelloFresh and AdoreMe.

"We are dedicated to expanding Klarna's role as a growth partner for retailers and continuing to offer consumers tailored shopping experiences that meet their preferences," said Kristina Elkhazin, Head of North America, Klarna. "Rokt's technology will complement our own AI-powered shopping feed and create incremental value for both our retail partners and our shoppers."

Retailers and brands are leveraging Klarna's marketing and ad solutions to put their message in front of the company's US network of 37 million highly engaged and loyal shoppers. By partnering with Rokt, Klarna aims to offer retailers another opportunity to connect with their target audience and maximize conversion, while creating more curated shopping experiences for consumers.

Chatbots are the most popular AI-powered marketing tool today, but companies recognize the opportunity to do more — and are prioritizing data quality in order to get there

New research from Twilio, the customer engagement platform that drives real-time, personalized experiences for today’s leading brands, shows that AI automation has emerged as the primary means by which businesses are looking to grow revenues and operate efficiently.

Twilio Segment’s 2023 Growth Report, a study of 2,450 business leaders, found that 88% of businesses are already using some form of AI in their marketing efforts this year, and more than half (54%) expect to spend even more on AI-powered campaigns in the coming year. The findings show that leaders expect their AI investments to pay off, with nine out of ten leaders (90%) reporting that AI will deliver either time or cost savings for their business.

The rise of generative AI chatbots appears to be having an impact on marketing leaders, as chatbots are the most common way businesses expect to use AI. Among the survey’s respondents, 38% of businesses say they will be using AI chatbots in their marketing efforts.

Additionally, businesses are tapping into AI models using customer data to tailor their marketing, with 34% of leaders integrating predictive AI. For example, Cisco uses Twilio Segment to collect product analytics data, and is currently building an AI model to predict user’s propensity and readiness to buy or upgrade to a new product. Training AI models on real-time data creates a flywheel – as the models analyze more data, it gets smarter to understand, perceive, and activate on valuable customer insights stored in the Customer Data Platform (CDP).

Data quality and CDPs are critical enablers

The report also shines a light on the essential role of data quality: 40% of businesses are struggling with technology infrastructure or low-quality data, highlighting the pivotal role of relevant, timely data in unleashing the full power of AI. 71% of respondents say AI could be more useful with access to higher-quality data.

CDPs are having a positive effect in ensuring data quality: Companies using a CDP experienced a 32% growth rate in the past year, compared to a 21% growth rate at companies not using a CDP. Because CDPs unify customer data that is collected across the organization, it offers brands a single source of truth for their customers’ needs. These powerful tools are displacing the traditional customer relationship management (CRM) software — 24% of respondents say they plan to simplify, remove, or reduce their CRM spend in the coming 12 months. This shift points to the broader trend of businesses investing more in alternative technologies like data warehouses for customer data management that are powerfully interoperable with CDPs.

Consumer privacy concerns persist

On the topic of customer data, privacy remains paramount. While 66% of leaders feel that customers would appreciate AI-enhanced marketing if it leads to superior service, 28% express concerns about data privacy associated with AI adoption. Addressing these concerns, most businesses (85%) say it’s a priority to do a better job of capturing and leveraging first-party data in the coming year, marking a 14% increase from the 71% recorded in 2022.

“AI has taken the world by storm in 2023, and the data is clear that businesses have embraced the technology wholeheartedly as a means to attract, engage, and retain customers. The challenge now is ensuring that these AI efforts bear fruit,” said Katrina Wong, VP of Marketing at Twilio Segment. “Businesses have to prioritize data quality just as much, or even more, than they’re prioritizing AI. Otherwise, they’re leaving money on the table.”

AI to Take Center Stage at CDP Week 2023

For more about Twilio Segment’s 2023 Growth Report, and to discover how to more effectively deploy AI and use CDPs to solve data quality problems, tune into the virtual CDP Week, on October 24-26, 2023. Keynote speaker Sinead Bovell, a futurist and MIT-certified AI ethicist, will share her perspective on the future of work and life with advanced technologies. In addition, numerous speakers will offer sessions on increasing customer lifetime value (LTV), improving customer engagement, assessing your company’s data maturity, and more.

This year's report found that B2B buyers' top priority for the next 12 months is increasing efficiency in their processes, while 94% also prefer to work with businesses that continuously evolve their digital capabilities.

Today, Hero Digital, a leading customer experience transformation company, released its annual B2B Buyer Report. The report highlights the top customer experience priorities of today's B2B buyers to meet complex demands, high digital expectations, and strict budgets.

In today's volatile economy, B2B buyers need to do more with less. They're reevaluating their external partnerships to ensure investments deliver the expected value. And they will only work with organizations that provide a seamless digital customer experience.

Simply going digital won't cut it anymore. Faced with economic uncertainty, inflation, and increased interest rates, today's B2B buyers require technology and service partners who understand their unique business challenges, how market conditions impact their business, and can translate their customer data into actionable insights that drive revenue. A deep understanding of your prospects', customers', and clients' unique needs is critical to success.

Hero Digital's B2B Buyer Report surveyed 150 B2B buyers employed at organizations with over $250 million in annual revenue, spanning industries including, but not limited to, financial services, manufacturing, and consumer packaged goods (CPG).

The report revealed that B2B buyers' top priority for the next 12 months is increasing efficiency in their processes. The report also found that 94% of B2B buyers agree their company prefers to work with businesses that continuously evolve their digital capabilities and experiment with offerings, while 88% of B2B buyers said they would turn to a competitor if their supplier's digital channel could not keep up with their desires as a buyer. 

"Businesses are looking to uncover innovative ways to improve operational efficiency and drive revenue," said Scott Webb, Chief Commercial Officer of Hero Digital. "We're seeing more and more executives revisit their existing digital transformation solutions, marketing efforts, digital experiences, and purchasing processes for opportunities to wring every last dollar out of their technology investments. At the same time, their B2B buyers are asking for the latest and greatest digital experiences. We help them prioritize and accomplish both."

According to the research, B2B buyers are looking at more than just their own internal operations. B2B buyers are reevaluating external partnerships to ensure these investments deliver the expected value, and they look to work with suppliers that provide a seamless customer experience (CX) and digital user experience (UX). 

Key findings from the report include:  

• 92% — B2B buyers agree economic uncertainty has placed additional pressure on their organization to make more cost-effective purchases.
• 92% — B2B buyers experience at least one pain point with their suppliers' use of current technology.
• 79% — B2B buyers would pay a higher price for a product or service if the supplier provided an excellent digital UX.
• 81% — Organizations currently use a combination of the default capabilities provided by their digital platform(s) as well as some customized capabilities.
• 60% — Organizations use a combination of digital platform(s) they've purchased and built in-house.

Braze Feature Flags drive personalization and enable more efficient marketing and product teams

Braze, the comprehensive customer engagement platform that powers interactions between consumers and the brands they love, today introduced new product innovations, including Feature Flags, an agile feature management tool that allows brands to create meaningful experiences at scale, which is designed to drive in-product conversions and revenue for brands. Feature Flags pair with the customer journey orchestration to enable brands to deliver and improve personalized experiences in their mobile and web applications. Jon Hyman, Cofounder and CTO of Braze, announced Feature Flags, along with other upcoming product innovations at the company’s annual customer conference, Forge at Metropolitan Pavilion in New York.

In today’s highly saturated world, consumers have more choices than ever about where to spend their time and money. Contextually relevant and personalized experiences are what set successful brands apart when reaching their target audience. According to Deloitte, organizations with mature personalization strategies report nearly 2x improvements in customer engagement, 1.5x improvement in customer loyalty, and 1.5x increase in revenue per customer. With Feature Flags, brands are able to more easily deliver and improve personalized experiences in mobile and web applications by unlocking relevant features and functionality for customers in the app or website using first-party customer data in Braze. Feature Flags integrate seamlessly with customer journey orchestration and are designed to assist brands in increasing their operational efficiency by breaking down silos between marketing and product teams to create campaigns faster, which, in turn, may reduce customer operational costs.

“With Braze Feature Flags, we were able to reduce campaign development time by 50%,” said Paolo Sabatinelli, Chief Product Officer of Immobiliare.it. “The tool has been instrumental in allowing us to easily coordinate feature releases with customer messaging with a single click and eliminate risks of inconsistency in segment targeting. Our product teams have been able to run with feature flags and collect valuable insights efficiently and independently, enabling us to provide the seamless and personalized experiences to our customers that they have come to expect.”

In addition to Feature Flags, Braze announced an upcoming Landing Pages product that can help brands easily capture information on prospects and convert them into leads and loyal customers. Landing Pages is designed to reduce technical complexities for marketing teams of all sizes and resource levels with its low-code visual editor to build and launch custom landing pages from Braze. With Landing Pages, brands can retain customers by seamlessly capturing first-party data from new and existing customers, which can help drive further monetization for customers.

New AI Products Encourage Marketers to Efficiently Experiment

Braze also announced upcoming additions to its Sage AI by Braze™ products aimed at helping marketers save time with efficient experimentation that guides them toward the most personalized and relevant customer engagement experiences. These products include:

• AI Recommendations: Braze has launched a beta version of AI Recommendations engine that uses machine learning (ML) to match relevant items from Braze Catalogs with the customers most likely to buy them. This feature is designed to create personalized experiences, which may result in increased revenue and boosted brand loyalty for customers.
• Canvas AI Step: Also in beta, the AI step in Braze Canvas Flow uses a third-party large language model (LLM) to quickly interpret user-provided inputs, like survey feedback, to determine the appropriate response and trigger messages. Brands can leverage the Canvas AI step to create meaningful customer journeys that can increase retention and support increased revenue.
• Message Content Recommendations: Currently on Braze’s product roadmap, the objective of Message Content Recommendations will be to aid marketers in saving time and increasing conversions. This upcoming product is intended to recommend copy and content for messages created via native Braze channels, as well as predict which message variant will perform better based on proprietary predictive models without the need to run a full experiment.

“At Braze, we are continuing to push the boundaries when it comes to delivering the most personalized and well-tested brand experiences for our customers,” says Jon Hyman, Cofounder and CTO of Braze. “Forge was the perfect stage to share these exciting enhancements and our roadmap of product innovation that we are working diligently to deliver to our customers. By releasing Feature Flags, announcing Landing Pages, showcasing our extensive product roadmap in AI, data flexibility, and cross-channel engagement, we're demonstrating our commitment to building powerful and cutting-edge customer engagement tools at Braze.”

In the past five months, Braze has released several product enhancements to help Braze customers improve customer engagement, including new and enhanced data features, new additions to the existing AI suite (Sage AI by Braze™), and a new suite of productivity features.

New integration enables hyper-personalization for ABM campaigns

Intellimize, the leading AI experience optimization platform, today announced their partnership and integration with Demandbase, the leader in AI-driven account-based go-to-market.

Shared customers of Intellimize and Demandbase can now use firmographic attributes to build custom audiences that deliver personalized experiences. For example, customers can target specific accounts, or groups of accounts based on company size, industry, revenue, and more, to show a dedicated experience on their website. This integration enables marketers to deliver dynamic website experiences across the buyer's journey, a critical element to account based marketing (ABM) program success.

Coupa, a SaaS company, is using the integration to deliver personalized landing pages to target accounts in specific industries and has seen great success. By breaking out their campaigns not only by industry, but also revenue tier, they're able to further tailor experiences to key accounts and deliver messages that resonate with each visitor.

"We used the Intellimize integration with Demandbase to personalize pages on our website by industry and by revenue tier, and as a result we were able to boost conversions by an average of 8.4% (and for a certain industry it was a 227% boost in conversion rates!). We were also able to figure out which messages work best for which industry and which revenue tier, which is extremely valuable across all of our marketing efforts." 

- Ally Vandenherik, Senior Digital Marketing Manager, Coupa Software

This integration will not only enable users of both products to curate highly personalized experiences for target accounts, but will also allow them to ensure those experiences are consistent across all website properties, landing pages, and other content, better educating buyers across all points of their journey. Additionally, the integration will unlock significant upsell and cross sell opportunities for brands looking to create account-specific special offers, amplifying countless revenue opportunities.

"We are excited to partner with Intellimize, so our joint customers can create more meaningful experiences for their customers," remarked Michael Wilczak, chief strategy and development officer at Demandbase. "We're all about using data and AI to light up the buyer journey and remove friction for both the buyer and seller. Our partnership with Intellimize is a perfect fit for this vision." 

A significant addition to Jivox omnichannel personalization platform, putting control in the hands of marketers seeking to improve creative and media performance for achieving relevance at scale

Jivox, the personalized commerce marketing technology leader, today announced the breakthrough enhancements to IQ Blaze Analytics, Powered by Snowflake. The current release provides high-impact metrics in a package, combining instant creative and media analytics in one place. Market-leading IQ Blaze Analytics delivers creative clarity through in-line creative previews via LiveBoards, which are live, interactive charts and graphs displayed in a dashboard format. Keeping user experience in focus, IQ Blaze Analytics visualization is paired with the natural-language query capability that puts the control and insights at the fingertips of the busy, modern-day digital marketers.

IQ Blaze Analytics is built on Snowflake's single, integrated platform and produces fast queries, drill downs and various analytics from the petabytes of data generated by marketing campaigns run on the Jivox platform"IQ Blaze Analytics is a breakthrough innovation," said Jivox founder & CEO, Diaz Nesamoney. "What's unique about these enhancements to our IQ platform are the depth and granularity of the data–because it's not only at the campaign performance level, but down to creative, asset, product, and audience levels. Within creative performance, IQ Blaze Analytics drills further down to specific messaging and products. Importantly, this data is organized into powerful insights that enable marketers to truly understand key performance drivers. In this release, insights can be visualized in real time through intuitive, natural language queries, exactly when and how marketers want it. Marketers can be notified about creative fatigue or drops in performance, allowing them to make adjustments to creative or strategy in real time and to restore performance immediately, getting the best ROI on media performance."

"Marketing leaders at large global advertisers can divine greater, more precise insights in their personalized marketing activations thanks to Jivox's innovations on the Snowflake Data Cloud," said David Wells, Industry Principal, Media, Entertainment, & Advertising at Snowflake. "Our scalable platform allows Jivox to collect and process all manner of data. Moreover, Jivox makes insights associated with that massive volume of data accessible, which allows advertisers to identify segments or micro segments of individuals whose shopping activity is a little different or whose affinities might skew towards specific products at specific times of the year."

"As third-party cookies go away from the digital marketing ecosystem, and with increasingly more media platforms turning into walled gardens, brands that want to control their own destiny must invest in strong campaign data management infrastructure in order to enable audience creation, attribution and measurement of their own," Mr. Nesamoney added.

With Jivox's technology, brands are able to measure offline attribution, such as store sales as a result of consumers seeing the ad creative. This type of sales attribution requires significant data processing: by matching offline sales data with online sales data. All of this data with actionable insights are available in IQ Blaze Analytics.

IQ Blaze Analytics Enhancements: Key Benefits:

Gain Instant Creative Clarity

• See which creatives outperform the rest of the pack with previews built directly into visualizations
• Assess real-time campaign data for actionable insights
• Get an instant performance snapshot by accessing LLM generated graphs of KPIs

Share Insights Intuitively

• Build, save, and share custom LiveBoards for the metrics that matter
• Create visualizations with a choice of charts for any KPIs
• One-click sharable insights – no screenshots to PowerPoint needed

Harness AI For Queries Using Natural Language

• A "search engine" for campaign data: ask Jivox for specific insights, and LiveBoard charts will be auto-generated instantly
• Drill down to learn more about a specific creative, day, placement and more with one click
• AI-powered natural language queries mean anyone can dig deeper into performance, no data science qualifications necessary

"Relevance is measured through analytics based on the granular data we collect," Mr. Nesamoney added. "Only then, marketers can compare different messages for different audiences and really zero-in on what is working best for each audience. That allows them to produce the right type of creative, the right type of messaging, and the right type of offers. That works best to engage consumers and ultimately produce more sales."

IQ Blaze Analytics and its advanced enhancements are available immediately to customers using Jivox's omnichannel personalization platform based on its automated Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) technology.

Industry leading applications are Powered by Snowflake. By building on Snowflake, product and engineering teams are able to develop, scale, and operate their applications without operational burden, delivering differentiated products to their customers. With the Powered by Snowflake program, builders get access to resources to help them design, market, and operate their applications in the Data Cloud.