The RepTrak Company—best known for turning corporate reputation into measurable, actionable data—has tapped two heavy hitters for its Board of Directors: Thierry D’Hers and Catherine Hernandez-Blades. The appointments are designed to fast-track product innovation, deepen AI capabilities, and sharpen governance expertise as the company scales its reputation intelligence platform.

A Data Visionary Joins the Fold

Thierry D’Hers brings serious product and engineering chops, with a career spanning more than two decades at the intersection of analytics and innovation. He played a key role in building Tableau’s data visualization capabilities—work that influenced Microsoft’s PowerBI ascent—before leading product and engineering at Vivun.

Now advising tech companies from AI startups to mission-driven nonprofits, D’Hers sees RepTrak as sitting “at the intersection of technology, data, and trust.” He joins the board as the company leans into AI-driven stakeholder perception tools.

A Global Reputation Leader with Governance Cred

Catherine Hernandez-Blades’ resume reads like a masterclass in corporate communications and governance. The Emmy and Cannes Lions award-winner has helmed marketing and communications at SAIC, Aflac, and Flex, and now serves on the board of CoreCivic. She’s also earned spots on the Forbes Top 50 Global CMOs list and at Davos for her international reputation work.

Hernandez-Blades isn’t just an admirer—she’s been a RepTrak customer for more than a decade. “It quantifies teams’ business impact and plays a critical role in C-suite decision-making,” she said, calling out the strategic importance of the company’s upcoming product releases.

Why This Matters for RepTrak

Both hires arrive as RepTrak pushes forward with Compass™, its new AI-powered platform aimed at giving brands a sharper, more predictive understanding of how they’re perceived by customers, employees, investors, and policymakers.

Mark Sonders, RepTrak’s CEO, says the blend of D’Hers’ product/AI expertise and Hernandez-Blades’ governance and ESG insight “positions us to serve our clients with more accurate information, deeper trust, and greater value than ever before.”

With AI and product innovation accelerating across martech and analytics, RepTrak’s board moves are as much about market positioning as they are about leadership—signaling that the company intends to compete not just on data, but on the intelligence and trust behind it.

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Podium is putting its AI-powered sales assistant—affectionately nicknamed “Jerry”—in the driver’s seat for Ford and Lincoln dealerships nationwide. The customer engagement company announced its AI BDC (Business Development Center) solution is now officially part of the FordDirect program, giving dealers exclusive pricing and direct integration into FordDirect’s Customer Journey Platform (CJP).

The move comes as dealerships face a trifecta of challenges: staffing shortages, tighter competition, and increasingly impatient consumers who expect instant responses. “This partnership is about delivering an end-to-end communication platform that drives measurable results,” said Eric Rea, Podium’s co-founder and CEO.

Why Dealers Should Care

Podium’s AI BDC is designed to handle every inbound lead instantly—with a human-like tone, in the dealership’s own voice—while drawing on more than a decade of automotive data to tailor responses. The system is built to schedule more appointments, lock in higher show rates, and free up staff for in-person sales.

Proven results from over 1,800 dealerships using Podium AI include:

• 80% increase in after-hours appointments

• 10% boost in appointment show rates

• 70% reduction in lead response times

• 30% improvement in lead-to-sale conversions

The FordDirect Advantage

With the integration, Podium’s AI BDC plugs directly into the FordDirect CJP, ensuring leads from multiple digital channels get an immediate, consistent response. For dealers, that means no more missed opportunities because a salesperson was tied up on the floor.

“FordDirect is proud to expand our partnership with Podium,” said Dean Stoneley, CEO of FordDirect. “This gives our dealers the ability to execute superior customer engagement, improving both customer and dealer satisfaction.”

Bigger Picture: AI in the Showroom

The automotive retail sector is no stranger to AI, but most implementations focus on inventory management or marketing analytics. Podium’s approach—embedding AI in the customer communication workflow—underscores a shift toward real-time, personalized engagement as a competitive differentiator.

For Ford and Lincoln dealers, this could mean more than just better efficiency; it’s about turning speed into sales. And in an industry where the first responder often wins the deal, “Jerry” might just become the most valuable employee in the showroom.

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Global IT giant FPT is doubling down on its AI-first ambitions with the launch of FleziPT, a new artificial intelligence platform designed to deliver end-to-end, industry-tailored AI transformation at speed and scale.

The platform, unveiled at FPT’s 2025 global client event in Danang, puts AI agents into every phase of the software development life cycle (SDLC)—turning what once took months into days. The result:

• 60% faster development cycles

• 50% less rework

• 30% higher productivity

AI-Driven SDLC: From Months to Days

FleziPT’s key differentiator is its ability to embed AI throughout the development process—whether in waterfall, agile, or hybrid models—allowing teams to run concurrent workflows, accelerate iteration, and increase precision. The AI-augmented workforce includes 12,000 AI-skilled engineers and a pipeline of one million digital workers in the making worldwide.

Proprietary toolsets like AgentVista, CodeVista, and TestVista handle code generation, testing, and optimization, while vertical-specific solutions like AIDP and IvyChat have already scored industry awards in 2024 and 2025.

Built for Every Industry—With an AI Talent Pipeline to Match

FPT is targeting high-value industries including manufacturing, healthcare, finance, automotive, and energy. The company is backing the platform with a multi-tier AI talent strategy:

• 2,000 AI/Data Engineering graduates per year from FPT University

• 1,500+ new AI experts trained by end of 2025

• 50,000 AI specialists targeted by 2030

The platform’s development is reinforced by strategic alliances with global AI leaders such as Microsoft, SAP, Landing AI, Mila, and NVIDIA—including the joint FPT AI Factory initiative.

A Co-Creation Approach

FPT is positioning FleziPT as more than a service—it’s an AI co-creation ecosystem. Clients can access AI labs, hackathons, and verticalized proof-of-concept builds, with solutions tuned for speed, scalability, and ethical compliance.

“We are not stopping at providing AI services,” said Pham Minh Tuan, CEO of FPT Software and EVP of FPT Corporation. “We deliver scalable, trusted, enterprise-grade AI solutions while upholding ethical and responsible AI practices.”

Context: Vietnam’s Rising AI Profile

The launch—timed with FPT’s 20-year milestone in Danang—highlights Vietnam’s growing role as a global innovation hub. The event drew over 400 industry leaders for AI exhibitions, panels, and live demos, underscoring the country’s move from offshore outsourcing to AI product leadership.

With FleziPT, FPT isn’t just chasing efficiency—it’s aiming to reshape the economics of software development and cement its role as a full-stack AI global systems integrator.

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Global IT and digital services heavyweight NTT DATA has inked a global partnership with Google Cloud aimed at accelerating AI-powered cloud innovation for enterprise customers worldwide. The move blends NTT DATA’s deep industry playbook with Google Cloud’s AI and analytics muscle, promising tailored solutions across industries from banking and healthcare to manufacturing and public sector.

This isn’t just a cloud hookup—it’s a bet on agentic AI and industry-specific modernization at scale. According to Gartner, public cloud spending will hit $723 billion by 2025—up from $595.7 billion in 2024—and AI adoption is one of the key drivers.

From Financial Compliance to AI Concierges

The partnership will build verticalized AI solutions that address sector-specific challenges. Examples include:

• Financial Services: NTT DATA’s Regla platform leveraging Google Cloud AI for compliance and reporting.

• Hospitality: A multilingual, 24/7 Virtual Travel Concierge using Google’s Gemini models to handle 3 million+ monthly conversations with real-time itinerary planning.

Under the hood, these offerings draw on Google Agentspace, Gemini AI models, and secure data clean rooms—wrapped in NTT DATA’s advisory, build, and managed services expertise.

Modernization With Sovereignty in Mind

Beyond industry use cases, the collaboration puts heavy emphasis on secure, sovereign cloud deployments using Google Distributed Cloud. Clients can choose air-gapped environments for maximum isolation or connected setups for compliant integration—critical for highly regulated sectors like finance, government, and healthcare.

NTT DATA is also rolling out a Google Distributed Cloud sandbox, giving developers a “digital playground” for rapid prototyping with pre-built templates, plus hands-on training for AI and cloud deployments.

Scaling Talent and Delivery Globally

To make it work at enterprise scale, NTT DATA is forming a global Google Cloud Business Group with thousands of engineers, architects, and consultants. The company plans to certify 5,000 engineers on Google Cloud tech, reinforcing its global delivery capacity.

This isn’t their first rodeo together—NTT DATA and Google Cloud already had a 2024 APAC co-innovation agreement. The partnership now expands globally, bolstered by NTT DATA’s acquisition of Niveus Solutions, a Google Cloud specialist that just won three 2025 Google Cloud Partner Awards.

Competitive Implications

The deal positions NTT DATA alongside other global integrators like Accenture, TCS, and Infosys racing to fuse AI frameworks with cloud modernization. NTT DATA’s Takumi GenAI framework—now integrated with Google Cloud’s AI stack—gives it a fast-track advantage in turning proofs-of-concept into production systems.

For enterprise IT leaders, the message is clear: modernize faster, personalize deeper, and keep it compliant—all while Google’s AI agents quietly crunch the heavy lifting.

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BELLEVUE, Wash. and COPENHAGEN, Denmark — Siteimprove today announced Siteimprove.ai, its new agentic content intelligence platform designed to help organizations create, manage, and optimize content for both human audiences and AI-powered search engines.

In an era where generative AI search is rewriting the rules of discoverability, Siteimprove says it can uniquely blend content performance with accessibility compliance, delivering measurable ROI while keeping brands compliant with regulations like EAA and ADA.

IDC analyst James McCormick calls this shift a necessary adaptation:

“Generative search is disrupting the digital landscape… Companies like Siteimprove are well positioned to lead this next evolution with a focus on content intelligence that brings the power of both content that performs and that is compliant.”

Agentic Content Intelligence in Action

Siteimprove.ai uses a modular AI Agent architecture to help marketing, accessibility, and content teams work in sync:

• Accessibility Agents: Proactively detect and fix compliance risks across websites, mobile apps, social channels, and documents.

• Analytics Agents: Provide conversational insights into traffic, engagement, and ROI, predicting performance trends.

• Search Agents: Optimize content for discoverability by both traditional search engines and AI-driven discovery platforms.

• Content Agents: Generate data-driven briefs, outlines, and high-quality drafts for faster content production.

• Orchestration Agents: Integrate with CMS, DXP, CMP, and other martech tools to embed Siteimprove.ai directly into existing workflows.

The platform runs on Amazon Bedrock with Amazon Nova Models, leveraging AgentCore for secure, large-scale AI agent deployment.

AWS’s Carol Potts says Siteimprove’s approach “helps customers improve content quality, accessibility compliance, and SEO/AIO at scale” while maintaining security and performance standards.

End-to-End Lifecycle, Accessibility-First

The launch addresses a major gap in fragmented enterprise content workflows. Siteimprove’s “Shift Left” approach builds accessibility into content from the earliest stages, enabling compliance without slowing down delivery.

It also integrates with a robust partner ecosystem, including Drupal, WordPress, Adobe, Optimizely, and WordPressVIP, ensuring that AI-driven content optimization happens where teams already work.

“In the AI era, enterprises are under tremendous pressure to meet rising compliance standards while ensuring their content performs — not just for people, but for AI,” said Nayaki Nayyar, CEO of Siteimprove. “Siteimprove.ai is the only platform delivering both on a unified agentic content intelligence framework.”

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Evertune, a leader in Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and AI-powered marketing, has closed a $15 million Series A funding round led by Felicis Ventures, joined by strategic AI and marketing investors from OpenAI, Uber, Meta, and Antenna, as well as returning backers Eniac Ventures, NextView Ventures, and Roger Ehrenberg.

The funding comes as AI-driven discovery reshapes the marketing landscape. With ChatGPT processing 2.5 billion prompts daily and 80% of consumers using AI summaries for nearly half of their searches (Bain & Company), Evertune positions itself as the go-to platform for measuring and optimizing brand visibility in AI-generated search results and recommendations.

“Marketing leaders can’t ignore AI’s transformative impact on consumer discovery,” said Brian Stempeck, CEO of Evertune. “Our platform delivers strategic insights and measurable results to ensure brands remain visible and relevant in AI-driven environments.”

Data-Driven AI Visibility

Evertune’s platform conducts 100,000+ AI model queries per brand, using direct API-level integrations with providers like OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Meta, Perplexity, and DeepSeek. This enables consistent, statistically valid measurement of brand presence across multiple AI ecosystems.

Unlike consumer-facing analytics tools, Evertune focuses on enterprise-grade baseline AI model behavior to guide precise optimization strategies.

Building the AI Marketing Suite of the Future

While its core GEO analytics help brands improve placement in AI-generated responses, Evertune is also building out a full AI marketing suite targeting:

• AI-based advertising inside conversational models.

• AI commerce readiness, including transaction-enabled agents.

• Agent economy navigation tools for emerging digital assistants.

This expansion will address all AI-driven consumer touchpoints, from search to purchase.

Market Adoption and Client Impact

Trusted by Canada Goose, Miro, and WPP’s Choreograph, Evertune has seen strong adoption in B2B SaaS, private equity portfolios, automotive, and healthcare—markets where purchase decisions involve high consideration and brand trust.

“When we looked at the new breed of players tackling AI-driven discovery, Evertune stood out in strategy, tech, and credibility,” said Evan Hanlon, Global CEO of Choreograph.

Peter Deng, General Partner at Felicis and former VP of Product at OpenAI, highlighted the company’s measurement-first approach:

“If you’re not measuring correctly, your actions won’t be effective. Evertune nails both accuracy and execution.”

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Intelligent Relations—the AI PRTech company behind the AI-powered PR assistant Preston—has gone mobile. The company today announced the global launch of its first iOS and Android app, giving PR pros, founders, and comms teams the ability to manage campaigns, pitch journalists, and track results on the go.

This move tackles one of PR’s biggest modern challenges: the 24/7 news cycle. When media moments break, speed is everything—and Preston’s mobile app aims to be the always-on PR sidekick that fits in your palm.

“We’re putting the full power of our AI PR platform into users’ hands—literally—so they can pitch, respond, and track performance wherever they are,” said Stamatis N. Astra, co-founder of Intelligent Relations.

PR Without the Desk

The app delivers real-time alerts, AI-generated press materials, smart journalist recommendations, and campaign analytics—all tuned for a mobile-first experience. Users can:

• Monitor the media landscape live.

• Generate and send personalized outreach instantly.

• Receive AI suggestions on who to contact and how.

It’s a rethinking of PR software from the ground up, said lead developer Zeshan Javed, who rebuilt Preston’s AI engine and overhauled the UX to make complex PR workflows feel intuitive on a smartphone.

A Challenge to Legacy PR Platforms

While traditional PR platforms often feel desktop-bound, clunky, and slow to adapt, Intelligent Relations is betting on speed + mobility as the new differentiator. Preston’s mobile-first approach offers a nimble alternative to legacy media databases and manual processes that can’t keep pace with today’s media velocity.

The app’s launch also marks a step forward in AI-assisted communications—a trend reshaping not only marketing but also corporate reputation management. As PR teams juggle shrinking news cycles, influencer channels, and AI-generated content, the ability to react instantly from anywhere could become the competitive edge.

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Omnisend survey finds Americans are rethinking spending as 66% have seen price hikes post tariffs

CHARLESTON, S.C., Aug. 11, 2025 -- An Omnisend survey of 1,200 Americans finds U.S. adults now spend an extra $12.2 billion* each month – averaging $47 more per person following new tariffs on Chinese goods put in place by Donald Trump. One in seven report monthly increases of $100 or more.

Two-thirds (66%) say they've noticed higher prices following the tariffs announcement. Shoppers most commonly point to Amazon (39%), Temu (30%), and Walmart (27%) as places where they noticed a pricing shift.

As for tariff sentiment, 49% of Americans say they oppose tariffs, 28% support and 23% don't have an opinion. This compared to only 42% who opposed tariffs on Chinese goods in a similar survey conducted in February 2025. There has also been a slight increase of Americans (43%) who are willing to pay more for goods from the U.S. compared to 40% in February.

"You won't see a 'tariff' line at checkout – you feel it in the grocery total, the back-to-school cart, and the small online orders that now cost a bit more to bring to your door. For most families, it just means less breathing room at the end of the month," says Marty Bauer, ecommerce expert at Omnisend.

"The impact comes in waves as new shipments arrive, which is why many people felt it first on the big marketplaces and will likely feel it later on at local stores. Even things made here, in the U.S., can increase in cost when imported parts or packaging get pricier."

Shoppers are changing where and how they buy

With budgets squeezed, consumers are cutting unnecessary spending and have started looking for alternatives. Two-thirds (68%) have reduced or moved away from Chinese marketplaces like Temu and Shein as the end of the de minimis rule for Chinese goods removed much of their price advantage. Price increase is the #1 trigger to switch with 34% of Americans citing it as the main reason for no longer shopping on Chinese marketplaces.

"De minimis once let small packages under $800 enter the U.S. duty-free, and platforms like Temu and Shein built their low-price models around it. When that break ended for China, their biggest advantage vanished overnight. Temu paused U.S. ad campaigns for a few months and blocked shoppers from seeing China-shipped items. With fewer listings and higher prices, shoppers started looking elsewhere," says Bauer.

Shoppers are also looking for workarounds – 23% have already purchased or are actively looking to buy from Canada or Mexico to dodge price shocks, and another 26% say they'll do so if prices keep rising.

"Tariffs have people looking for cheaper options, and right now, buying from Canada or Mexico online still avoids extra fees thanks to the $800 de minimis rule. If you bring something back yourself, there's a separate duty-free allowance for travelers. However, that is not for long, as on August 29, the de minimis rule will expire for the rest of the world," continued Bauer.

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