artificial intelligence 19 Mar 2026
Ansira Partners, Inc. (“Ansira”), a leading platform for brand-to-local marketing ecosystems, hosted its sixth annual client summit, The Channel Effect, February 23–25, 2026. The event brought together senior marketing leaders from industries spanning automotive, finance, hospitality, healthcare, technology, and retail to explore the evolving landscape of partner and channel marketing.
“The Channel Effect continues to demonstrate the power of bringing our clients together,” said Paul Tibbitt, CEO of Ansira. “When marketing leaders from different industries share experiences, challenges, and successes, it sparks ideas that influence initiatives and innovation long after the event.”
Keynote speaker Omar Johnson, former CMO of Beats by Dre and former VP of Marketing at Apple, emphasized the enduring value of human intelligence in marketing. While AI can automate and optimize, Johnson noted that judgment, domain expertise, and cultural insight—built through experience—remain areas machines can’t fully replicate.
“Brands that understand context, behavior, language, and nuance have a unique opportunity to forge authentic consumer connections,” Johnson said.
Nikhil Lai, Principal Analyst at Forrester, addressed how AI is reshaping media strategy for brands and local partners. Ansira experts highlighted practical applications, demonstrating AI-driven enhancements in organic search, media buying, and strategic planning across brand-to-local programs.
The three-day summit also offered actionable guidance for navigating complex partner ecosystems. Sessions covered:
Driving revenue through platform-driven strategies
Creating regional and local marketing synergy
Empowering partners with eLearning and enablement content
Leveraging flexible technology platforms in brand-to-local ecosystems
Engaging long-tail partners effectively
Improving end-user engagement
Harnessing data and analytics across marketing actions
Applying AI to real-world campaigns
Attendees gained insights not just from thought leaders but also from peers representing top brands including American Family Insurance, Dell Technologies, Harley-Davidson, Hyundai, Microsoft, Moet Hennessy, Nissan, ServiceNow, Splunk, Tempur Sealy, and dozens more.
A recurring theme at The Channel Effect was the synergy between AI and human expertise. While AI enables faster decision-making and predictive analytics, human judgment ensures campaigns remain culturally relevant, nuanced, and aligned with strategic intent. This balance is particularly critical in brand-to-local ecosystems, where regional and partner-specific adaptations can make or break campaign success.
Ansira’s approach demonstrates how data-driven, AI-enhanced platforms can coexist with human insight to improve partner performance, engagement, and ROI. As brands continue to navigate increasingly complex ecosystems, events like The Channel Effect provide a blueprint for harmonizing technology, strategy, and creativity.
On-demand insights and content from the event are available on Ansira’s website for marketing professionals looking to implement these strategies.
Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.
artificial intelligence 19 Mar 2026
Marketing technology is stepping into a bold new phase. According to Rajesh Jain, Founder and MD of Netcore Cloud, the future isn’t just about automation—it’s about autonomous, agentic systems that continuously interpret customer behavior and make decisions to optimize revenue, retention, and lifetime value.
“For nearly two decades, martech has been paying a revenue tax for reacquiring the same customers,” Jain says. “At Netcore, our North Star is simple: Never lose customers. Never pay twice. Never pay fixed. Agentic marketing is built to deliver exactly that.”
Traditional martech systems largely focus on automation: scaling workflows, improving targeting, managing segmentation, running A/B tests, and orchestrating channels. Humans still defined the rules; the systems executed them at scale.
Agentic marketing flips this model. An agentic system evaluates context in real time, interprets behavioral signals, and makes autonomous decisions—all within guardrails set by the business. It closes the loop between insight and execution, optimizing outcomes without waiting for human intervention.
“The difference between AI-enabled and agentic is authority,” Jain notes. “Many systems today provide recommendations. An agentic system has the authority to act. It moves marketing from programmed execution to autonomous optimization.”
One of the biggest impacts of agentic systems is economic efficiency. Traditional digital marketing prioritized scale over precision, leaning heavily on paid acquisition while retention and loyalty were under-optimized.
Agentic Marketing introduces economic intelligence at each interaction, evaluating:
When and how to intervene
Which channel to use
What incentive to offer
How much budget to allocate
By making these decisions in real time, brands can reduce acquisition costs, increase lifetime value, and optimize discounting to protect margins. “When customer relationships compound over time, the value created is measurable in incremental revenue, higher contribution margins, and reduced reacquisition spend,” Jain says.
The shift is not merely technological—it’s organizational. Campaigns evolve from episodic initiatives to continuous decision systems aligned with business outcomes. Predictive AI alone isn’t enough if humans still interpret insights, coordinate teams, and deploy changes.
“Intelligence without authority to act does not create a compounding advantage,” Jain emphasizes. “Agentic Marketing integrates prediction and execution within a governed system. The same intelligence that detects opportunity can initiate action immediately.”
Autonomy operates within guardrails: CMOs define outcomes, strategic intent, risk tolerance, and brand constraints. Agents handle micro-decisions at scale—timing, sequencing, offer calibration, and channel selection—while humans remain accountable for strategy and compliance.
Campaign-centric marketing assumes bursts of engagement, but customer behavior is dynamic. Agentic systems monitor behavioral signals, purchase cycles, and engagement decay, allowing brands to intervene before churn occurs and reduce reliance on paid channels.
This shift also redefines the role of the CMO. The next-generation CMO will be a systems designer and AI orchestrator, accountable for profit, retention, contribution margins, and lifetime value—not clicks or campaign metrics. “The next-generation CMO is not just a marketer. They are a profit leader turning marketing from a cost center into a true growth engine,” Jain concludes.
As marketing technology moves from automation to autonomy, agentic systems promise real-time, data-driven decision-making, transforming how companies acquire, retain, and grow their customers—without paying twice.
Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.
advertising 19 Mar 2026
Follett Higher Education, the nation’s largest campus retail partner, is diving headfirst into fan-first eCommerce with the launch of College Nation, a digital storefront and collegiate sportswear hub built in partnership with Shopify Platinum agency P3 Media. Going live just in time for the NCAA Basketball Championship, the site debuts with official merchandise from fourteen powerhouse athletic programs, including Arizona, Alabama, LSU, Michigan, Syracuse, and Villanova.
But College Nation is more than just an online store—it’s designed as a destination for college sports enthusiasts. Fans, students, alumni, and families can now celebrate their teams, wear their colors, and connect with school traditions through officially licensed merchandise.
The rapid launch was a feat in itself: Follett and P3 Media took the project from concept to live site in under two months, one of the fastest Shopify Plus rollouts of this scale. P3 Media’s end-to-end eCommerce expertise handled everything from UX/UI and frontend/backend development to branding and marketing execution.
“Follett has always been at the forefront of connecting fans with their school spirit,” said Hejar Oncel, CIO at Follett. “With College Nation, our goal is to create a place where college sports enthusiasts can truly live their passion for their teams. P3 Media’s technical expertise was critical to creating a truly fanworthy eCommerce experience.”
AI-Powered Merchandising and Marketing
To meet its ambitious timeline, P3 Media leveraged advanced AI tools to generate over 1,000 launch-ready SKUs and digital assets for web, email, and paid media campaigns—tech that, according to co-founder David Wagoner, “didn’t even exist six months ago.” The combination of AI and tight collaboration between Follett and P3 Media allowed the site to launch at unprecedented speed.
“Most of the AI technologies and techniques we applied were cutting-edge,” Wagoner said. “But the project came together because of exceptional trust and collaboration between the Follett and P3 Media teams.”
Looking Ahead: A Platform Built for Growth
College Nation’s architecture is designed for future expansion, with the potential to bring additional brands, programs, and fan experiences online. For now, the focus is clear: deliver an engaging, seamless shopping experience that captures the energy, pride, and tradition of college athletics.
For the college sports eCommerce landscape, Follett’s move signals a shift toward hyper-focused, fan-centric digital experiences. By pairing Shopify Plus with AI-accelerated merchandising, the platform sets a new benchmark for how retailers can combine speed, scale, and personalization. Competitors in collegiate merchandise may need to play catch-up as fans increasingly expect both convenience and brand authenticity online.
Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.
marketing 18 Mar 2026
Online fashion has a chronic problem: shoppers don’t trust the fit.
Now CATCHES thinks it can fix that—with physics, not guesswork.
At NVIDIA GTC, the company unveiled “RealFit,” a generative AI-powered virtual try-on system that promises something most fashion tech has struggled to deliver: accurate sizing, realistic fabric behavior, and a true-to-life preview of how clothes will actually look on your body.
Unlike earlier virtual try-on tools that rely heavily on visual approximation, RealFit leans into simulation.
Built on NVIDIA’s CUDA and Omniverse platforms, the system combines generative AI with physics-based modeling to simulate how garments drape, stretch, and move. The result, CATCHES claims, is a “mirror-like” experience where shoppers can see how a piece fits—not just how it looks.
Here’s how it works:
Users upload a photo and input body measurements
The system generates a personalized digital twin
Shoppers can try on garments virtually and toggle between sizes
Fabric behavior is simulated based on real-world material properties
The first live deployment is already running on the AMIRI website, with more brand rollouts expected in the coming months.
Sizing uncertainty isn’t just a UX issue—it’s a revenue killer.
In some fashion categories, return rates exceed 50%, largely driven by poor fit. That creates a cascade of costs: reverse logistics, lost margins, and environmental impact.
RealFit is designed to tackle that head-on by giving shoppers confidence before they click “buy.” If it works as advertised, the upside is straightforward: higher conversion rates and fewer returns.
That’s a compelling pitch in a market where brands are under pressure to improve both profitability and sustainability.
Under the hood, RealFit is doing more than standard generative AI.
CATCHES spent two years building a GPU-accelerated simulation framework that models real fabrics—capturing weight, structure, and movement with high precision. The platform combines:
Physics engines for fabric simulation
Diffusion models for visual generation
Vision-language and large language models for interaction
NVIDIA’s accelerated computing stack for performance
The system runs on high-end infrastructure, including NVIDIA RTX and Blackwell GPUs, enabling millimeter-level fit accuracy and photoreal rendering.
In short: this isn’t just AI-generated imagery—it’s a hybrid of simulation and generation, which could mark a shift in how digital fashion experiences are built.
Most virtual try-on solutions today—from startups to features embedded in platforms like Shopify—focus on visual overlays or size recommendations.
CATCHES is taking a different route: anchoring AI to physical laws.
That approach aligns with a broader trend in AI development, where companies are moving beyond probabilistic outputs toward systems grounded in real-world constraints—especially in areas like robotics, simulation, and design.
If successful, it could push the entire category forward from approximation to accuracy.
CATCHES has already raised $10 million from a mix of tech and luxury industry investors, including figures tied to LVMH and former executives from brands like Tommy Hilfiger.
That backing signals growing interest from high-end fashion, where fit, craftsmanship, and customer experience are central to brand value.
Luxury brands, in particular, may see RealFit as a way to replicate the in-store experience online—without sacrificing personalization.
RealFit sits at the intersection of retail, AI, and customer experience—squarely in MarTech territory.
For marketers and e-commerce teams, the implications go beyond sizing:
Better conversion data: Understanding which sizes and styles resonate
Personalized journeys: Tailoring recommendations based on body profiles
Reduced churn: Fewer returns mean happier customers
New engagement channels: Virtual try-on as a discovery experience
It also hints at a future where digital twins become a standard part of online shopping—especially as AI-driven personalization evolves.
Virtual try-on has been around for years, but accuracy has always been the missing piece.
CATCHES’ RealFit is betting that combining generative AI with physics simulation can finally close that gap—turning a flashy feature into a functional tool.
If it delivers, it won’t just improve online shopping. It could fundamentally change how fashion is sold in the AI era.
Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.
marketing 18 Mar 2026
AI in marketing isn’t lacking tools—it’s lacking structure.
That’s the bet behind Candid Platform’s new “Live Marketing” environment, an end-to-end AI infrastructure designed to unify strategy, execution, and media operations under one system.
The pitch is ambitious: replace today’s fragmented stack of AI tools with a centralized platform where campaigns, research, and production happen faster—and with measurable business impact.
Most marketing teams today operate in what can only be described as AI sprawl.
They use tools like ChatGPT alongside dozens of niche solutions for content, analytics, media buying, and automation. The result is disconnected workflows, duplicated effort, and limited ROI visibility.
Candid’s Live Marketing platform aims to solve that by acting as a unified backbone—bringing multiple AI models, agents, and workflows into a single environment.
According to the company, the system is built to handle the entire marketing value chain, from strategy and research to execution and production.
Candid makes a bold prediction: AI will handle up to 90% of operational marketing tasks in the near term.
That aligns with broader industry signals—but also highlights a growing gap. While AI adoption is high, measurable results are not. Candid cites research showing that while most organizations use AI, only a small fraction see real financial impact.
The implication: adoption isn’t the problem—execution is.
Live Marketing is structured around three core components:
Gateway: Provides simultaneous access to multiple LLMs and proprietary AI tools
Cortex: An automation layer where AI agents orchestrate workflows across campaigns
Studio: A production engine for visuals, video, audio, and creative assets
Together, these modules aim to compress timelines dramatically—turning processes that once took months into days.
It’s a familiar promise in AI marketing, but Candid’s differentiation lies in integration: rather than adding another tool, it’s trying to replace the stack.
A key selling point is security and compliance.
Unlike standalone AI tools that may require data sharing with third parties, Candid emphasizes an ISO-certified, GDPR-compliant environment designed for enterprise use. That positions the platform for organizations that want to operationalize AI—not just experiment with it.
This is increasingly important as data governance becomes a barrier to AI adoption, particularly in regulated markets.
Candid isn’t just selling software—it’s bundling it with services.
With over 300 specialists across agencies like Brand Potential and STROOM, the company can offer Live Marketing as a managed service.
That hybrid model—platform plus expertise—mirrors strategies from larger players in consulting and advertising, where technology alone isn’t enough to drive transformation.
Candid’s move reflects a broader shift in MarTech.
Companies like Adobe, Salesforce, and HubSpot are all evolving their platforms into AI-powered ecosystems that unify data, workflows, and execution.
What sets Candid apart—at least in positioning—is its focus on infrastructure over applications. Instead of offering AI features within tools, it’s building a system where tools themselves become interchangeable components.
The timing is critical.
According to recent CMO data, AI has rapidly jumped to the top of the priority list, yet most teams still rely on disconnected tools. That mismatch is creating inefficiencies—and limiting ROI.
Platforms that can unify these capabilities while maintaining security and compliance could become the next layer of competitive advantage.
Marketing doesn’t need more AI tools—it needs systems that make them work together.
Candid’s Live Marketing platform is an attempt to build that system: a centralized, secure environment where AI moves from experimentation to execution.
If it delivers on its promise, it could help marketers finally close the gap between AI adoption and real business results.
Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.
artificial intelligence 18 Mar 2026
AI is coming for one of the most manual corners of enterprise operations: insurance underwriting.
Convr has introduced a generative AI assistant embedded directly into the underwriting workbench, aiming to streamline how insurers analyze risk, process submissions, and make decisions.
The pitch is straightforward: bring conversational AI—think ChatGPT—into the heart of underwriting workflows, but with domain-specific intelligence built for commercial insurance.
Traditional underwriting is document-heavy and time-consuming. Teams sift through submissions, cross-check external data, and manually piece together a risk profile before making decisions.
Convr’s approach turns that process into a conversation.
Underwriters can query a submission in natural language, ask for summaries, uncover hidden risks, and even trigger actions—all within the same interface. The AI assistant doesn’t just surface insights; it helps complete tasks like updating submissions or finalizing reviews.
That shift—from passive review to interactive analysis—could significantly reduce cycle times.
What differentiates Convr’s offering is its underlying architecture.
The assistant is powered by the Convr Context Engine, which combines a commercial insurance ontology, knowledge graph, and semantic layer. This allows the system to interpret industry-specific data and relationships more accurately than general-purpose AI models.
The result:
Context-aware risk analysis
More reliable summaries and recommendations
Reduced dependence on large external models
In a regulated industry where accuracy and explainability matter, that domain focus is critical.
The assistant goes beyond Q&A.
After analyzing both submission data and relevant external information, it generates key observations and can take next steps—creating tasks, updating data, or moving the submission toward completion.
This “action-oriented” AI mirrors a broader trend toward agentic systems that don’t just assist users but actively participate in workflows.
For underwriting teams, that could mean fewer handoffs, less manual input, and faster turnaround times.
Another notable feature: every interaction with the AI is recorded within the underwriting file.
That creates a transparent audit trail—something essential in insurance, where decisions must be documented and defensible.
It also allows teams to review and refine how the AI is used over time, improving both performance and compliance.
The insurance sector has historically lagged in digital transformation, but that’s changing.
Carriers are increasingly adopting AI for claims processing, fraud detection, and risk modeling. Vendors like Guidewire and Duck Creek Technologies are also embedding AI into core systems.
Convr’s focus on underwriting—arguably the most complex and judgment-driven function—signals where the next wave of innovation is headed.
Underwriting sits at the core of insurance profitability. Faster, more accurate decisions can directly impact loss ratios, customer experience, and operational efficiency.
By embedding AI directly into the workflow, Convr is targeting a key friction point: the time and effort required to move from submission to decision.
If successful, this could help insurers scale operations without proportionally increasing headcount—a major advantage in a competitive market.
AI in insurance is moving beyond automation into augmentation.
Convr’s generative AI assistant brings conversational, context-aware intelligence into underwriting—turning a traditionally manual process into a more dynamic, interactive system.
For insurers, the question isn’t whether to adopt AI—it’s how quickly they can integrate it into the decisions that matter most.
Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.
customer experience management 18 Mar 2026
Customer journeys no longer start on your website—and Contentsquare is redesigning analytics to keep up.
As AI assistants like ChatGPT become a primary entry point for discovery, the company has rolled out a major platform expansion to help brands track, analyze, and act on journeys that now span humans, LLMs, and AI agents.
The update introduces a unified system that connects signals from websites, mobile apps, AI assistants, and customer conversations—effectively creating a 360-degree view of what Contentsquare calls the “agentic” customer journey.
For years, digital analytics revolved around websites and apps. That model is breaking.
Today, users increasingly discover products through AI prompts, interact with brands inside chat interfaces, and only later (if at all) visit traditional digital properties.
That fragmentation creates a visibility gap. Brands can see what happens on their sites—but not what happens before or alongside those interactions.
Contentsquare’s latest release aims to close that gap by bringing AI-driven touchpoints into the analytics fold.
At the center of the update is Sense Analyst, the company’s configurable AI agent.
Unlike traditional dashboards that surface metrics, Sense Analyst is designed to interpret them—proactively identifying issues, surfacing opportunities, and prioritizing actions based on business impact.
Key capabilities include:
Personalized insights aligned to KPIs and industry context
A customizable “Newsroom” where AI agents continuously analyze experience data
Automated insight delivery via email to reduce dashboard fatigue
This reflects a broader shift across analytics: from reporting what happened to recommending what to do next.
One of the more notable additions is visibility into interactions happening inside ChatGPT apps.
Brands building experiences within LLM ecosystems can now track:
How users discover them via prompts
Engagement within AI-driven interfaces
Movement between AI assistants and websites
That opens the door to entirely new questions:
Which prompts drive conversions? Are AI-native experiences worth investing in? Do users return via these channels?
For early adopters like Accor, this kind of visibility is critical as they experiment with AI-first customer experiences.
It’s not just about discovery—AI is also reshaping how traffic reaches websites.
Contentsquare now provides analytics for LLM- and agent-driven traffic, helping teams distinguish between human and AI interactions and understand how each behaves.
That includes insights into:
Traffic originating from AI chatbots
Navigation patterns of AI-referred visitors
Conversion performance of these new segments
As AI agents increasingly act on behalf of users, this level of visibility could become essential for optimizing content and conversion strategies.
The platform is also doubling down on conversation intelligence, integrating insights from support tickets, chats, reviews, and social media.
Powered in part by its Loris acquisition, this layer connects what customers say with what they do—and what it means for revenue.
That unified view helps teams:
Identify friction points and sentiment trends
Track movement between conversations and digital interactions
Prioritize fixes based on business impact
In a landscape where journeys often begin with a question or complaint, this connection between voice and behavior is increasingly valuable.
In a nod to how teams actually work today, Contentsquare is pushing insights beyond its own platform.
The company is integrating with tools like Microsoft Copilot and other AI assistants using the Model Context Protocol (MCP), allowing users to query experience data directly within their workflows.
Instead of opening dashboards, teams can ask questions like “Where is friction highest this week?” and get immediate answers.
It’s a small UX shift—but one that reflects a larger trend toward ambient, embedded analytics.
Contentsquare’s move comes as competitors like Adobe, Salesforce, and Google race to unify customer data across channels.
What’s new here is the explicit focus on AI-native touchpoints—something most legacy analytics platforms weren’t built to handle.
As LLMs become intermediaries between brands and customers, understanding those interactions may become as important as tracking website clicks.
The shift to AI-mediated journeys isn’t theoretical—it’s already happening.
Brands that fail to measure these interactions risk losing visibility into the earliest—and often most influential—stages of the customer journey.
Contentsquare is betting that the next generation of analytics won’t just track users—it will track conversations, agents, and intent across an increasingly complex ecosystem.
Digital analytics is being redefined in real time.
By bringing AI assistants, conversations, and behavioral data into a single system, Contentsquare is positioning itself for a future where customer journeys are no longer linear—or even fully human.
For marketers and product teams, the message is clear: if you can’t see AI-driven interactions, you can’t optimize them.
Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.
artificial intelligence 18 Mar 2026
AI isn’t just reshaping applications—it’s rewriting how software gets built and shipped.
Opsera has launched its Unified Insights solution on the Microsoft Marketplace, positioning itself at the center of a growing shift toward AI-driven software development lifecycles (AI-SDLC).
The move makes Opsera’s Agentic DevOps platform directly accessible to enterprises running on Microsoft Azure, with deep integrations across tools like GitHub and Microsoft Teams.
Traditional DevOps focused on automation—CI/CD pipelines, faster releases, and tighter feedback loops.
Opsera is betting the next evolution is “agentic.”
Its platform uses AI agents—powered by its Hummingbird AI engine—to orchestrate and optimize software delivery across increasingly complex, hybrid environments. The idea is to move beyond dashboards and alerts toward systems that actively diagnose issues, recommend fixes, and automate decisions across the SDLC.
That’s a notable shift: from observing performance to actively improving it.
One of the persistent challenges in enterprise AI adoption is proving ROI. Opsera’s pitch is that Unified Insights closes that gap.
The platform translates engineering metrics into business-level outcomes, helping teams identify bottlenecks, reduce delivery friction, and quantify the impact of AI investments.
According to the company, customers in the Fortune 1000 using Azure have already seen:
85% reduction in time to pull request
65% increase in deployment frequency
Improved 24/7 operational resilience
While vendor-reported metrics always warrant scrutiny, the direction aligns with broader industry expectations: AI should not just accelerate development—it should make it more predictable and measurable.
The Marketplace launch is as much about distribution as it is about technology.
By embedding directly into the Microsoft ecosystem, Opsera gains access to enterprises already standardized on Azure and related tools. That includes tight integration with GitHub workflows, collaboration via Teams, and hybrid cloud environments.
For Microsoft, it’s another step in expanding Marketplace as a hub for enterprise AI solutions—an increasingly strategic battleground as cloud providers compete to own the AI application layer.
The concept of an AI-driven SDLC is gaining traction across the industry.
Vendors like GitHub (with Copilot), Atlassian, and GitLab are all embedding AI deeper into development workflows—from code generation to testing and deployment.
Opsera’s differentiation lies in orchestration and governance—connecting fragmented toolchains and ensuring AI-driven workflows remain compliant, secure, and auditable.
That’s particularly important as enterprises move from isolated AI tools to fully integrated, AI-native delivery pipelines.
Enterprises are under pressure to modernize software delivery while managing growing complexity—multi-cloud environments, security requirements, and now AI integration.
The result is a fragmented SDLC that’s harder to manage than ever.
Platforms that can unify these workflows—and add intelligence on top—are becoming essential infrastructure rather than optional tooling.
By positioning itself within Microsoft Marketplace, Opsera is aligning with where enterprise buyers are already looking for solutions.
DevOps isn’t going away—but it is evolving.
Opsera’s Unified Insights signals a shift toward AI-managed software delivery, where agents don’t just automate tasks but actively optimize outcomes.
For enterprises investing heavily in AI, the next challenge isn’t building smarter applications—it’s building them faster, safer, and with clear business impact.
Get in touch with our MarTech Experts.
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