Senior marketing leaders overwhelmingly believe that marketing drives growth—but when it comes to explaining how marketing is measured and defending budget decisions in the boardroom, confidence falters. That’s the key takeaway from Haus’ inaugural Decision Confidence Index, which surveyed senior marketing and finance executives on their ability to measure, defend, and optimize marketing investments.

According to the report, only 49% of leaders can clearly articulate their measurement approach to the board. While dashboards, AI tools, and data analytics are abundant, many organizations lack the clarity required for high-stakes decisions, leaving financial accountability unclear and long-term growth strategies vulnerable.

“Massive marketing budgets are being allocated based on methods that leaders themselves don’t fully trust,” said Zach Epstein, CEO of Haus. “That uncertainty drives wasted spend and cautious, short-term decisions that can limit long-term growth.”

Confidence Drops as Stakes Rise

While 90% of respondents believe marketing drives growth, 35% admit that over 20% of their budget is inefficiently allocated. Confidence erodes further in scenarios with real financial implications:

• Only 49% say they measure what truly drives growth and business outcomes

• 51% admit they focus on metrics expected by leadership or easily accessible, rather than strategic impact

• More than 20% lack confidence evaluating ROI for large-scale brand initiatives

Underlying these gaps are inconsistent measurement systems: 34% cite reliability concerns, while 33% report conflicting data sources, making it difficult to act decisively on insights.

Measurement Gaps Shape Strategic Decisions

Uncertainty in measurement affects which marketing initiatives are pursued. Nearly three in four (74%) report abandoning or scaling back campaigns due to unclear impact, while 69% feel pressure to deprioritize brand-building initiatives in favor of immediate performance metrics.

“The risk is a structural shift toward short-termism,” Epstein explains. “Organizations end up favoring easier-to-measure returns over initiatives that drive long-term brand value and innovation.”

AI Accelerates Execution—but Not Accountability

AI adoption is widespread, and most leaders express confidence in leveraging AI tools. Yet when it comes to financial accountability, confidence drops sharply:

• Only 51% feel confident explaining AI-driven ROI to the board

• 71% believe AI tools prioritize short-term performance over long-term growth

• 63% report pressure to deliver more with fewer resources due to AI

AI is changing how marketing operates, but execution is outpacing clarity. “AI systems learn from observed data, which biases them toward short-term metrics,” Epstein notes. “Without linking investment to actual financial outcomes, organizations risk scaling the wrong objectives.”

Implications for Growth

For brands managing multimillion-dollar budgets under increasing scrutiny, these findings are a wake-up call: confidence in marketing measurement is not the same as clarity or accountability. Organizations that fail to connect performance to financial outcomes risk undermining strategic growth, misallocating capital, and missing opportunities to innovate.

Effective measurement is no longer just about tracking activity—it’s about creating systems that allow leaders to defend decisions, allocate resources confidently, and invest in initiatives that drive durable growth.

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Arctiq, a leading provider of IT solutions and managed services, has acquired Shadow-Soft, an Atlanta-based technology firm known for its expertise in observability, automation, and modern platform operations. The deal strengthens Arctiq’s engineering capabilities across North America, particularly for organizations adopting AI-driven applications and complex digital environments.

Shadow-Soft brings deep technical experience with Dynatrace, Red Hat, Kubernetes, containers, and cloud-native platforms. The company has built a reputation for engineering-led delivery, helping clients implement automation, DevOps practices, and platforms that enhance operational efficiency and reliability. Shadow-Soft’s team will join Arctiq’s broader engineering and services organization, continuing to serve existing customers while extending expertise across a global client base.

“Shadow-Soft adds exceptional technical depth to our team and strengthens our delivery capabilities globally,” said Paul Kerr, CEO of Arctiq. “As organizations adopt AI-driven applications and operate more complex digital environments, visibility and automation across infrastructure, applications, and security become essential. The expertise this team brings in observability and platform operations will help our customers run more resilient, intelligent environments at scale.”

Engineering Expertise Meets Global Scale

James Chinn, Founder & CEO of Shadow-Soft, noted that modern platforms generate enormous operational data, but many organizations struggle to translate it into actionable insights. “That is the challenge Shadow-Soft has been focused on solving through observability, automation, and deep platform engineering expertise around Kubernetes, containers, and cloud-native architectures,” Chinn said.

He added that joining Arctiq gives Shadow-Soft the opportunity to deliver its engineering capabilities to a larger customer base while providing clients access to a global services platform, expanded infrastructure and security capabilities, and innovation in AI-driven operations.

The acquisition reflects a broader trend in IT services: as enterprises increasingly rely on AI and cloud-native architectures, providers that can combine observability, automation, and platform engineering are positioned to help clients run more intelligent, resilient, and scalable environments.

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Corelight, a leading network detection and response (NDR) provider, is rolling out category-first agentic AI capabilities designed to dramatically improve security operations center (SOC) efficiency. The launch includes Agentic Triage, a new suite of machine learning models to detect encrypted threats, and integrations across AI-enabled security ecosystems that allow immediate containment of compromised accounts.

“By pairing Corelight’s high-fidelity network telemetry with an expert-governed AI agent, security teams receive evidence they can trust, verify, and act on,” said Vijit Nair, Corelight VP of Product. “Corelight uniquely transforms overwhelming alert queues into verified, defensible investigations, drastically reducing time-to-triage and equipping analysts with definitive answers.”

Accelerating SOC Workflow with Agentic Intelligence

Modern SOCs face relentless pressure as adversaries leverage generative AI to automate attacks, while most triage processes remain manual and repetitive. Corelight’s Agentic Triage automates investigation of the highest-risk entities, consolidating signals into entity-centric investigations and providing single, evidence-backed triage verdicts.

Unlike black-box AI solutions, Corelight exposes every playbook step, query, and piece of evidence used to reach a conclusion. This transparency is critical for enterprises requiring AI to be accountable, reviewable, and defensible during audits and incident response.

“Only Corelight delivers true agentic AI triage in NDR, applying expert playbooks to industry-leading network evidence with AI reasoning,” Nair added.

Connecting and Empowering the AI-Enabled Ecosystem

Once alerts are triaged, SOCs need to act quickly. Corelight now ingests real-time identity data to correlate “who” is involved with “what” is happening on the network. Integrations with Microsoft Azure AD/Entra and CrowdStrike allow one-click actions such as universal logouts or password resets without switching tools. Analysts can also quarantine endpoints or trigger firewall blocks directly from the Corelight platform.

Additionally, Corelight’s new integration with CrowdStrike Charlotte AI enables cross-agent collaboration. Charlotte AI can automatically pull Corelight ground-truth data, validating host behavior against network reality, accelerating evidence-backed response.

“The question for CISOs isn’t whether to adopt AI, but how quickly and comprehensively,” said Andrew Braunberg, principal analyst at Omdia. “Explainability isn’t optional—it’s a requirement, particularly in regulated environments.”

Detecting Multi-Stage Intrusions with Advanced ML

Corelight is also expanding its machine learning and behavioral detections to uncover evasive post-exploitation tactics without decryption. New models detect anomalies in tunneling and VPN usage, credential theft attempts, and unauthorized lateral movement.

By analyzing behavioral metadata and traffic patterns, Corelight can expose covert C2 channels, lateral movement, and brute-force attacks across Kerberos, RDP, SMB, and SSH. This empowers SOCs with high-fidelity visibility even in encrypted or otherwise opaque environments.

With these updates, Corelight positions itself at the forefront of agentic AI in NDR, combining automation, explainability, and advanced detection to help security teams respond faster and more confidently to evolving threats.

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Consensus, the leading platform for automated product demos, has partnered with Opine, an AI-powered technical deal orchestration platform, to modernize the enterprise technical buying journey. The collaboration integrates Consensus’s demo automation with Opine’s orchestration tools, creating a continuous, buyer-led workflow from product discovery to proof-of-concept and beyond.

Enterprise buying often stalls in the so-called “messy middle,” where disconnected demos, evaluations, and stakeholder coordination slow down deals. By feeding buyer intent data from Consensus demos directly into Opine’s platform, revenue teams gain immediate visibility into stakeholder interests, feature priorities, and buyer intent, enabling precise technical evaluations from day one.

“Today's buyers want to experience the product immediately,” said Adam Freeman, Global Partnerships & Strategic Alliances at Consensus. “By partnering with Opine, we’re ensuring momentum from automated demos translates into a highly tailored sales engineering process that accelerates deals and builds trust with buyers.”

Key Benefits for Joint Customers

• A Warm Start for Every Opportunity: Sales engineers no longer start from scratch. Consensus captures feature interests and buyer pain points that automatically flow into Opine, enabling tailored engagement from the first interaction.

• Reduced Time-to-Value: Automating early product education through Consensus and coordinating complex technical validation with Opine shortens sales cycles and delivers value faster.

• Total Deal Visibility: Revenue leaders can track a continuous thread of buyer intelligence from the first demo click to final technical sign-off, identifying where deals accelerate or stall.

The partnership also integrates Consensus’s Demolytics analytics with Opine’s AI-powered deal signals and sentiment analysis, giving teams a unified view of stakeholder engagement and deal health throughout the technical evaluation process.

“Enterprise deals are won or lost in the technical evaluation phase,” said Akash Ganapathi, CEO of Opine. “Our partnership with Consensus connects product education directly to the technical sales workflow, enabling revenue teams to act faster and more precisely, while providing buyers a smoother, more informed experience.”

By uniting product experience, buyer intelligence, and technical sales orchestration into a single workflow, the Consensus–Opine integration transforms fragmented processes into an insight-driven system—scaling expertise, accelerating deals, and building lasting buyer trust.

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Neoclouds, MSPs, sovereign AI providers, and IT service companies are under mounting pressure to deploy AI-ready environments quickly, onboard tenants on demand, and maintain strict uptime and isolation—all without months of custom integration. Spectro Cloud and Netris are tackling that challenge head-on with a new integrated solution combining PaletteAI and Netris NAAM (Network Automation, Abstraction, and Multi-Tenancy).

The joint platform lets teams provision tenant-ready AI environments with coordinated changes across cluster, workload, and network layers in a single, automated workflow. The result: faster time-to-revenue, instant safe onboarding, lower operational risk, and a future-ready architecture for NVIDIA GPU ecosystems.

From Months to Days: Key Benefits

• Faster Time-to-Revenue: Pre-validated full-stack deployments—from bare metal to billable tenant—replace months of manual assembly.

• Instant, Safe Tenant Onboarding: Hard isolation enforced at the network layer with automated tenant provisioning, no cross-team tickets required.

• Lower Operational Risk: API-driven orchestration ties network changes directly to cluster lifecycle, reducing outages and strengthening SLAs.

• Multi-Fabric Consistency: Unified control plane across Ethernet, DPUs, InfiniBand, and NVLink fabrics.

• Secure Multi-Tenancy: Netris DPU agents enable NVIDIA DOCA HBN for network isolation and concurrent multi-tenant workloads on bare-metal GPU hosts.

• Future-Ready Architecture: Validated today on NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPUs and designed for upcoming NVIDIA BlueField-4 and Vera Rubin architectures.

How the Integration Works

• PaletteAI: Delivers curated, deployable blueprints across OS, Kubernetes, storage, and the NVIDIA AI Enterprise ecosystem with governance and self-service for AI teams.

• Netris NAAM: Automates network orchestration, enforces hard isolation, and removes manual ticket-driven bottlenecks.

The integration ensures end-to-end tenant orchestration: PaletteAI deploys validated platform blueprints, while Netris provisions matching network constructs. Day-two operations—expansions, onboarding, decommissioning—trigger automatic network updates via Netris APIs. Compliance-aligned, air-gapped deployments are supported for regulated environments.

Built on the NVIDIA Ecosystem

The joint solution is validated across NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet, Quantum-X InfiniBand, BlueField DPUs, NVLink, and the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software stack. By unifying infrastructure, networking, and AI workloads, the platform enables operators to move from infrastructure to inference in days, not months.

Executive Perspectives

“Building AI infrastructure at scale has always required stitching together cluster and network manually. Spectro Cloud and Netris eliminate that—meeting at the DPU to deliver a production-ready AI factory,” said Alex Saroyan, CEO and Co-Founder of Netris.

“The next generation of cloud infrastructure is the AI factory. PaletteAI automates full-stack management, and Netris extends that to network orchestration and hard multi-tenancy. Together, we deliver a turnkey platform for operators to move from bare metal to revenue quickly,” said Tenry Fu, CEO of Spectro Cloud.

This solution positions operators to standardize deployments, accelerate production readiness, and confidently scale multi-tenant AI workloads, transforming GPU infrastructure into a fully automated “AI factory.”

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UiPath (NYSE: PATH), a global leader in agentic automation, has unveiled a new security automation capability built in collaboration with Microsoft. The solution streamlines security operations by automating threat detection, enrichment, and response workflows across Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Microsoft Sentinel, and integrated Microsoft threat intelligence.

The integration combines UiPath’s automation platform with Microsoft’s security ecosystem to enrich alerts with business context, allowing enterprises to detect, investigate, and remediate threats faster while minimizing disruption to business workflows. The solution will be available via the UiPath Solutions Marketplace, enabling organizations to deploy and operationalize security automation alongside existing Microsoft security investments.

Embedding Security into Operational Workflows

“This collaboration brings security automation closer to where work actually happens,” said Andrei Oros, Director of IT Automation at UiPath. “By combining our automation capabilities with Microsoft Defender, Sentinel, and Security Copilot, enterprises can embed security controls directly into operational processes—protecting data and maintaining compliance without slowing business.”

Ruthy Kaidar, Managing Director Solutions, Software Companies, Microsoft EMEA, added: “UiPath’s integration fuses automation with built-in security and governance, enriching signals with business context, empowering human-in-the-loop decisions, and accelerating detection and response—so enterprises can scale agentic automation with confidence.”

How the Solution Works

Files and alerts generated from automated workflows are automatically:

1. Scanned with Microsoft Defender for Cloud for threats

2. Enriched with business context before being forwarded to Microsoft Sentinel

3. Investigated using Microsoft Security Copilot, with guided human-in-the-loop analysis

4. Remediated via UiPath automations, executing follow-up actions such as quarantining files, pausing workflows, or escalating incidents

This approach reduces mean time to respond (MTTR), enhances SOC productivity, and integrates security directly into enterprise workflows, providing a defensible, enterprise-scale solution for modern threat landscapes.

“Security teams need solutions that move at the speed of modern threats,” said Steven Spirou, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft Security. “UiPath’s collaboration with Sentinel and Security Copilot extends automation with richer context and faster response, delivering real, production-grade value to SOC teams.”

The solution reflects a growing trend of agentic automation in cybersecurity, where AI-driven orchestration reduces manual triage, ensures compliance, and enables faster, more accurate security responses across enterprise environments.

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Verint®, The CX Automation Company™, has appointed Teresa Anania as Chief Customer Officer (CCO), signaling a renewed focus on delivering measurable business outcomes for its enterprise customers. Anania brings over 25 years of experience driving customer success across enterprise software, most recently serving as CCO at Sophos and previously at Zendesk and Autodesk.

“Teresa’s appointment reflects exactly where we are as a company,” said Dave Rhodes, CEO of Verint. “We’ve built one of the most powerful CX Automation platforms in the industry, delivering measurable AI business outcomes. Teresa’s experience with turning customer success into a competitive advantage will accelerate us to the next level.”

Turning Customer Success into Measurable Wins

Anania will oversee Verint’s global customer success, professional services, support, and renewals across both Verint and Calabrio customer bases. Her mandate: help customers achieve tangible results using the Verint CX Automation Platform, which combines AI, automation, and analytics to optimize customer experience.

“Verint is entering a new era,” Anania said. “My focus is turning our strengths into measurable wins for customers — because outcomes are the scoreboard.”

Anania’s appointment underscores a broader industry trend where post-sales engagement, retention, and measurable ROI are becoming central to enterprise software success. By aligning customer success with business outcomes, Verint aims to differentiate its CX Automation Platform and accelerate adoption across its enterprise and commercial segments.

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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.

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