Scorpion Levels the Playing Field for Local Businesses By Democratizing Generative AI Technology

Scorpion, the leading provider of digital marketing technology for local services businesses, is pleased to announce the launch of its new product offering, Connect with AI Chat. Local services businesses can now easily have their own specialized natural language conversational AI chatbot, capable of answering questions about their business and services, without requiring any technical expertise.

By democratizing a technology that was previously reserved for enterprise-level organizations, Scorpion helps level the playing field for local businesses. Each business using Scorpion's AI Chat benefits from a customized AI model available 24/7 and trained on the specifics of its company, its unique selling propositions, and its industry. The AI is further refined through ideal responses learned from hundreds of thousands of real customer conversations.

Connect was built for local businesses who seek a simple and effective way to engage with more potential customers online — from scheduling, to texting, to emailing, or paying invoices. It interacts seamlessly with website visitors, addressing their questions and guiding them to take relevant actions, such as scheduling an appointment or making a payment.

"Our customers want convenience and a great experience from the first time they interact with us on our website, all the way through to their service and purchase," said Toby Tippets, President of Big Mountain Heating & Air Conditioning. "Scorpion's AI Chat can answer questions about our services, help customers schedule an appointment, and even facilitate payment of an invoice. It's been like having an employee providing personalized customer service directly from our website."

Businesses equipped with their own AI chat now have a powerful tool that can continuously learn about their business and offer immediate, helpful answers and support to website visitors. Local businesses will have more opportunities to convert new leads and customers than ever before.

Scorpion's AI Chat is designed to address the unique challenges and opportunities that local services businesses face. While existing generative AI solutions sometimes struggle with inaccuracy or inappropriate responses, Scorpion's AI Chat has been specially tuned to deliver factually accurate, up-to-date, and safe responses. It also follows industry-specific workflows and behavioral guidelines developed through Scorpion's more than 20 years of experience with law firms and home service professionals.

"Generative AI technology like OpenAI's GPT models offer unprecedented opportunities for saving time through automated workflows," said Scorpion Chief Data Scientist Matt Bentley. "But making AI safe and effective for local services businesses requires a suite of supporting technologies, much like electricity requires infrastructure and specialized tools to become something that can be safely used by everyone."

Scorpion's AI Chat incorporates industry- and business-specific knowledge into each chat response, creating a personalized experience for every new conversation. This makes it effortless for website visitors to acquire the information they need to move forward in the buying process.

Local businesses utilizing Scorpion Connect with AI Chat can expect to:

• Improve Engagement: Help visitors go from "just looking" to "ready to get started."
• Enable Quick Scheduling: Convert potential customers into real appointments.
• Provide Accurate Answers 24/7: Scorpion's AI Chat responds regardless of the time of day (or night)!
• Reduce Workload for Staff: Work more efficiently by letting Scorpion's AI Chat answer the most common questions people have online.

The enhanced set of capabilities in the new CEP enables full-funnel interactions to drive lower CAC and higher LTV

Gupshup.io, the leading Conversational Engagement Platform, has unveiled a series of new and cutting-edge features in their latest launch. This latest update is designed to empower businesses to engage in personalized, two-way conversations with their customers at scale, especially as the festive season approaches.

The latest update streamlines and automates customer acquisition, qualification, personalized engagement, remarketing, and customer service. It introduces features such as audience categorization, automated retargeting for leads generated from click-to-chat advertisements, as well as from the brand's own channels. The addition of Gupshup.io's ACE LLM into generative AI-driven chat and voice bots guarantees high quality, precise interactions.

"The conversational phenomenon has seen a massive boost with the rise of LLMs, and we observe businesses transitioning to two-way interactions, whether for advertising, growth marketing, commerce, or support. Personalization is a crucial component of customer experience and with the emergence of click-to-chat ads, brands are now building their first-party databases and harnessing them to offer personalized and relevant interactions to their customers," said Gaurav Kachhawa, Chief Product Officer, Gupshup.io.

Top brands across verticals such as BFSI, retail, eCommerce and more are using Gupshup.io Conversational Engagement Platform to capture leads, nurture them through interactive campaigns and create delightful 1:1 experiences to drive higher engagement rates. Through the use of Gupshup.io's Bot Studio and visual journey builder, business users can craft omnichannel bot flows, quickly reducing the time to launch and optimize journeys. Through AI-powered Agent Assist dashboard, agents can aid consultative selling based on a customer's recent interactions, leading to better resolution and higher conversion rates.

Key capabilities in Gupshup.io's Conversational Engagement Platform

Personalized and interactive campaigns at scale

Now businesses can quickly launch advanced two-way interactive campaigns on channels such as WhatsApp with just a few clicks. With new capabilities in the campaign manager brands can easily make any message two-way by simply linking a journey to the template. Additionally, the Campaign Manager now offers an immediate preview of the selected template, allowing brands to see what the message will look like to their users.

Automated remarketing for cold leads acquired through conversational ads

Click to chat ads help businesses acquire leads from digital ads and qualify them through a chatbot conversation, eliminating the friction associated with form fills and app downloads. With the Conversational Ads Manager, brands can build their first-party database and drive higher conversions through remarketing within the same chat window. With this release, businesses can set up rules to automatically nudge leads that didn't convert earlier. Marketers can send retargeting messages up to 72 hours.

AI features to help save agent time and resolve customer problems better

While running a helpdesk on WhatsApp, it's time-consuming for agents and supervisors to catch up with lengthy chat history to get the context. With AI Summarize, Gupshup.io Agent Assist can generate a short blurb of the chat with the key details, so agents can seamlessly continue the conversation. Available in Beta. Agents can also leverage the Rephrase and Expand features to improve their responses, making them more professional and clear.

Full funnel analytics to help optimize spends and journey flow

Beyond advertising impressions and CTR, brands will now get insights on the chatbot funnel performance and retargeting campaigns effectiveness. Bot analytics now provides businesses with metrics and trends of conversations, messages, number of users, and returning users along with insights into typical drop off points.

ACE LLM for more natural conversations without redundant back and forth

Subsequent to the launch of ACE LLM in Q3, this release brings AI into the no-code journey builder, allowing business users to train bots on their enterprise knowledge base. With the ability to automatically identify intents and entities, the bot becomes smarter, avoiding needless questions that are already available in customer input.

Company introduces self-service "Plus" plan with Analytics, CDP and feature-management capabilities at just $49 per month

Amplitude, Inc. (Nasdaq: AMPL), a leading digital analytics platform, today announced the launch of Amplitude Plus, a new self-service offering that puts more capabilities from its platform into the hands of more teams at a lower cost. With Plus, businesses of all sizes gain access to the most powerful features of Amplitude’s Digital Analytics Platform to deliver better digital experiences and drive better outcomes.

Acquiring, retaining, and monetizing customers is critical for early-stage companies looking to scale. However, many teams cannot afford the full stack of tools they need to understand what their customers love, where they get stuck, and what keeps them coming back. The Plus plan levels the playing field by putting the full breadth of the Amplitude platform into the hands of every organization at an affordable price.

Starting at just $49 per month for up to 300,000 monthly tracked users (MTU), Plus includes Amplitude Analytics’ capabilities, powerful audience-management tools within its Customer Data Platform, as well as A/B testing, feature flagging and other feature-management tools previously only available in Experiment. The Plus plan is truly self-service – people can sign up online and get started immediately.

"We've heard the feedback that the pricing models for data analytics are broken. For the category as a whole, it's clear that event-based approaches can get expensive fast, pricing isn’t transparent, and the jump from free to paid is often steep," said Spenser Skates, CEO and co-founder of Amplitude. “With the Plus plan, we're changing all that. We're the first company to offer the best of our digital analytics platform in a self-serve way. It's available at the best price on the market. And we're making it super-simple to get up and running quickly."

The launch of Plus comes on the heels of an enhanced onboarding process to make it easier and faster for teams to get value from Amplitude. This includes:

• Taxonomy templates and event recommendations that make it easy to instrument data.
• Industry-specific starter templates that quickly surface product insights and guide users to more complex questions.
• Amplitude Academy offers flexible, self-paced learning, along with the Cohort community where industry peers share product and growth insights.

Organizations Recognize the Need to Blend Traditional and Generative AI and Incorporate Solutions that Enable Data Fabrics to Maximize AI’s Overall Impact

Qlik^® shows that enterprises are planning significant investments in technologies that enhance data fabrics to enable generative AI success, and are looking to a hybrid approach that incorporates generative AI with traditional AI to scale its impact across their organizations.

The “Generative AI Benchmark Report”, executed in August 2023 by Enterprise Technology Research (ETR) on behalf of Qlik, surveyed 200 C-Level executives, VPs, and Directors from Global 2000 firms across multiple industries. The survey explores how leaders are leveraging the generative AI tools they purchased, lessons learned, and where they are focusing to maximize their generative AI investments.

“Generative AI’s potential has ignited a wave of investment and interest both in discreet generative AI tools, and in technologies that help organizations manage risk, embrace complexity and scale generative AI and traditional AI for impact,” said James Fisher, Chief Strategy Officer at Qlik. “Our Generative AI Benchmark report clearly shows leading organizations understand that these tools must be supported by a trusted data foundation. That data foundation fuels the insights and advanced use cases where the power of generative AI and traditional AI together come to life.”

The report found that while the initial excitement of what generative AI can deliver remains, leaders understand they need to surround these tools with the right data strategies and technologies to fully realize their transformative potential. And while many are forging ahead with generative AI to alleviate competitive pressures and gain efficiencies, they are also looking for guidance on where to start and how to move forward quickly while keeping an eye on risk and governance issues.

Creating Value from Generative AI

Even with the market focus on generative AI, respondents noted they clearly see traditional AI still bringing ongoing value in areas like predictive analytics. Where they expect generative AI to help is in extending the power of AI beyond data scientists or engineers, opening up AI capabilities to a larger population. Leaders expect this approach will help them scale the ability to unlock deeper insights and find new, creative ways to solve problems much faster.

This vision of what’s possible with generative AI has driven an incredible level of investment. 79% of respondents have either purchased generative AI tools or invested in generative AI projects, and 31% say they plan to spend over $10 million on generative AI initiatives in the coming year. However, those investments run the risk of being siloed, since 44% of these organizations noted they lack a clear generative AI strategy.

Surrounding Generative AI with the Right Strategy and Support

When asked how they intend to approach generative AI, 68% said they plan to leverage public or open-source models refined with proprietary data, and 45% are considering building models from scratch with proprietary data.

Expertise in these areas is crucial to avoiding the widely reported data security, governance, bias and hallucination issues that can occur with generative AI. Respondents understand they need help, with 60% stating they plan to rely partially or fully on third-party expertise to close this gap.

Many organizations are also looking to data fabrics as a core part of their strategy to mitigate these issues. Respondents acknowledged their data fabrics either need upgrades or aren’t ready when it comes to generative AI. In fact, only 20% believe their data fabric is very/extremely well equipped to meet their needs for generative AI.

Given this, it’s no surprise that 73% expect to increase spend on technologies that support data fabrics. Part of that spend will need to focus on managing data volumes, since almost three quarters of respondents said they expect generative AI to increase the amount of data moved or managed on current analytics. The majority of respondents also noted that data quality, ML/AI tools, data governance, data integration and BI/Analytics all are important or very important areas to delivering a data fabric that enables generative AI success. Investments in these areas will help organizations remove some of the most common barriers to implementation per respondents, including regulation, data security and resources.

The Path to Generative AI Success – It’s All About the Data

While every organization’s AI strategy can and should be different, one fact remains the same: the best AI outcomes start with the best data. With the massive amount of data that needs to be curated, quality-assured, secured, and governed to support AI and construct useful generative AI models, a modern data fabric is essential. And once data is in place, the platform should deliver end-to-end, AI-enabled capabilities that help all users - regardless of skill level - get powerful insights with automation and assistance. Qlik enables customers to leverage AI in three critical ways:

• A trusted data foundation for AI – Qlik’s data integration and quality solutions leverage AI to automate data delivery and transformation, reducing complexity, mitigating risk, and enabling data fabrics.
• AI-enhanced and predictive analytics – Qlik has a long track record of delivering AI-enhanced and predictive analytics capabilities. Qlik’s OpenAI connectors extend the power of generative AI to Qlik analytics, bringing even more powerful chat capabilities to a rich user experience.
• AI for advanced use cases – Qlik AutoML™ helps organizations scale data science investments while enabling technically inclined staff to customize AI solutions for new use cases.

The leading provider of branded calling partners with major carrier to fast-track business adoption of the CX solution in Germany

First Orion, the leading provider of branded communication solutions for businesses, today announces its partnership with Vodafone Germany, a leading mobile communications operator, to increase business adoption of branded calling in Germany. First Orion was first to the market with branded calling technologies that put trust and transparency back into the phone call and will be pivotal in bringing Vodafone’s CallerID to market in Germany.

CallerID allows businesses to enhance their outbound calls by prominently displaying their name on their customers' smartphones. This branding initiative elevates the quality of phone conversations and improves the efficiency of businesses' calling strategies, resulting in increased customer engagement. By enhancing the effectiveness of the phone channel, businesses not only provide an improved customer experience but also achieve operational efficiency and a stronger bottom line. A financial services company saw a 76% increase in first-call conversions using branded calling technologies.

“Our collaboration with Vodafone reflects our unwavering commitment to enhancing the phone call experience globally. Together, we’re pioneering a path for businesses in Germany to improve this vital customer communication channel, simultaneously bolstering consumer confidence and security,” said Jeff Stalnaker, CFO and EVP of Strategic Initiatives at First Orion. “Branded calling brings trust and transparency back into the phone call for consumers while helping businesses improve their customer experience, operational excellence, and bottom line.”

Consumers expect businesses to brand their calls, and a survey conducted by First Orion found that nearly three out of four participants would consider switching their business to a competitor who identifies their calls. Marcel de Groot, Managing Director Consumer Customers at Vodafone Germany: “If we know who is calling us, it increases the likelihood that we will no longer miss important calls. We are the first provider to bring this network-based technology, which can help companies but also many millions of people in their everyday lives, to Germany.”

Worldwide, branded calling is gaining momentum, and First Orion recently marked a notable achievement by surpassing one billion branded calls in the U.S. this year alone. As the leading provider of branded calling, First Orion partners with numerous Fortune 500 companies to ensure the success of their calling programs.

More than 15 new advancements strengthen the platform creating a scalable, intuitive and technology-agnostic solution. Advancements future-proof the Coveo Composable AI Search and Generative Experience platform, ensuring its relevance and efficacy for enterprises.

Coveo  a market-leading platform that enables individualized, connected, and trusted digital experiences at scale with Semantic search, AI recommendations, and GenAI answering, today announced more than 15 new enhancements to the Coveo platform™. These innovative enhancements strengthen the Coveo composable AI Search and Generative experience platform to improve digital experiences across commerce, service, website and workplace to deliver superior business outcomes for enterprises.

“After a decade of enriching our platform to serve forward-thinking global enterprises, we know what it takes to gain a trusted AI-Experience Advantage,” said Laurent Simoneau, President, CTO and Co-Founder of Coveo. “Through our integrated SaaS platform and comprehensive suite of powerful AI and GenAI models, customers are effectively getting a subscription to ongoing innovation. We are constantly innovating to power individualized, trusted, and connected experiences that delight customers and employees while driving superior business outcomes.”

15 innovations to the Coveo platform^TM for Commerce, Service, Website, and Workplace use cases, across 4 different categories:

Cutting-edge AI and GenAI models help enterprises deliver the digital experience that customers and employees expect while improving business outcomes

Relevance Generative Answering: Implement secure, enterprise-ready generative answering across your organization today. Generate answers to complex customer and employee queries with this breakthrough capability that respects content permissions, ensures answer freshness and limits hallucinations across commerce, service, workplace and website use cases.

Cold Start Product Vectors: Improve your overall personalization capabilities while helping shoppers discover more products easily. Solve for the cold-start problem by generating product vectors for new and longtail products.

Query Suggestions Automatic Fallback: Increase the chance of visitors avoiding the dreaded zero results page and converting with this new model which automatically displays the last successful set of suggestions.

Extend the value of your platforms and achieve interoperability with connectors and integrations

GraphQL Connector: Achieve seamless site connectivity with this Connector offering a more precise way to request and index information while providing support for headless CMS frameworks including Sitecore, Adobe and more.

Website Connector: Enhance findability on your sites with our improved web connector which includes added features such as crawling rules, web scraping capabilities, and authentication support in a no code / low code manner.

Coveo Cartridge for Salesforce B2C Commerce: Supercharge your Salesforce B2C Commerce storefronts with improved search and AI-powered recommendations. The Coveo cartridge brings AI search, dynamic faceting, optimized listing pages, and relevant recommendations to Salesforce B2C Commerce storefronts. Can be used for both Commerce Cloud Storefront Reference Architecture (SFRA) and the new Composable Storefront.

Coveo for Salesforce Updates: Maximize your Salesforce investment with new features built on top of a modern UI framework, Coveo Quantic, including: Smart Snippets AI model, Feature Result tag, among others.

Empower business users to build dynamic search, commerce, and agent experiences while leveraging modern UI frameworks

Next-Gen Search Page Builder: Build dynamic, cohesive and intelligent search pages, quickly, easily with no-code. User-friendly interface allows the creation of a new page in just a few clicks.

Next-Gen In-Product Experience (IPX) Updates: Deploy AI Search and Generative Answering across your SaaS-based applications and websites swiftly with IPX. Updates include support for Secured Search, User Context, Quickview, and the ability to leverage Coveo’s new Relevance Generative Answering model.

Multi-Product Badging: Increase conversions and revenue per visitor by easily deploying badging strategies across your site - from product listings and search results to your basket pages.

Hosted Insight Panel (HIP) Enhancements: Keep agents informed in the flow of their work while AI Search and Recommendations augment their ability to serve customers with new features including: Support for Smart Snippets, Viewed by Customer Tag and more.

Self-service Insight Dashboards: Easily report on and show the value and ROI of deployed commerce capabilities with direct access to normalized data.

Reduce time-to-value with full-stack capabilities that help developers build and QA search experiences

Atomic UI Updates: Easily discover, create, share, install, and reuse custom Coveo Atomic components. Developers can also upload custom Atomic Hosted Search Pages to the Coveo Admin Console for quick publishing.

Facet Generator: Surface meaningful results to visitors faster. Automatically generate the most relevant search facets based on a user’s query and based on your indexed content - even with zero traffic.

Relevance Inspector: Help developers and site administrators easily troubleshoot search queries and improve the overall relevance of search results. Inspect query pipelines, rules, ranking score and more. Available for all search interfaces and implementations (ie. Atomic, Headless and JSUI).

New Data Health Overview Dashboard: Ensure your implementation captures suitable data to power AI and GenAI models via the new overview dashboard that provides aggregate and detailed views of events that have failed validation and helps developers identify, prioritize, and correct event analytics integration problems.

Operate confidently with enterprise-grade security and resiliency

Officially ISO 27001 certified: Protect and manage sensitive information, including employee and customer data, financial information, and information entrusted by third parties with Coveo’s ISO 27001 certification.

Active-Active and Five Nines Premium: Experience improved traffic performance and guaranteed uptime for US-based customers with the Active-Active redundancy query path. Additionally, customers desiring 99.999% uptime or five nines can purchase now additional resiliency.

Want to dig deeper into the AI-Experience Advantage with the latest innovations from Coveo? Join the New in Coveo Session that’s right for you. Only 1 hour to get more information on all Coveo’s new features.

• Website Session on October 18, 2023, 12pm ET
• Ecommerce Session on October 19, 2023, 11AM ET
• Service Session on October 24, 2023, 11AM ET
• Workplace Session on October 25, 2023, 11AM ET

By partnering with the leading sports betting platform provider, Optimove is strategically investing in scaling the leading CRM Marketing Solution for iGaming solution in the African continent

Optimove, the leading CRM Marketing platform for the iGaming sector, is set to grow its presence in the South African market, bringing the benefits of its all-in-one CRM Marketing Solution to local operators via a partnership with Amelco, the leading sports betting platform provider.

South Africa is a sports betting hotbed and the continent's biggest gambling market, as its Gross Gambling Revenue is expected to pass $2.3 billion by the end of 2023. Optimove's partnership with Amelco already includes as joint client the fast-growing South African operators Lulubet and others.

Optimove's leading all-in-one CRM Marketing platform will enable South African operators to build stronger long-term relationships with their players. Operators will be empowered to create sophisticated, real-time and scheduled AI-orchestrated marketing campaigns, personalized at scale. Delivering the ideal message to each player at the optimal time and through the optimal marketing channel.

Driven by Optimove's integrated Customer Data Platform, AI orchestration engine, and native marketing channels, operators maximize player LTV, increase loyalty and retention, and accurately attribute the incremental impact of each player interaction.   
Operators will gain the following key capabilities:  

• • Advanced Generative AI: Optimove’s AI will support operators across Insight Generation, Campaign and Journey Creation, and Marketing Orchestration and Optimization. 
  • Multichannel personalization and orchestration: Optimove’s AI-led orchestration engine will ensure players experience hyper-personalized journeys across channels. 
  • Native marketing channels: Optimove’s native email, SMS, mobile push, in-app, web push, and web pop-ups allow marketers to create all their messages from a single platform.
  • Digital experience personalization – Optimove's Digital Experience Platform (DXP) dynamically customizes websites, apps, and messages in real-time by leveraging over 20 AI models and player data. 

"As the iGaming market continues to flourish in South Africa, it becomes paramount for operators to seize every opportunity to make a lasting impact," said Dan de Souza, Director of Partnerships at Optimove. "We recognize the significance of this pivotal stage in the market's growth. Our market-leading CRM Marketing solution empowers South African operators to stay one step ahead of the competition by putting players at the heart of every marketing action. By prioritizing player-centric strategies, operators will elevate player retention, foster player loyalty, and maximize player lifetime value, enabling them to thrive in this dynamic and burgeoning market.

"Optimove's CRM Marketing solutions have proved invaluable for our joint clients in South Africa," said Brandon Walker, Business Development Manager at Amelco. "In this fast-paced industry and rapidly growing market, Optimove allows operators to understand what's happening and react in real-time with the ideal message at the right time. Our joint clients have seen great benefits and fantastic ROI in terms of elevated retention rates and increased player LTV."

The partnership comes on the heels of Optimove being recognized by EGR Global as both the Acquisition and Retention Partner of the Year and the Data and AI Partner of the Year. 

Swoogo, a leading event management platform, and Zoom Events, the event branch of the virtual powerhouse, Zoom, announced their partnership, as well as a forthcoming native integration, at IMEX 2023 in Las Vegas. This collaboration will bridge the gap between in-person and virtual audiences for the most effective hybrid event experience.

"This integration has the potential to bring together larger and more engaged audiences, making events and conferences easier to access for everyone," said Wei Li, Head of Zoom Events, Webinar, Sessions, and Chat at Zoom. "Hybrid events are the future. With the power of Zoom and Swoogo, it's easier than ever for hosts to bring together audiences of all sizes and for attendees to join no matter where they are in the world."

Swoogo + Zoom Events will empower event professionals to effortlessly merge the capabilities of both platforms, simplifying the creation of exceptional hybrid events. Swoogo, the fastest-growing event management platform, harnesses the power of event registration to deliver fully personalized, bespoke, on-brand events that maximize engagement and impact. Zoom Events, formed by Zoom in 2021, facilitates seamless connections between on-site experiences for in-person attendees and virtual audiences, leveraging the Zoom mobile app for engagement and ensuring TV-quality production using Production Studio.

"With this new collaboration, event organizers finally have a unified solution to effectively build, lead, and manage virtual, hybrid, and in-person events," said Sam Harkness, SVP of Partnerships at Swoogo. "Swoogo is thrilled to announce our partnership with Zoom Events, which will modernize hybrid events for event organizers and attendees."

Through this integration, customers can build within Zoom Events or Swoogo and automatically sync event data between platforms with the click of a button. This collaborative effort is set to become commercially available in early 2024.