The chatbots will enable brands to offer full lifecycle conversational marketing, commerce & support on RCS

Gupshup, the world's leading Conversation Cloud platform today announced that brands on its platform can now offer AI chatbots for RCS conversations, opening up a whole new advanced and interactive experience for their users. Gupshup's Conversational AI product suite, spanning Auto Bot Builder and ACE LLM, are now using Google Cloud's Vertex AI platform to bring the benefits of Google's large language models (LLMs) to Gupshup's customers globally. 

The integration will enable businesses to deliver more precise and human-like interactions with speed and scale and offer a more personalized and responsive experience. Further, AI assistants on RCS will be able to intelligently respond to unstructured queries, assisting customers across various stages–from product discovery, lead generation to troubleshooting and customer support.

"Generative AI is transforming the RCS industry, and we're thrilled that Gupshup is utilizing our latest LLMs on Vertex AI to further personalize and enhance how businesses engage with customers through AI-driven conversations," said Warren Barkley, Senior Director of Product Management, Vertex AI at Google Cloud. "Vertex AI provides partners like Gupshup with a unified AI platform to leverage state-of-the-art foundational models, and we look forward to seeing the ways Gupshup continues to innovate with this technology."

"We've always leveraged the latest cutting-edge AI technologies to offer a superior customer engagement platform to our brands. With our Auto Bot Builder and domain-specific ACE LLM now leveraging Google's LLMs, business messages on RCS are set to get a massive facelift, leading to better ROI for enterprises. We are excited to work with Google Cloud to help our brands bring intelligent conversations on RCS that will redefine customer engagement," said Beerud Sheth, Founder and CEO, Gupshup.

Gupshup is a pioneer in leveraging domain-specific, fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) to automate the creation of enterprise-grade chatbots with appropriate guardrails. In January 2023, it launched Auto Bot Builder, a tool that leverages LLMs to automatically and effortlessly build advanced chatbots for enterprises.

Gupshup's Conversational AI solutions are already live with several clients in India and abroad. The advanced chatbot for Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) - Dubai's largest utility, is powered by Gupshup. In India, several brands such as Tata Capital and Chaayos are using it for brand engagement, product discovery, employee training, and consultative selling.

At MWC 2024, more than 65 of Intel’s leading customers and partners showcase systems and solutions across new hardware, software and services for modernizing and monetizing future infrastructure. 

NEWS HIGHLIGHTS

• Intel announced its future Intel® Xeon® processor with built-in AI acceleration, code-named Granite Rapids-D, and highlighted first-call validation with key partners.

• Intel, in collaboration with 5G core software suppliers, previewed its next-gen Intel Xeon processor for 5G core, code-named Sierra Forest, demonstrating a 2.7x performance per rack improvement¹.

• Intel announced Intel’s Edge Platform, a modular and open software platform that enables enterprises to build, deploy, run, manage and scale edge and AI solutions on standard hardware with cloud-like simplicity.  

• Intel will announce extended benefits of the AI PC to commercial designs with the new Intel vPro® platform, on day two of MWC 2024.

At MWC 2024, Intel announced new platforms, solutions and services spanning network and edge AI, Intel® Core™ Ultra processors and the AI PC, and more. 

In an era where technological advancements are integral to staying competitive, Intel is delivering products and solutions for its customers, partners and expansive ecosystem to capitalize on the emerging opportunities of artificial intelligence and built-in automation, to improve total cost of ownership (TCO) and operational efficiency, and to deliver new innovations and services.

More: Intel Announces New Edge Platform for Scaling AI Applications | Intel Unleashes 2.7x Performance per Rack Improvement for 5G Core | Intel at MWC Barcelona 2024 (Press Kit)

Across today’s announcements, Intel is focused on empowering the industry to further modernize and monetize 5G, edge and enterprise infrastructures and investments, and to take advantage of bringing AI Everywhere. For more than a decade, and alongside Intel’s customers and partners, the company has been transforming today’s network infrastructure from fixed-function to a software-defined platform and driving success at the edge with more than 90,000 real-world deployments².

“Intel is delivering innovations for our partners and their customers across network, edge and enterprises to modernize their networks, monetize new services at the edge, and bring AI everywhere,” said Sachin Katti, senior vice president and general manager of the Network and Edge Group at Intel. “Intel’s network- and edge-optimized SOC strategy uniquely integrates general purpose compute and acceleration for networking, AI and vRAN workloads, and we are announcing market-leading next generation products for 5G core with Sierra Forest and 5G vRAN with Granite Rapids-D.”

Utilizing Built-in AI Acceleration, Intel Spearheads the Future of Modern Network Innovation

Announced last year, 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® processors with Intel® vRAN Boost (code-named Sapphire Rapids EE) deliver up to twice the capacity³ for virtual radio access network (vRAN) workloads compared with the previous generation. The capacity increase allows operators to double their number of cell sites or subscribers while providing an additional 20% reduction⁴ in vRAN compute power consumption by removing the need for external acceleration to reduce system complexity and costs.

Further extending its vRAN leadership, while driving down vRAN costs and power consumption and delivering it at a global scale, Intel announced its future Xeon processor Granite Rapids-D, featuring the latest generation of P-cores. This future processor will deliver significant gains in performance and power efficiency utilizing improved Intel AVX for vRAN and integrated Intel vRAN Boost acceleration alongside other architectural and feature enhancements. Silicon is currently sampling. Samsung has demonstrated a first-call at their research and development lab in Suwon, South Korea. Ericsson has also demonstrated a first-call validation in the Ericsson-Intel joint lab in Santa Clara, California. These accomplishments underscore the ease of gen-over-gen software portability and ecosystem readiness when the product launches. Intel is also working with Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Lenovo, Mavenir, Red Hat, Wind River and other leading ecosystem partners to ensure market readiness. Granite Rapids-D is planned to launch in 2025, following the launch of Granite Rapids server CPUs in 2024.

Artificial intelligence will play a pivotal role in helping operators optimize the performance, efficiency and intelligent management of resources in the evolving vRAN environment. To help operators and developers build, train, optimize and deploy AI models for vRAN use cases on general purpose servers in their existing network footprint, Intel is introducing early availability of the Intel® vRAN AI Development Kit to select partners. Built on Intel AI-optimized libraries, frameworks and tools, the optimized AI models in the development kit, when combined with 4th Gen Intel Xeon processors’ built-in AI acceleration, power management and enhanced telemetry capabilities, offers potential for operators to reconfigure their network dynamically to conceivably save costs, extract more value from infrastructure and support new revenue streams. Intel is working with AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, SK Telecom and Vodafone to showcase the benefits AI can bring to the RAN.

Innovating in 5G Core Performance and Power Savings

Intel architecture is the backbone of cloud-native, software-defined core networks around the world, with most virtualized network servers running on Intel CPUs. As the primary choice for operators, equipment builders and software providers, Intel Xeon platforms have set the bar in commercial deployments for 5G core performance with superior TCO and comprehensive power management – all delivered via a world-class ecosystem.

For operators, the company today previewed its next-gen Intel Xeon processor Sierra Forest that will launch later this year to expand Intel’s CPU roadmap by offering up to 288 Efficient-cores (E-cores) on a single chip. It is well-suited for 5G core workloads to advance network core performance and power savings. By utilizing Intel’s latest E-core technology, operators will recognize greater energy and cost savings, driving to a 2.7x performance per rack improvement¹ and industry-leading performance per rack for 5G core workloads.⁵

Operators and ecosystem partners – including BT Group, Dell Technologies, Ericsson, HPE, KDDI, Lenovo, and SK Telecom – are also showing interest in this ground-breaking next-gen platform, which is optimized for high performance per watt, core density and throughput.

For additional power savings and energy efficiency, Intel announced broad availability and industry adoption for the Intel® Infrastructure Power Manager software for 5G core, with Casa Systems, NEC, Nokia, and Samsung planning to deliver in 2024. Intel Infrastructure Power Manager enables operators to take advantage of the built-in telemetry of Intel Xeon processors to reduce CPU power by an average of 30% while maintaining key telco performance metrics⁶. Multiple operators are exploring lab trials for delivering carbon offset and TCO savings.

The Right Platform is Everything for Scaling AI and Edge Solutions

At the edge, enterprises want to innovate, be efficient and improve time to market by delivering new intelligent services. They are starting to leverage the tremendous amount of data they generate at the edge to achieve enhanced customer experience, scale operations through automation while being price-competitive, and dealing with the impacts of labor shortages. This is driving a tremendous new opportunity for edge AI.

Intel is leveraging its expansive installed base and deep expertise from more than 90,000 edge deployments today with a footprint spanning more than 200 million processors sold in the past 10 years² to help customers quickly and efficiently take advantage of the edge AI opportunity.

Announced today, Intel’s Edge Platform has unique capabilities, including support for heterogeneous components for lower TCO and zero-touch, policy-based management of infrastructure and applications, and AI across a fleet of edge nodes with a single pane of glass. Additionally, AI runtime with OpenVINO™ inference is built-in to enable real-time AI inferencing optimization and dynamic workload placement within the infrastructure software for application deployment.

As an evolution of the solution first introduced at Intel Innovation 2023 under the code-name Project Strata, Intel’s Edge Platform will be generally available later this quarter, with some partners and end users already taking advantage of its offerings. In support of Intel’s Edge Platform, Intel is working across the ecosystem and with industry leaders such as Amazon Web Services, Lenovo, L&T Technology Services, SAP, Red Hat, Vericast, Verizon Business and Wipro.

Delivering the Best AI PC Experience for Businesses of All Sizes

On day two of MWC 2024, Intel and Microsoft will host an AI PC industry reception at the Intel booth. Watch the Intel Newsroom for details.

Delivering Choice in Acceleration

For emerging spaces where protocols and use cases are still being defined – like vRAN, OpenRAN, 6G and AI – FPGAs enable first-to-market advantages and deliver maximum flexibility with dynamic, low-power, low-latency, high-throughput solutions. Intel’s Programmable Solutions Group (PSG) will launch two new radio macro and mMIMO Enablement Packages as well as Intel® Precision Time Protocol Servo, which allows customers to implement any timing configuration based on the 1588 timing precision protocol to synchronize devices in the Radio Access Network.

Additionally, the now standalone Programmable Solutions Group will conduct a business vision and strategy webinar on Feb. 29. Watch the Intel Newsroom for details.

Visit the Intel Booth at MWC 2024 (Hall 3, Booth 3E31), and don’t miss the Technology Showcase to see firsthand the latest partner innovations, including:

• Creating modern networks of the future to deliver peak performance and power savings.
• Scaling AI across vertical industries to drive better business outcomes.
• Delivering the AI PC with new features and manageability for organizations of all sizes.

The startup closed Pre-Series A Round Led by Goodwater Capital, with participation from previous round lead DCM 

FlowGPT, an inclusive platform fostering an open ecosystem for AI application creators and the community, announced it has raised $10 million in a Pre-Series A round. The round was led by Goodwater Capital, the world's largest venture capital fund exclusively focused on consumer technology, with participation from DCM, a global early stage VC firm, which led the company's prior round while the company was still in stealth. FlowGPT is the largest open source store for AI-native applications, with a mission to bring AI to everyone. Since the company's launch in January 2023, FlowGPT has attracted millions of users monthly across 110 countries. FlowGPT's engaged user base has developed more than 100,000 AI applications, for use on LLMs, such as ChatGPT, Google PaLM and open source models like Pygmalion.

"We believe the biggest future for AI is in open ecosystems," said Coddy Johnson, Partner at lead investor Goodwater Capital. "FlowGPT is helping to lead the way by building the largest open platform for AI apps, with the widest choice for users and with the most flexibility and freedom for creators to choose their models and collaborate with their communities."

Before LLMs, developing software required a whole team of professional engineers, designers and product managers. The high cost and required skill base were barriers to creating software solutions, leaving a huge number of problems unsolved. FlowGPT founders, Jay Dang and Lifan Wang recognized this issue and the opportunity for LLMs to enable anyone to create AI-native applications using natural language (prompts). With a vision that AI would democratize software development, Jay and Lifan created FlowGPT, the largest all-in-one AI app store and community where users can directly explore, use, and create AI-native applications powered by the creativity of creators.

FlowGPT will use the funding to expand its engineering and research teams globally. The company is actively hiring front-end and back-end development engineers, mobile development engineers and product and operation staff. In addition, the funding will be used to further develop a dynamic and engaging community.

"Real world problems are being solved everyday through the creation and collaboration in the vibrant FlowGPT open ecosystem platform," said Hurst Lin, General Partner at DCM. "This platform serves as a unique space where top prompt creators converge to creatively build cutting-edge AI apps. We're happy to support the FlowGPT team in actively seeking to expand their team to harness diverse talents, perspectives, and expertise in shaping the future of AI-driven solutions."

FlowGPT is firmly committed to empowering creators, understanding that a thriving ecosystem hinges on fostering an attractive, engaging, and dynamic environment for them. To bolster this vision, FlowGPT recently partnered with industry giants such as Google, Leonardo.ai, and Opus Clip for the latest FlowGPT Hackathon Season 3. This initiative attracted more than double the previous number of participants. This level of engagement underscores FlowGPT's dedication to nurturing a vibrant and innovative community of creators.

In the near future, FlowGPT will also be launching their Flow mobile app. The Flow mobile app is a brand new multimedia experience that differs from the current website. It combines the power of LLMs, agents, text to speech, text to image and text to video, to bring AI to users' daily lives.

D-ID Agents can hear, think, and speak in real-time, enabling businesses of all sizes to provide consumers with the lifelike customer experience and service they demand  

D-ID, the leading platform for the generation of digital humans, today announced the general availability of D-ID Agents – highly customized, autonomous AI avatars that can take verbal commands from users and respond in multiple languages, using facial expressions and hand gestures. Companies can seamlessly integrate D-ID Agents into their digital platforms, enhancing customer experience and marketing with human-like interactions.

D-ID Agents address the growing demand for more natural digital interactions, aligning with predictions that a significant portion of digital communications will soon be avatar-supported. Natural User Interface (NUI) powers D-ID Agents and enables the avatars to engage in a conversation with a user, creating a sense of mutual understanding, emotional connection, and trust.

D-ID Agents also harness Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) technology, enabling them to comprehend the users' environment and respond to them accurately, intelligently, and swiftly with over 90% accuracy delivered in under two seconds. D-ID's RAG technology transcends the limitations of traditional language models, providing up-to-date and refined information. The use of RAG offers a major advancement in the development of conversational AI, thus combining the best of chatbots and AI assistants and parcelling them together in an engaging humanlike form. 

"Making D-ID Agents widely available is a leap forward in our mission to bridge the communications gap between humans and rapidly advancing technologies," said Gil Perry, CEO and Co-founder of D-ID. "As LLMs (large language models) become increasingly critical for enterprises, we understood that the natural progression was to move from text-based interactions to audio and video. So, our platform is not just about enhancing digital interactions; it's about transforming them into meaningful conversations, fostering trust and understanding between businesses and their customers."

The transition to general availability brings enhanced functionalities including advanced API options for enterprise-level customization and increased flexibility and the ability for all users to create a D-ID Agent through the Creative Reality™ Studio at no cost (for a limited time), with a limit of one active embedded Agent per account. Pro+ plans will now include voice cloning capabilities, allowing users to create personalized Agent voices directly within the platform.

"The overwhelming interest in Agents during our beta phase demonstrates that businesses are ready for a new way to provide online customer service that goes beyond the standard chatbot," said Eliran Kuta, CTO and Co-founder of D-ID. "Today's digital interactions must be seamless, intuitive, and lifelike and Agents enables businesses to offer just that."

The general release of D-ID Agents includes several key updates and improvements based on feedback from the beta phase. These enhancements focus on increasing accessibility, end-user analytics for business intelligence, and expanding the platform's language support to ensure a more inclusive and versatile user experience. Additionally, D-ID Agents can now be embedded and shared. 

Seeley brings over 25 years of global brand, digital, and performance marketing expertise to PayPal and its family of brands, including Venmo

PayPal Holdings, Inc. today announced Geoff Seeley has joined the company as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), reporting to Diego Scotti, Executive Vice President (EVP) and General Manager (GM) of Consumer Group and Global Marketing & Communications. Seeley brings over 25 years in global brand, digital, and performance marketing while building teams to drive transformative marketing models. Seeley was most recently the Global CMO and Communications Officer at CashApp and Afterpay.   

Seeley will be responsible for overseeing the Global Marketing team across PayPal's family of brands, including Venmo. At PayPal, Seeley will be focused on making sure the PayPal and Venmo value propositions are clear, compelling, and simple for customers. He will also focus on bringing new energy to the PayPal and Venmo brands by leveraging the company's innovative history, powerful product portfolio, and continuing to build on customer trust.

"Geoff has a rich and impressive background leading marketing teams and building brands across some of the biggest global companies," said Diego Scotti, EVP and GM, Consumer Group and Global Marketing & Communications, PayPal. "Geoff brings over 25 years of expertise in transforming global consumer and B2B brands by leveraging cutting-edge digital and performance marketing and building strong teams focused on enhancing brand awareness and engagement with customers."    

Seeley previously worked on Airbnb's Homes business, where he had responsibilities across regional brand marketing, product marketing, global media, brand partnerships, marketing analytics, and research. Additionally, Seeley worked with Unilever as Global Communications Planning Director, where he helped established, legacy brands transform their marketing models and technology, upleveling the brand experience for customers. 

Ad-Shield, a provider of next-gen adblock recovery solutions, announced today the successful closing of a $2 million Pre-Series A funding round. Shorooq Partners led the oversubscribed round, joined by existing investors, Bass Investment and Hashed.

Launched in 2023, Ad-Shield leverages its proprietary adblock recovery technology to help publishers monetize previously unreachable audiences. Globally, it is estimated that over 30% of internet users employ some form of adblocking services, willingly or unwillingly. These services disadvantage many businesses, most notably publishers, who rely on ads for customer insights and revenue generation. Until now, there have been few options for publishers to address this growing issue and Ad-Shield aims to break the status quo.

“More and more publishers are struggling to stay afloat with declining ad revenue and increasing costs,” said Dustin Cha, Co-Founder & CSO of Ad-Shield. “We’ve seen as high as 65% adblock usage on some of the publishers that we serve, and this is frankly a matter of staying alive for them. Many publishers have come to us asking for help, trying to reach this audience, with no real viable solution. That’s why we have developed this next-gen technology to give more publishers access to this new solution while maintaining audience trust.”

Ad-Shield’s mission is to create a sustainable, ad-supported web ecosystem – rather than to remove ads entirely. Intrusive ads lead to the installation of adblockers, which in turn causes revenue loss for publishers. In desperation, publishers increase the number of ads or compromise on quality, triggering a further rise in adblocker usage. This cycle not only affects publishers but also advertisers, who experience diminished returns on their ad spend and obscured performance metrics.

To break this vicious cycle, Ad-Shield focuses on protecting a minimal number of ads to promote a healthier digital ad ecosystem. This approach has garnered significant market interest, evidenced by the company’s 30%+ monthly growth since its launch and overwhelming demand from global publishers.

“We believe in the mission of Ad-Shield,” said Shane Shin, Founding Partner of Shorooq Partners. “With its innovative technology, Ad-Shield is becoming a key disruptor in the industry by providing publishers better and easier ways to engage with adblock traffic. This will create a new market that benefits digital publishers, advertisers, and consumers alike, around the world.”

With this new funding, Ad-Shield plans to expand its team and accelerate the market introduction of its new product. “We are emboldened every day by the publishers we meet and support,” added Dustin. “Most of them struggle to effectively manage adblock traffic, which continues to grow. We’re thrilled to help them focus on what they do best - generating quality content.”

International Consumer Collective Powered by the Stagwell Marketing Cloud

Stagwell, the challenger network built to transform marketing, has unveiled "Unlock Surveys," a new global research community, providing brands and researchers with real-time access to the opinions and insights of hundreds of thousands of verified, trustworthy consumers across international markets. The panel aims to add over 200,000 new active survey members in 2024 and sits within the Stagwell Marketing Cloud (SMC) suite of data-driven SaaS products for modern marketers. 

"Unlock Surveys is arguably the most significant research panel launched in nearly a decade, in an industry that has seen research means consolidated, leading to commoditization, poor data quality and high participant turnover," said Mark Penn, chairman and CEO, Stagwell. "From brand competition for customer satisfaction and loyalty, to understanding voters in the political arena, the demand for capturing the public's opinion online is at an all-time high. As a pioneering pollster, I'm proud to see this advanced, member-first offering come under the Stagwell umbrella, making it easier than ever for brands to unlock quality insights that inform vital business decisions."

"Under the current model, researchers and brands can spend tens of millions of dollars per year collecting online research from an increasingly unreliable pool of external suppliers. In exchange, the quality of that deliverable has declined dramatically over the past decade as fraud rates have increased, respondent engagement has dropped, and trust has diminished," said Adam Dietrich, managing director, Unlock Surveys. "We're building Unlock Surveys in a way that connects with authentic people and is underpinned by proven, time-tested research principles."

Why this matters for modern marketing
Beyond the standard single-use research panels, the Stagwell Marketing Cloud will tap into proprietary data from Unlock Surveys to drive more comprehensive, two-way consumer behavioral analytics, thereby enhancing media targeting capabilities and providing marketers with more granular insights into the demands of modern-day consumers.

Brand marketers, media buyers and planners, researchers and other professionals in need of an international, representative collection of trustworthy respondents benefit from Unlock Surveys in a myriad of ways:

• Data purity enables speed and agility: Clients of any of Stagwell's 70+ agencies benefit from access to a centralized data house and the flexibility to pursue follow-up surveys, longitudinal studies, qualitative interviews, and other activities without the need to consult new or outside sources.
• Members are trusted, verified participants: All members are double-opted-in via email verification, and must pass a series of stringent quality measures that include cutting-edge bot deterrents and the latest in fraud prevention systems before ever being placed into a client survey. This weeds out bad actors and technology fraudsters, also ensuring the client is receiving a participant that is most likely to qualify for and complete their survey. These panels have been built to score highly in any "research on research" metric such as quality, consistency, and census representation.
• Applying science to behavior: As brands push the limits of quantitative research, it is vital to have a people engine to unlock the next phase of meaningful insights. This panel provides not only the respondents to participate in traditional research, but also the loyal, engaged group required for the ever-evolving complexities of behavioral understanding that come with ongoing engagement and analysis.

Award-Winning Platform Helps Enterprises Explore Survey Data, Deliver Insights, and Take Action

mTab, a leading market insights platform and a portfolio company of Milestone Partners, today announced the closing of a $15 million growth credit financing by Kayne Anderson Growth Capital. The latest financing comes as the company further accelerates its growth and global expansion to support more customers in new industries, along with advanced technology enhancements to its platform. 

mTab connects organizations and research providers of all sizes with a powerful, trust-driven platform to answer any question. mTab’s technology provides instant access to the largest selection of insights on markets, industries and brands, supported by up-to-date data, analytics, reports and an expert community. Over 50,000 insight professionals across 250+ organizations in 40+ countries use mTab for faster insights and better decisions to enhance experiences, motivate customers, and innovate to beat the competition.

“This new round will help mTab accelerate innovation in several key areas and broaden our product offering so we can help existing customers scale their insights while expanding in new markets. The funding will enable us to accelerate the growth of our team and invest even more in visualization and artificial intelligence features. We look forward to continuing to support our clients with industry-leading analytics solutions,” Mark Langsfeld, mTab’s CEO said.

“Our Kayne Anderson Growth Capital team prides itself on carefully selecting partners who are industry leaders,” said Leon Chen, Managing Partner, Kayne Anderson Growth Capital. “mTab solves the fundamental pain points of bringing enterprises' siloed market research together into one place for insight discovery, analysis, and visualization. We are extremely excited to partner with the company and leverage Kayne Anderson’s resources to grow the business into a clear market leader.”