artificial intelligence 11 Dec 2025
South Africa is rapidly emerging as a leading hub for customer experience excellence and digital transformation in Africa. As organizations shift from traditional contact center models to intelligent, AI-driven customer engagement ecosystems, the need for secure, compliant, and locally hosted platforms has intensified. Addressing this demand, NICE has officially launched a dedicated local instance of CXone Mpower, its AI-powered customer experience platform, hosted with full redundancy across Cape Town and Johannesburg.
This launch not only ensures data sovereignty and compliance with South African regulatory frameworks but also establishes a strategic foundation for NICE’s broader expansion across Africa. It brings advanced agentic AI, unified customer journey orchestration, and integrated digital and voice channels to enterprises across regulated industries, financial institutions, and large-scale customer operations.
Organizations are transitioning away from legacy contact center models.
Real-time decisioning and operational resilience are becoming essential.
Regulated sectors need platforms that ensure strict data governance.
Businesses seek measurable, outcome-driven customer engagement strategies.
Ensures all CXone Mpower applications and data remain within South Africa.
Supports compliance with stringent data protection and governance laws.
Helps organizations minimize regulatory risk while improving customer trust.
Enables secure deployment models for financial institutions and government agencies.
CXone Mpower is now fully hosted within South Africa.
Redundant data centers in Cape Town and Johannesburg enhance resilience.
Supports continuous operations with high availability for enterprise workloads.
Provides a scalable foundation for broader African deployment.
Enables end-to-end customer journey orchestration across channels.
Integrates digital and voice interactions in a unified cloud environment.
Supports real-time AI-driven insights and automated workflows.
Delivers measurable improvements in operational efficiency and CX outcomes.
Combines automated and agent-assisted conversations.
AI can understand context, listen, analyze intent, and execute tasks.
Enables organizations to merge human empathy with intelligent automation.
Enhances accuracy, speed, and consistency of customer interactions.
Provides a 360° view of customer journeys across touchpoints.
Improves agent performance, satisfaction, and productivity.
Empowers supervisors with AI-powered insights and decisioning tools.
Supports front, middle, and back-office alignment for seamless operations.
NICE has strengthened telecom infrastructure to keep voice traffic within the region.
Ensures low latency for real-time interactions.
Improves clarity, call reliability, and overall customer experience.
Supports higher-volume enterprise and BPO operations across Africa.
Darren Rushworth, President of NICE International, emphasized South Africa’s importance as a global CX leader and a market with strong potential.
Local hosting supports AI-assisted, outcome-driven service innovation.
The launch reflects NICE’s long-term regional strategy.
Positioned to scale across Africa as enterprises modernize CX environments.
Provides the technological foundation for South African organizations to compete globally.
Automates routine customer interactions with AI-driven workflows.
Supports agents with intelligent assistance and dynamic guidance.
Enhances efficiency and reduces handling times across channels.
Integrates systems across the front, middle, and back offices.
Provides seamless journeys with consistent, personalized experiences.
Enables organizations to measure real-time outcomes for continuous improvement.
NICE will work with local technology partners and systems integrators.
Plans to host executive briefings, workshops, and industry roundtables.
Supports customer enablement and knowledge transfer for regional success.
NICE’s launch of a dedicated, locally hosted CXone Mpower instance in South Africa marks a significant advancement for the region’s customer experience industry. By integrating agentic AI, unified omnichannel capabilities, and robust data governance, NICE empowers organizations to modernize their engagement strategies while meeting strict regulatory requirements.
With enhanced telecommunications infrastructure, regional hosting, and scalable cloud services, enterprises in South Africa and beyond can deliver high-quality, resilient, and personalized customer experiences. As part of NICE’s global strategy to accelerate the adoption of CX AI, this launch sets the stage for long-term growth, innovation, and competitive advantage across Africa.
Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.
artificial intelligence 10 Dec 2025
Brick-and-mortar retail is in the midst of a transformation. Once considered at a disadvantage to e-commerce due to limited shopper data, physical retail environments are now becoming just as measurable, responsive, and insight-driven as digital channels. Advances in artificial intelligence, sensor-based technologies, and computer vision have enabled retailers to capture and act on real-time data that was previously inaccessible.
At the forefront of this shift is Sensormatic Solutions, the global retail solutions portfolio of Johnson Controls. By integrating AI-enabled sensors and cameras into retail environments, Sensormatic Solutions is helping retailers unlock critical business metrics tied to shopper behavior, store performance, and operational efficiency.
Its Store Guest Behaviors Analytics, powered by AI and built on Re-Identification (Re-ID) technology, gives retailers unprecedented visibility into how shoppers move, dwell, and engage inside physical stores. Delivered through Orbit AI overhead people counters, Video AI cameras, and ShopperTrak Analytics, the platform turns raw activity into actionable insights, enabling faster decision-making and measurable sales growth—all while maintaining shopper privacy.
This evolution represents a major moment for MarTech and retail analytics, where offline behavior is no longer a blind spot but a strategic growth lever.
Traditionally, e-commerce platforms have dominated when it comes to shopper analytics. Retailers could track clicks, conversion paths, dwell time, abandonment, and revenue attribution with precision. Physical stores, by contrast, relied on sales totals and foot traffic, offering limited context into shopper intent or engagement.
That gap is rapidly closing.
According to Sensormatic Solutions leadership, today’s brick-and-mortar retailers now have access to data that rivals, and in some cases complements, digital insights.
Key developments making this possible include:
AI-powered computer vision that tracks movement without personal identification.
Advanced sensors capable of distinguishing shoppers from staff and passersby.
Real-time analytics platforms that transform foot traffic into business intelligence.
Privacy-first design that excludes personally identifiable information.
The result is not just more data, but better data—information that directly influences store layout, staffing decisions, merchandising strategy, and revenue optimization.
At the core of Sensormatic Solutions’ innovation is Store Guest Behaviors Analytics, a suite designed to convert in-store movement into measurable and actionable insights.
Store Guest Behaviors Analytics is driven by a combination of hardware and software innovations:
Orbit AI Overhead People Counters
AI-enabled sensors mounted overhead
Designed to accurately count shoppers
Exclude staff, children in strollers, and non-shopping traffic
Video AI Cameras
Capture anonymized movement patterns
Enable behavioral attribution without facial recognition
Re-Identification (Re-ID) Technology
Assigns anonymized IDs to track movement journeys
Identifies repeat behavior patterns during a visit
ShopperTrak Analytics Platform
Centralized dashboard for data visualization
Translates raw inputs into actionable metrics
Together, these components create a complete view of shopper behavior across the store.
One of the biggest challenges in modern analytics is balancing personalization and insight with consumer privacy. Sensormatic Solutions has prioritized privacy by design.
Key privacy measures include:
No collection of personally identifiable information (PII)
No facial recognition or biometric capture
Anonymized behavior tracking only within a single visit
Exclusion of staff and irrelevant traffic from analytics
This approach allows retailers to benefit from high-quality behavioral insights while staying compliant with evolving global privacy regulations and maintaining shopper trust.
One of the most valuable applications of Store Guest Behaviors Analytics is its ability to reveal the path to purchase inside physical stores.
By understanding how shoppers move through a space, retailers can identify:
Entry points with the highest engagement
High-traffic versus low-traffic aisles
Bottlenecks that prevent smooth navigation
Drop-off zones where shoppers disengage
Retailers can use journey data to:
Optimize store layouts based on real movement patterns
Reposition high-margin or promotional products
Improve signage and wayfinding
Reduce friction in high-traffic zones
Rather than relying on assumptions or outdated floor plans, retailers gain data-backed clarity on how store design directly impacts sales conversion.
Beyond movement, understanding where shoppers spend their time is critical to merchandising success.
Store Guest Behaviors Analytics provides insights into:
Zone preference
Dwell time by display or category
Engagement levels across store sections
With these insights, retailers can:
Identify top-performing displays that capture attention
Compare engagement across multiple product categories
Test and validate new merchandising strategies
Quickly adjust underperforming displays
This level of real-time feedback allows merchandising teams to move from static setups to dynamic, data-driven optimization.
Labor optimization remains one of the most complex challenges in retail. Overstaffing increases costs, while understaffing hurts customer experience and sales.
AI-powered traffic analytics offer a more precise approach.
Retailers can use traffic and behavioral data to:
Identify peak shopping hours with higher accuracy
Align staff scheduling with real demand
Adjust floor coverage dynamically throughout the day
Reduce wait times during high-traffic periods
By matching labor allocation to actual in-store activity, retailers improve both efficiency and shopper satisfaction without increasing labor spend.
Sensormatic Solutions’ innovations are already delivering measurable value for retail brands.
LIDS, a long-time partner of Sensormatic Solutions, has deepened its collaboration with the introduction of Orbit AI technology.
According to LIDS leadership, the new technology provides:
Clearer visibility into shopper flow
Better understanding of in-store engagement
Stronger decision-making around layout and merchandising
Improved overall shopper experience
These insights demonstrate how AI-powered analytics can transition from experimentation to everyday operational value.
Store Guest Behaviors Analytics represents a broader trend in MarTech: the blending of physical and digital intelligence.
Key implications for MarTech leaders include:
Offline data is becoming first-class marketing intelligence
Attribution is expanding beyond clicks to physical experiences
Customer journey mapping is now omnichannel by default
Real-time decision-making is extending into physical environments
Retailers that embrace this convergence gain a competitive advantage by aligning digital strategy with in-store realities.
Sensormatic Solutions will showcase Store Guest Behaviors Analytics at the 2026 NRF Big Show, taking place January 11–13 at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City.
Attendees can expect:
Live demonstrations of AI-powered analytics
Hands-on walkthroughs of Orbit AI sensors
Insights into upcoming retail technology innovations
Direct discussions with Sensormatic Solutions experts
This event provides a tangible look at how AI-backed MarTech is reshaping physical retail.
The future of retail is no longer a debate between online and offline. It is about how effectively brands can connect data, insights, and action across every customer touchpoint.
Sensormatic Solutions’ Store Guest Behaviors Analytics shows what’s possible when AI, sensors, and MarTech principles converge. By transforming in-store activity into real-time, privacy-safe intelligence, retailers can:
Increase conversion rates
Strengthen merchandising performance
Optimize staffing and operations
Deliver better shopper experiences
As physical retail becomes more measurable and responsive, solutions like these will define the next era of data-driven growth. For retailers looking to compete smarter, faster, and more efficiently, AI-powered in-store analytics are no longer optional—they are foundational.
Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.
advertising 10 Dec 2025
Connected TV (CTV) has rapidly become one of the most important digital advertising channels, but it has also introduced new complexities around targeting, measurement, and relevance. As streaming ecosystems grow more fragmented, advertisers are searching for smarter ways to align their messages with meaningful content moments—without relying on personal data.
Historically, contextual targeting in video advertising has stopped at broad classifications such as genre, show title, or channel. While useful, these approaches lack the precision required to reflect how viewers actually experience content. A comedy show can contain intense moments. A live sports broadcast can shift tone in seconds. Advertisers need intelligence that operates at the same speed and nuance as streaming content itself.
That gap is now closing.
Anoki, a leader in contextual video intelligence for CTV, has announced its integration with Index Marketplaces, Index Exchange’s omnichannel platform for curated, signal-rich supply activation and sell-side decisioning. With this integration, Index becomes one of the first global ad exchanges to provide buyers and sellers with scalable access to AI-powered, scene-level contextual intelligence across streaming TV.
This collaboration marks a significant advancement in how CTV advertising is planned, activated, and optimized—bringing real-time contextual precision into programmatic workflows at scale.
For years, marketers have depended on contextual tools that classify content at a high level. While these methods helped ensure brand adjacency and general relevance, they fall short in today’s dynamic streaming environment.
Common limitations include:
Context classification limited to genre or program level
Lack of emotional or tonal understanding within content
Inability to adapt ads to real-time content shifts
Missed opportunities during high-impact scenes
Inefficient spend due to overly broad targeting
As a result, advertisers have struggled to fully capitalize on CTV’s storytelling power, often delivering creative messages that are misaligned with the actual moment viewers are experiencing.
Scene-level intelligence represents a step change in contextual advertising. Instead of treating a program as a single environment, it analyzes content moment by moment.
With Anoki’s AI-powered approach, marketers gain visibility into:
Scene-level tone and sentiment
Subject matter within individual moments
Emotional context of live and on-demand programming
Shifts in content during live events
Nuanced storytelling elements that influence viewer attention
This intelligence allows advertisers to move from static adjacency to dynamic contextual alignment, where creative messaging can be activated around the most relevant moments in real time.
The integration connects Anoki’s ContextIQ platform with Index Marketplaces, combining deep content intelligence with curated, high-quality supply.
Anoki ContextIQ
AI-powered scene-level contextual analysis for streaming TV
Categorizes scenes by tone, sentiment, and subject matter
Enables real-time activation without personal data
Index Marketplaces
Omnichannel platform for curated, signal-rich inventory
Designed for scalable activation and sell-side decisioning
Supports premium streaming and live event supply
Index Exchange Infrastructure
Efficient, transparent, and DSP-agnostic activation
Seamless integration with existing programmatic workflows
Together, these components allow scene-level intelligence to be operationalized across the open internet at scale.
A major strength of Index Exchange lies in its leadership in dynamic ad podding, particularly across streaming and live events.
By pairing Anoki’s intelligence with dynamic ad podding, the integration enables:
Scene-aware decisioning at the pod level
Creative alignment with real-time content shifts
Reduced ad waste through more precise placements
Improved transparency across supply and delivery
Greater control over how ads appear within content experiences
Rather than treating every ad break equally, advertisers can now align creative messaging with the emotional and contextual state of the content at that exact moment.
Live events present some of the most valuable but challenging inventory in CTV. Content tone, momentum, and emotional intensity can change rapidly, making traditional targeting ineffective.
This integration enables advertisers to:
Activate ads around key live moments
Maintain brand safety even in unpredictable environments
Respond to content changes as they happen
Deliver more emotionally aligned messaging
Enhance viewer experience without disrupting engagement
For live sports, news, and events, scene-level intelligence ensures ads remain relevant without sacrificing scalability.
From a buyer perspective, the Anoki–Index integration delivers immediate and measurable benefits.
Access to scene-level contextual targeting without personal data
Curated, high-performance deal packages in Index Marketplaces
Improved alignment between creative and content moments
Enhanced brand safety, including live event environments
Reduced inefficiencies from overly broad contextual buys
No disruption to existing DSP or SSP workflows
Marketers gain more control and confidence in where and how their ads appear—driving stronger performance outcomes.
Media owners also stand to benefit significantly from this integration, particularly those with premium CTV and live event inventory.
AI-powered intelligence to enhance inventory valuation
Greater transparency into content-level performance
Improved yield through smarter contextual alignment
Control over how inventory is packaged and sold
Ability to compete beyond basic contextual signals
No additional platform fees or workflow changes
By activating scene-level insights through Index Marketplaces, media owners can unlock the full contextual value of their content without increasing complexity.
As privacy regulations evolve and third-party data becomes less reliable, contextual advertising is emerging as a core MarTech strategy.
This integration reinforces that shift by:
Eliminating dependence on personal or identity-based data
Preserving viewer privacy across streaming environments
Supporting compliance with global regulatory standards
Delivering relevance through content, not consumers
For MarTech leaders, this represents a sustainable model for performance-driven advertising in a privacy-first future.
Industry leaders see this collaboration as a meaningful step forward for CTV advertising.
Key themes highlighted by executives include:
A new level of precision in contextual activation
Stronger emotional alignment between content and creative
Smarter decisioning across fragmented streaming platforms
Improved outcomes for both buyers and sellers
Expanded creative opportunities not possible in legacy programmatic models
The consensus is clear: scene-level intelligence is reshaping what’s possible in CTV.
This integration reflects a broader MarTech evolution toward moment-based marketing, where relevance is defined by context, timing, and emotional resonance rather than static segments or assumptions.
Implications for MarTech teams include:
Context becoming a primary optimization signal
Creative strategy increasingly tied to content moments
Programmatic buying shifting toward curated intelligence
Measurement expanding beyond impressions to impact
CTV emerging as a premium, intelligent channel—not just a scaled one
The integration between Anoki and Index Marketplaces represents a meaningful leap forward for connected TV advertising. By bringing AI-powered scene-level intelligence into curated, scalable programmatic workflows, the partnership addresses one of CTV’s biggest challenges: delivering relevance without sacrificing privacy or efficiency.
For marketers, it unlocks real-time alignment with meaningful content moments. For media owners, it enhances inventory value and transparency. For the broader MarTech ecosystem, it signals a future where contextual intelligence operates at the same depth and speed as streaming content itself.
As CTV continues to grow, solutions that connect intelligence, efficiency, and relevance will define the next phase of digital advertising and this integration sets a strong benchmark for what’s possible.
Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.
artificial intelligence 10 Dec 2025
Modern enterprises are operating in an environment where sensitive data is no longer confined to a single system, platform, or location. Data is spread across cloud storage, SaaS applications, on-prem systems, and increasingly, automated and AI-driven processes. This distribution has unlocked efficiency and scale but has also introduced new security, governance, and compliance risks.
When incidents occur—whether it’s a file deletion, unauthorized access, suspicious downloads, or misuse by automated systems—security teams often face a critical challenge: they cannot quickly answer the most basic investigative questions. Who accessed the data? What was touched? When did it happen? And was it a human user, a service account, or an AI-driven process?
Traditional audit logs were not designed for today’s hybrid, AI-enabled environments. They are often fragmented, inconsistent, difficult to search, or entirely unavailable. As a result, investigations slow down, insider risks go undetected, and organizations face increased exposure to regulatory, operational, and reputational damage.
BigID, a leader in data security, privacy, compliance, and AI governance, is addressing this gap with the launch of Activity Explorer—a new capability that delivers centralized auditability and granular activity investigation across distributed environments. By unifying activity signals into a single interface, BigID enables security teams to move faster, investigate smarter, and strengthen their overall data security posture.
Insider risk has evolved beyond malicious employees acting alone. Today’s environments include:
Human users with legitimate access
Privileged service accounts running automated processes
AI agents interacting with sensitive data at scale
Hybrid data estates spanning cloud, SaaS, and on-prem systems
When combined with limited visibility, this complexity increases exposure.
Key challenges facing security teams today include:
Incomplete audit trails across systems
Lack of context around what data was accessed
Difficulty correlating identity activity across platforms
Manual, time-consuming investigations
Limited support for AI and non-human identities
Without unified visibility, organizations often discover issues too late—after damage has already occurred.
Activity Explorer is designed to provide auditability and investigative clarity across modern data ecosystems. It centralizes activity events from cloud and on-prem environments into a single, searchable, and filterable interface.
Unified activity visibility across hybrid data environments
Granular tracking of human, service, and AI-driven activity
Faster investigations through centralized search and filtering
Reliable audit trails for compliance and forensics
Context-rich insights tied to data sensitivity and risk
This capability extends BigID’s platform beyond discovery and classification into actionable monitoring and response.
One of the core strengths of Activity Explorer is its ability to remove blind spots created by fragmented logging systems.
BigID Activity Explorer consolidates activity across:
AWS S3
SharePoint
OneDrive
Google Drive
NetApp
Cloud, SaaS, and on-prem data stores
By centralizing these activity signals, security teams no longer need to hunt across multiple tools or inconsistent logs to reconstruct events.
Complete visibility across distributed data sources
Faster triage and investigation
Reduced operational complexity
Improved confidence in audit accuracy
This unified approach is essential for modern data security operations.
A defining challenge in today’s environments is the explosion of non-human identities. Service accounts, scripts, automation tools, and AI agents now access sensitive data as frequently as human users.
Activity Explorer extends visibility across all identity types, including:
Individual user accounts
Privileged and non-privileged service accounts
Automated workflows and system processes
AI-driven agents interacting with data
This ensures that no identity operating within the environment is invisible to security teams.
When incidents arise, speed and precision are critical. Activity Explorer provides security teams with a powerful investigative experience designed for real-world response scenarios.
Security teams can:
Search activity by date, user, operation, or resource
Filter events using multiple criteria simultaneously
Quickly answer questions such as:
Who deleted this file?
What data did this account access yesterday?
Which identities performed downloads during a specific window?
This flexibility significantly reduces investigation time and improves response accuracy.
Compliance and governance demands require disciplined record-keeping. Activity Explorer maintains a comprehensive activity history across sensitive data environments.
Activity Explorer supports:
Long-term audit logging
Forensic analysis during investigations
Regulatory requirements such as:
HIPAA
GLBA
GDPR
Having trustworthy, centralized activity records enables organizations to respond confidently to auditors, regulators, and internal governance teams.
When accounts are compromised, understanding the scope of exposure becomes urgent. Activity Explorer enables security teams to analyze the blast radius of an incident.
Identify all data accessed during a breach window
Trace compromised account activity across systems
Determine what sensitive data was touched
Prioritize containment and remediation
This accelerates incident response and reduces the likelihood of prolonged exposure.
Activity Explorer is not only reactive—it also enables proactive risk detection.
The platform helps surface patterns associated with:
Unauthorized access attempts
Mass downloads
Suspicious file deletions
Unusual behavior by privileged accounts
Anomalies involving service accounts or AI agents
By identifying risky behavior early, organizations can intervene before incidents escalate.
Activity logs alone only tell part of the story. BigID enhances Activity Explorer by pairing activity events with data context and sensitivity classification.
With this combined view, security teams can understand:
What type of data was accessed
Whether it included regulated or sensitive information
The potential risk level of the activity
The business impact of the event
This context-driven approach allows teams to focus on what truly matters, rather than chasing low-risk noise.
According to BigID leadership, visibility is the cornerstone of effective data protection.
Security leaders emphasize that without the ability to see and trace activity across environments, organizations cannot:
Protect sensitive data
Investigate incidents effectively
Maintain compliance
Secure AI-driven processes
Activity Explorer is positioned as a foundational capability that strengthens every layer of data security operations.
The launch of Activity Explorer builds on BigID’s broader leadership across:
Data Security Posture Management (DSPM)
Data Detection and Response (DDR)
Insider risk management
Cloud Data Loss Prevention (Cloud DLP)
AI governance and oversight
Together, these capabilities help organizations reduce risk, accelerate investigations, and maintain confidence in their security controls.
For MarTech and data-driven organizations, Activity Explorer addresses a growing concern: ensuring accountability as AI and automation become embedded into data workflows.
Key implications include:
Stronger governance for AI-enabled data access
Improved auditability for marketing and analytics systems
Greater alignment between data security and compliance teams
Reduced operational risk tied to sensitive customer data
As MarTech stacks continue to expand, audit visibility becomes as critical as activation and performance.
As data ecosystems grow more distributed and AI-driven, organizations can no longer rely on fragmented, incomplete audit logs to protect sensitive information. Insider risk, whether human or automated, demands unified visibility and rapid investigative capabilities.
With Activity Explorer, BigID delivers a centralized, context-rich, and scalable approach to activity auditing and investigation. By bringing together identity activity, data sensitivity, and historical records into a single experience, the platform enables security teams to move faster, smarter, and with greater confidence.
In an era where understanding who accessed data, when, and why is non-negotiable, Activity Explorer sets a new standard for modern data security and governance.
Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.
technology 10 Dec 2025
Enterprise communication is undergoing a structural shift. Businesses are moving away from fragmented, transactional messaging models toward conversational, engagement-driven interactions that align with how consumers actually communicate. At the center of this transformation is WhatsApp, which has rapidly evolved from a consumer messaging app into a critical enterprise engagement channel.
As customer expectations increase and digital interactions become the default, organizations are rethinking how they connect with users across sales, support, and operations. Messaging channels that support rich media, real-time conversations, and high delivery reliability are now essential to customer experience strategies.
Within this context, Messangi—a leader in enterprise messaging and CPaaS solutions—has been promoted to Select Partner in Meta’s Partner Performance Accelerator for Business Messaging Program. This milestone reflects sustained growth in WhatsApp adoption among Messangi’s customers and highlights a broader industry transition toward conversational messaging at scale.
The promotion underscores not only strong performance metrics but also Messangi’s growing role in helping enterprises modernize their communication infrastructure across the Americas.
For years, SMS served as the backbone of enterprise messaging. While reliable and ubiquitous, SMS is inherently limited in its ability to support rich, interactive experiences.
As organizations began prioritizing engagement, personalization, and two-way communication, the limitations of SMS became increasingly clear.
Key challenges of legacy SMS-only platforms include:
Limited support for rich media
Lack of structured conversational flows
Lower engagement rates for complex interactions
Reduced ability to personalize experiences
Minimal support for automation and AI-driven journeys
Conversational channels like WhatsApp address these challenges by enabling branded messaging, media-rich interactions, verified business identities, and real-time responses—all within a user experience that customers already trust and use daily.
Over the past several years, Messangi has worked closely with enterprises, telecom operators, aggregators, and independent software vendors to help them transition from SMS-centric messaging models to modern, conversational platforms.
This transition has not been theoretical. Messangi has supported real-world deployments where WhatsApp became a core communication channel for customer engagement, notifications, and support.
Key factors driving WhatsApp adoption among Messangi’s customers include:
Growing consumer preference for messaging-based interactions
Demand for richer, more interactive customer experiences
Need for faster response times and two-way communication
Higher reliability compared to traditional SMS in certain markets
Better alignment with omnichannel engagement strategies
As a result, WhatsApp usage among Messangi’s customer base has grown rapidly, directly contributing to its promotion within Meta’s partner ecosystem.
Meta’s Partner Performance Accelerator for Business Messaging Program evaluates partners based on performance, scale, adoption success, and customer outcomes. Promotion to Select Partner reflects sustained excellence across these dimensions.
Messangi’s Select-level recognition provides:
Increased access to Meta enablement resources
Participation in incentive and growth programs
Closer collaboration with Meta teams
Early insight into product updates and best practices
Enhanced ability to support large-scale WhatsApp deployments
This strengthened position enables Messangi to better serve organizations seeking to operationalize WhatsApp as part of their long-term messaging strategy.
Through deployments across multiple industries, Messangi has consistently observed WhatsApp outperform SMS across key performance indicators.
Higher conversion rates on customer journeys
Stronger engagement and response rates
Improved message delivery reliability
Faster customer response times
More effective two-way communication
These outcomes validate the broader shift in enterprise communication behavior and confirm that conversational messaging is not just a trend, but a performance-driven evolution.
Messangi’s WhatsApp implementations span a wide range of industries, each with distinct communication needs but shared performance goals.
Transactional notifications with two-way engagement
Customer service automation
Secure and trusted messaging channels
Faster response handling and issue resolution
Service notifications and plan updates
Customer onboarding and retention messaging
Conversational support at scale
Reduced reliance on call centers
Order updates and delivery notifications
Promotional messaging with rich media
Conversational commerce experiences
Increased engagement across the customer lifecycle
Policy updates and claims communication
Customer education and support workflows
Faster resolution through conversational interactions
Across these sectors, WhatsApp has emerged as a preferred channel for delivering timely, relevant, and interactive communication.
Messangi’s expanded role as a Select Partner enhances its ability to support organizations at different stages of messaging transformation.
Upgrading legacy SMS-only infrastructure
Integrating native WhatsApp capabilities
Embedding messaging into enterprise software platforms
Supporting ISVs building messaging-driven solutions
Scaling conversational strategies across regions
For organizations navigating messaging modernization, this support reduces complexity and accelerates time to value.
Messangi leadership views the Select Partner promotion as a reflection of customer trust and market momentum.
Key themes emphasized by executives include:
Clear growth trajectory for WhatsApp adoption
Measurable performance improvements for customers
Increasing demand for conversational engagement
Long-term shift away from transactional-only messaging
These signals reinforce the idea that messaging is no longer just a utility—it is a strategic channel for customer experience and brand engagement.
While WhatsApp plays a central role, Messangi continues to support a broad messaging ecosystem designed for flexibility and scale.
SMS
RCS
AI-powered chatbots
Intelligent workflows and automation
Scalable CPaaS infrastructure
This multichannel approach allows organizations to meet customers where they are while maintaining consistency, control, and efficiency.
From a MarTech perspective, Messangi’s Select Partner status highlights a larger trend: messaging platforms are becoming foundational engagement layers within modern marketing and customer experience stacks.
Key implications for MarTech leaders include:
Messaging is evolving from support to engagement
Conversational channels drive higher lifecycle value
Automation and AI are essential for scale
Channel strategy must reflect customer preference
Platform partners play a critical role in execution
As brands compete on experience, messaging performance is increasingly tied to business outcomes.
Messangi’s promotion to Select Partner in Meta’s Business Messaging Program reflects more than a partner milestone—it signals where enterprise communication is headed.
As WhatsApp adoption accelerates across industries, organizations are prioritizing channels that deliver higher engagement, faster interactions, and richer customer experiences. Messangi’s proven ability to help customers transition from legacy SMS platforms to conversational messaging has positioned it as a key enabler of this shift.
With expanded access to Meta’s resources and continued investment in multichannel, AI-enabled messaging, Messangi is well-positioned to help organizations scale modern communication strategies that meet the expectations of today’s connected customers.
Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.
artificial intelligence 10 Dec 2025
Artificial intelligence is reshaping marketing at every level, from audience targeting and personalization to budgeting, forecasting, and creative optimization. Yet for many enterprises, AI progress is constrained by a stubborn underlying problem: fragmented, unreliable, and inflexible data infrastructure.
While AI-powered tools continue to proliferate, most organizations still rely on legacy marketing measurement systems that were never designed for real-time decisioning, generative models, or autonomous agents. Data is siloed across channels, vendors, and teams, making it difficult to govern, unify, or activate intelligence at scale.
Marketing Evolution, long recognized as a pioneer in marketing analytics, is positioning itself at the center of this transformation. The company has announced new funding led by Insight Partners, a global software investor and existing backer. The investment is focused on accelerating product innovation and go-to-market expansion for Marketing Evolution’s AI-ready data infrastructure, purpose-built to unify, govern, and activate enterprise marketing data across AI-driven and agentic systems.
This milestone marks a strategic shift: from analytics provider to foundational data infrastructure platform designed for the next generation of marketing intelligence.
Founded in 2000, Marketing Evolution built its reputation by helping brands measure and improve marketing ROI through advanced data science. Over time, it became clear that measurement alone was no longer sufficient for enterprises navigating increasingly complex and automated marketing ecosystems.
Customers needed:
Unified data across channels and platforms
Reliable, governed inputs for AI systems
Faster insights and continuous learning
Explainable intelligence, not black-box outputs
Infrastructure that could support agentic decision-making
In response, Marketing Evolution began evolving its platform beyond analytics into a domain-specific, AI-ready data infrastructure for marketing.
This latest round of funding accelerates that transformation.
AI adoption in marketing is often framed as a tooling problem. In reality, it is a data architecture problem.
Without adaptable and trustworthy data infrastructure:
AI models produce inconsistent or biased results
Automation is limited to narrow use cases
Insights cannot be operationalized in real time
Marketing systems fail to learn and improve continuously
Marketing Evolution is addressing what it describes as the most critical barrier in marketing’s AI transformation: building infrastructure that can reliably operationalize AI across the marketing ecosystem.
Rather than focusing solely on performance dashboards or attribution models, the company is building the data backbone and connective tissue required for an always-on, learning-based marketing system.
The funding round is led by Insight Partners, reinforcing long-standing confidence in Marketing Evolution’s direction.
As part of the investment:
Rajiv Gihwala, Principal at Insight Partners, joins the Board of Directors
He will serve alongside George Mathew, Managing Director at Insight Partners and an AI-focused leader
The board also includes experienced industry leaders such as:
Andy Frawley, CEO of Data Axle and former CEO of Epsilon
Lindsay Luger, Founding Partner at EIP
Brett Marchand, CEO of Plus Company
This composition reflects the company’s positioning at the intersection of data, AI, and enterprise marketing transformation.
Traditional measurement systems were built for retrospective analysis. They explain what happened, but not what to do next, and they rarely improve themselves over time.
Marketing Evolution’s current strategy is designed for a different future:
AI-driven decision-making
Predictive and generative intelligence
Autonomous and semi-autonomous agents
Continuous learning from outcomes and feedback
This shift requires infrastructure that can ingest, unify, augment, and govern data at scale, while remaining flexible enough to support evolving AI use cases.
At the center of Marketing Evolution’s offering is Mevo, its domain-specific analytics and intelligence platform. Mevo is not just a reporting tool—it functions as a decision-ready intelligence layer for modern marketing organizations.
Built on a marketing-specific data model (ontology)
Designed to unify fragmented data across the enterprise
Continuously reconstructs customer and media journeys
Delivers explainable intelligence in real time
Supports predictive and generative AI use cases
Mevo represents the operational expression of Marketing Evolution’s AI-ready infrastructure vision.
Mevo enables marketing organizations to move from fragmented inputs to unified intelligence through three core capabilities.
Mevo delivers:
A standardized data structure across sources and channels
Alignment between audiences, tactics, outcomes, and spend
Consistent definitions across teams and systems
Trustworthy inputs for analytics and AI models
This unified structure reduces the friction that typically prevents enterprise-scale AI adoption.
Unlike static analytics systems, Mevo is designed to learn continuously.
Key learning capabilities include:
Reconstructing journeys across complex touchpoints
Generating synthetic data to fill gaps and improve models
Feeding predictive and generative AI systems
Improving accuracy as new outcomes are observed
This approach enables intelligence to compound over time, rather than reset with each analysis cycle.
Mevo introduces conversational access to intelligence, enabling:
Simulation of scenarios before decisions are made
Forecasting of outcomes across channels and budgets
Real-time recommendations based on live data
Faster alignment between insights and execution
This moves marketing intelligence closer to operational decision-making rather than post-hoc analysis.
Marketing Evolution’s infrastructure is not theoretical. It is already delivering measurable benefits to customers.
Organizations using its analytics suite have reported:
An average 35% increase in marketing ROI
Improved confidence in data-driven decisions
Faster insights across fragmented environments
Stronger alignment between spend and outcomes
These results demonstrate the tangible value of building intelligence on a strong data foundation.
In Q1 2026, Marketing Evolution plans to launch a next-generation enterprise data platform designed to extend its infrastructure vision further.
The upcoming platform aims to help brands:
Unify AI-ready marketing data across their ecosystems
Govern and control intelligence at the enterprise level
Activate insights across AI-driven and agentic systems
Own and compound the value of their data assets
This launch represents the next phase of the company’s evolution from analytics provider to infrastructure leader.
Marketing Evolution’s announcement reflects a broader MarTech trend: competitive advantage is shifting from tools to infrastructure.
Key implications for MarTech leaders include:
AI success depends more on data readiness than algorithms
Domain-specific ontologies outperform generic data models
Continuous learning systems outperform static dashboards
Enterprises must own and govern their intelligence
Agentic systems require reliable, explainable data inputs
As marketing becomes increasingly autonomous, infrastructure will define which organizations can scale AI responsibly and effectively.
Industry leaders see this moment as part of a larger platform transition driven by AI-native companies.
Core themes emphasized include:
AI is redefining how industries operate, not just tools
Foundational data platforms will outlast point solutions
Marketing analytics is evolving into intelligence systems
Long-term value lies in adaptable infrastructure, not features
Marketing Evolution’s strategy aligns directly with this generational shift.
Marketing Evolution’s latest funding round signals a clear strategic ambition: to become foundational infrastructure for the AI-driven future of marketing.
By moving beyond legacy measurement and investing in AI-ready data infrastructure, the company is addressing the core challenge that blocks meaningful AI adoption across enterprises. With Mevo as its intelligence layer and a next-generation data platform on the horizon, Marketing Evolution is positioning itself to help brands build adaptive marketing systems that learn, explain, and optimize continuously.
As AI transforms marketing from analysis to autonomy, the organizations that succeed will be those that own their data, govern their intelligence, and invest in infrastructure designed for the future. Marketing Evolution is betting that this is where the next era of MarTech leadership will be defined.
Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.
artificial intelligence 10 Dec 2025
The marketing technology industry is at a turning point. After decades of platform sprawl, fragmented tools, and increasing complexity, marketing and customer engagement teams are demanding something fundamentally different. Insider One’s rebrand from Insider signals more than a name change—it marks a strategic declaration that the MarTech status quo is no longer sustainable.
As organizations struggle with bloated tech stacks, rising total cost of ownership, and diminishing returns on innovation, Insider One is positioning itself at the center of what it calls The Great Reset in MarTech. The company’s renewed mission is clear: bring everything marketing and customer engagement teams need into one unified, intelligent platform—so teams can focus less on managing tools and more on creating meaningful customer connections at scale.
This shift reflects a wider industry reckoning. Traditional MarTech promised acceleration but often delivered friction. Insider One’s rebrand is a challenge to that model and a roadmap toward a new category where AI sits above MarTech, reshaping customer engagement into what the company defines as AITech.
Insider One’s rebrand is rooted in a direct critique of how MarTech evolved—and where it went wrong.
Over the past two decades, marketing technology expanded rapidly but unevenly:
Vendors positioned themselves as “missing pieces” rather than cohesive solutions
Platforms added features without removing complexity
Integration challenges became the norm rather than the exception
Teams were forced to rebuild their stacks every 2–3 years
Instead of enabling growth, MarTech often became a blocker.
Insider One defines this overload as digital pollution—a state where:
Marketing teams feel overworked and overwhelmed
Tool management consumes more time than customer engagement
Innovation slows under the weight of operational complexity
Teams settle for partial solutions out of necessity
This cycle has led to widespread dissatisfaction, with marketing leaders recognizing that incremental fixes are no longer enough.
Insider One argues that the future of customer engagement is not about adapting to broken systems but replacing them altogether. The Great Reset represents a move toward:
Fewer platforms, but deeper capabilities
AI-native systems instead of AI add-ons
Technology that accelerates human creativity rather than replacing it
This reset forms the foundation of Insider One’s new identity and product vision.
At the heart of Insider One’s rebrand is a commitment to delivering the ultimate vendor experience—a unified platform that removes friction instead of adding it.
The Insider One platform is designed around a simple but ambitious promise:
Everything teams need to engage customers across channels
Nothing redundant or unnecessary
A single system that scales with business complexity
This vision reframes how brands think about customer engagement—not as a collection of disconnected tools, but as a continuous, intelligent journey.
Insider One’s new identity is anchored in three strategic promises that define how it serves modern marketing and customer engagement teams.
Insider One positions itself as a first mover in the transition from MarTech to AITech.
According to Insider One:
AI is no longer just a feature embedded in tools
It now operates above the tech stack, orchestrating it
Human intelligence and artificial intelligence must work together
This marks a fundamental reset in how customer engagement platforms are designed and deployed.
Insider One commits to:
A unified, AI-powered customer engagement platform
Continuous innovation driven by an ambitious product and AI roadmap
Omnichannel engagement at scale without added complexity
For customers, the benefit is clear:
Brands react to change while Insider One users shape it
Engagement strategies evolve faster than competitors
Innovation becomes proactive rather than reactive
Building on more than a decade of AI leadership, Insider One aims to redefine what modern customer engagement can achieve.
Technology should enable focus, not divert it. Insider One’s second promise targets one of marketing’s biggest pain points: operational drag.
The Insider One Advantage™ is a customer-obsessed operating model refined over more than a decade. It spans:
30+ global markets
15 industries
2,000+ enterprise customers
This experience informs how Insider One designs, deploys, and supports its platform.
Insider One helps brands:
Migrate from legacy systems with white-glove support
Onboard rapidly without operational disruption
Reduce tech-stack complexity and total cost of ownership
Accelerate time to value
By removing fear, cost, and complexity, Insider One enables teams to focus on what matters most: building lasting customer relationships and driving growth.
Beyond technology, Insider One emphasizes the power of shared learning and collective intelligence.
The Growth Makers™ Club is a global community of:
Marketing leaders
Innovators and strategists
Industry disruptors
This community exists to:
Share proven strategies
Accelerate learning across markets
Multiply impact through collaboration
Insider One believes that progress accelerates when:
Organizations learn from real-world outcomes
Best practices are shared, not siloed
Networks compound value over time
For customers, this means access not just to a platform—but to a living ecosystem of expertise.
Under its new identity, Insider One plans to accelerate growth across multiple fronts.
Insider One will focus on:
Acquiring best-in-class product companies
Integrating breakthrough technologies into its platform
Expanding its global footprint
Today, Insider One already operates at significant scale:
1,500+ team members
50+ nationalities
30+ offices across six continents
This foundation positions the company for aggressive expansion in both capability and market reach.
Insider One’s leadership points to its first decade as proof of its ability to anticipate and lead industry shifts.
Over the years, the company:
Navigated the shift from mobile-first to AI-driven engagement
Earned recognition from analysts and customers alike
Built trust with over 2,000 global brands
Looking ahead, Insider One aims to:
Lead the industry’s shift from MarTech to AITech
Deliver not just great technology, but a superior vendor experience
Empower teams to operate at peak potential
The company’s message is clear: marketing teams deserve more than fragmented tools—they deserve systems that learn, explain, and scale with them.
Insider One’s rebrand represents a decisive statement about the future of marketing technology. As AI reshapes how brands engage with customers, the industry is moving beyond point solutions toward unified, intelligent platforms.
The Great Reset in MarTech is not about incremental improvement—it is about replacing friction with focus, complexity with clarity, and tools with true systems of intelligence. By positioning itself at the intersection of AI, customer engagement, and operational simplicity, Insider One is setting a new standard for what marketing technology can and should deliver.
As MarTech gives way to AITech, Insider One is betting that the brands who thrive will be those who embrace fewer platforms, deeper intelligence, and experiences designed for humans first.
Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.
artificial intelligence 10 Dec 2025
EPAM Systems, Inc. (NYSE: EPAM) has taken a significant step in advancing enterprise AI adoption with the launch of multiple production-ready AI agents on Google Cloud Marketplace. Known for its deep expertise in digital, cloud, and AI transformation, EPAM is leveraging an engineering-first approach to deliver secure, compliant, and scalable AI solutions designed for real-world enterprise environments.
This launch strengthens EPAM’s strategic collaboration with Google Cloud and underscores its growing role in shaping the future of Gemini Enterprise. By making these AI agents readily available through Google Cloud Marketplace, EPAM enables organizations to deploy trusted AI solutions faster, reduce operational complexity, and maximize the value of their cloud investments.
The move reflects a broader industry shift toward agent-based AI systems that can automate workflows, optimize data usage, and deliver measurable business outcomes across regulated and complex enterprise settings.
The availability of EPAM’s AI agents on Google Cloud Marketplace represents a milestone in the company’s 360-degree partnership with Google Cloud.
EPAM’s relationship with Google Cloud spans:
Advanced engineering and cloud-native architecture
AI solution design and deployment
Joint go-to-market strategies for enterprise customers
This expansion builds on years of collaboration and signals EPAM’s growing influence as an enterprise AI delivery partner within the Google Cloud ecosystem.
Support for Gemini Enterprise ensures EPAM’s AI agents are:
Built on interoperable, enterprise-grade AI foundations
Secure by design and compliant with industry standards
Scalable across diverse enterprise workloads
By contributing its domain expertise, EPAM has helped customers adopt Gemini Enterprise as part of robust, production-ready AI workflows.
EPAM’s newly launched AI agents are engineered to address some of the most pressing challenges enterprises face today—from regulatory compliance to data optimization and operational inefficiency.
Across the portfolio, EPAM emphasizes:
Enterprise-grade security and compliance
Production readiness, not experimental prototypes
Rapid deployment through Google Cloud Marketplace
Tangible ROI through automation and performance optimization
This approach enables organizations to go beyond pilots and move directly into scaled AI execution.
The initial release includes seven high-impact AI agents, each tailored for specific industry and functional use cases.
Designed for financial services institutions, this agent delivers end-to-end automation of KYC processes.
Key capabilities include:
Automated data aggregation from multiple sources
Screening and validation of customer information
AI-driven risk assessment and compliance checks
Reduced manual effort and faster onboarding cycles
This solution helps financial institutions improve compliance while reducing operational cost and friction.
This agent focuses on accelerating document-heavy workflows in life sciences.
Key benefits include:
Automated creation of complex clinical trial documentation
Improved consistency and regulatory readiness
Faster time-to-market for research and development initiatives
By streamlining documentation, organizations can reallocate resources toward innovation rather than administrative overhead.
Built for research-intensive environments, this agent orchestrates advanced workflows across life sciences data sets.
Capabilities include:
Workflow orchestration for genomics and multiomics data
Integration of cheminformatics pipelines
Faster hypothesis testing and drug discovery cycles
This approach enables pharmaceutical and biotech organizations to shorten discovery timelines through AI-driven automation.
This agent targets inefficiencies in data analytics and cloud spend.
Core features include:
Automated analysis of complex SQL queries
Optimization and refactoring for performance improvements
Reduced query execution time and infrastructure costs
By improving query efficiency, enterprises can optimize analytics workflows while controlling cloud expenses.
Designed for modern retail and media environments, this toolkit enables advanced cross-platform coordination.
Primary functions include:
Unified management of media and data across platforms
Enhanced targeting and performance measurement
Improved efficiency in retail media execution
This solution supports data-driven marketing and monetization strategies across retail ecosystems.
As video data volumes surge, this agent transforms unstructured content into usable intelligence.
Key capabilities include:
Processing and indexing large video libraries
Making video assets searchable and actionable
Unlocking new value from existing media content
This agent helps organizations extract insights from video at scale, supporting analytics, training, and content discovery.
This agent democratizes data access through natural language interaction.
Benefits include:
AI-powered data analysis without technical queries
Natural language questions and conversational insights
Faster decision-making across business teams
By lowering the barrier to data exploration, enterprises can enable broader, real-time access to insights.
A defining element of EPAM’s AI agents is their enterprise readiness.
EPAM ensured that its AI agents are:
Secure and compliant with enterprise requirements
Interoperable across varied IT environments
Designed for long-term scalability
The company has also collaborated closely with Google Cloud on key initiatives such as:
The Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol
The Agent Developer Kit (ADK)
These efforts ensure that EPAM’s AI agents can operate reliably across different enterprise systems and use cases.
Launching these agents on Google Cloud Marketplace simplifies how enterprises adopt AI.
Key advantages include:
Faster procurement and deployment
Centralized management within the Google Cloud ecosystem
Trusted global infrastructure for scaling AI initiatives
For enterprises navigating digital transformation, this approach reduces friction and accelerates time to value.
EPAM’s launch of enterprise-grade AI agents on Google Cloud Marketplace reflects a broader evolution in how AI is designed, deployed, and scaled across industries. Rather than experimental tools, these agents are built to solve real business problems—securely, compliantly, and at production scale.
By combining advanced engineering expertise with Google Cloud’s trusted infrastructure and Gemini Enterprise capabilities, EPAM is positioning itself as a key enabler of agent-based AI adoption. From financial services and life sciences to retail, media, and data analytics, the new AI agents offer enterprises a practical pathway to operationalizing AI while maximizing cloud investments.
As organizations move toward autonomous, AI-driven workflows, EPAM’s collaboration with Google Cloud signals how enterprise AI is transitioning from vision to execution.
Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.
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