Press Release
Sooth, the Predictive Marketing Intelligence Leader, Enters Next Growth Phase with Two Key Hires
NEW YORK, NY (July 22, 2026) — Sooth, the leader in predictive emotional and behavioral intelligence for marketers, today announced David Jenkins as Principal & Managing Partner and Justin Shames as Strategy Director. The duo, who each bring more than 25 years of marketing and agency experience, will be pivotal in guiding Sooth's growth strategy and steering the company's long-term direction. Jenkins will lead client development and management — servicing existing relationships and developing new business — while Shames will oversee the day-to-day strategic direction of client engagements. "David is an exceptional talent and a proven leader whom I've had the pleasure of working with in the past, and Justin is one of the sharpest strategic minds I’ve ever encountered. I'm proud to have them as integral members of the team as we continue our work to redefine marketing and predictive intelligence," said Founder & CEO Ian Baer, who in 2025 was named to ADWEEK's inaugural Innovator 50 list for Sooth's impact on the marketing industry. “Their stewardship will be invaluable to our clients and to Sooth's growth as we rapidly expand our customer base along with our capabilities and offerings." Before joining Sooth, Jenkins served dual roles as U.S. business lead at WPP and as President, North America at TAXI (a WPP company), revitalizing the agency's business model to deliver sustained profitability, creative excellence, and organic growth. His experience spans gaming, CPG, retail, and consumer brands, with prior leadership roles at TBWA\Chiat\Day, BBH, McCann Erickson, and Kirshenbaum Bond Senecal + Partners. With international experience spanning Australia, Europe, the UK, Canada, and the U.S., Jenkins brings a global perspective to brand building, organizational integration, and transformative growth. "It is an honor to join Sooth, and to have this opportunity to reimagine and reshape the industry I love and have dedicated my career to," said Jenkins. "What Ian and the team have built is remarkable, and I am excited to play my part in helping marketers make better decisions — and strengthening the human and emotional connection between brands and their customers." Shames has held strategy leadership roles across agencies and enterprise organizations, most recently serving as Associate Director of Strategy at CRMOne (Publicis Groupe). His experience spans telecommunications, healthcare, financial services, automotive, travel, and consumer brands, with prior leadership positions at Accenture Interactive, TBWA, and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). Known for translating audience intelligence, market dynamics, and business objectives into growth strategies, Shames brings deep expertise in brand positioning, go-to-market strategy, and commercial storytelling. "What drew me to Sooth is its ability to answer the question I’ve been asking throughout my career — not just what consumers do, but why they do it. ELI gets at the emotional and cognitive drivers that traditional strategy tools miss entirely. I’m looking forward to putting that intelligence to work for clients who are ready to make decisions with real conviction behind them.” Both Jenkins and Shames are based in New York, NY. Earlier this year, Sooth was announced as a partner to Indiana-based beef producer Legacy Farms, whose marketing and product strategy are being guided by Sooth’s pioneering predictive intelligence system, ELI. The engagement is the first to extend ELI beyond marketing and into product development. About SoothSooth is a predictive intelligence company that uses neuroscience, behavioral psychology, and AI to anticipate consumer decisions with extraordinary precision. Our patent-pending Sooth Method™ uncovers the emotional and cognitive triggers that drive behavior—enabling brands and agencies to connect more deeply, act more confidently, and perform 5x to 12x better than traditional marketing strategy. Explore MarTech innovations helping brands optimize campaigns, improve customer experiences, and boost ROI.
marketing 23 Jul 2026
DemandScience Unveils a Reimagined Ionic™ for the Post-Platform Era of Performance Marketing
DANVERS, Mass., July 22, 2026 — DemandScience today announced a reimagined Ionic™, an intelligence layer built to help B2B organizations identify their most winnable opportunities, prioritize buying activity, activate coordinated engagement, and connect execution directly to measurable pipeline outcomes.The announcement comes as B2B organizations face a growing challenge: despite unprecedented access to data, intent signals, AI tools, and marketing technology, pipeline has become harder to predict.The Platform Era is Coming to an EndAccording to DemandScience's 2026 State of Performance Marketing study of 750 senior marketing leaders, 67% of organizations report that dashboards frequently show success even when revenue fails to follow. At the same time, 79% report rising martech costs without corresponding improvements in ROI, while organizations estimate that 25% of marketing spend is wasted on activities that fail to drive business outcomes.For over a decade, organizations responded to every challenge by adding another platform, dashboard, signal provider, or AI tool. DemandScience calls this hidden cost the Platform Tax: the six-figure investment many organizations make in platforms, integrations, and administration before a single dollar is spent generating demand or driving pipeline.The Post-Platform Era is about moving beyond disconnected systems toward intelligence that helps teams identify opportunity, prioritize action, and drive measurable outcomes."We've spent the last decade adding more platforms and more tools," said Derek Schoettle, CEO of DemandScience. "But more technology hasn't created more confidence. Most marketing teams never wanted another platform to manage. They wanted more pipeline. Somewhere along the way, managing platforms became the job. The organizations that win in the Post-Platform Era will be the ones that partner with providers who handle the intelligence and execution — so marketing teams spend less time managing systems and more time acting on strategy."Ionic was reimagined for that new reality, providing the intelligence layer organizations need to operate in the Post-Platform Era.Introducing Ionic: An Intelligence Layer for Performance MarketingRather than functioning as another system marketers must configure and manage, Ionic serves as an intelligence layer that continuously analyzes buyer and market signals to help revenue teams identify and prioritize their most winnable opportunities.The rebuilt Ionic unifies DemandScience's marketing intelligence hub and account-based marketing capabilities. Built on a foundation of more than 247 million verified B2B contacts and 51 billion behavioral, intent, technographic, and market signals, Ionic helps organizations answer three critical questions: Where is demand emerging? Which accounts are most likely to buy? What should we do next? By combining that intelligence into a single operating layer, Ionic helps organizations focus resources on the opportunities most likely to drive pipeline.Designed for the Post-Platform Era, Ionic reduces the complexity of fragmented intent, ABM, and activation technologies by unifying intelligence, prioritization, activation, and measurement into a single operating model. Combined with DemandScience's managed execution capabilities, Ionic helps organizations move from insight to action without adding operational complexity."Ionic isn’t designed to be another dashboard," said Schoettle. "It’s designed to help teams determine where opportunity exists, identify what's most winnable, and take the right action. The goal is simple: spend less time operating technology and more time driving outcomes."Across its broader intelligence and activation programs, DemandScience customers have achieved measurable business outcomes, including: 417% increase in marketing-influenced pipeline 32x pipeline ROI 39% shorter sales cycles As AI reshapes how buyers discover and evaluate vendors, organizations also need visibility into emerging AI-driven discovery channels. DemandScience helps organizations improve discoverability in AI-generated answers and recommendation engines, ensuring they are represented in the responses buyers increasingly rely on. "As buyers become harder to identify and traditional signals become less reliable, companies need more than visibility," Schoettle added. "They need a way to identify the opportunities they can actually win and execute against them with confidence. That's the role Ionic is designed to play in the Post-Platform Era."About DemandScienceDemandScience helps B2B organizations identify, prioritize, and activate their most valuable growth opportunities. Through proprietary data, AI-powered intelligence, managed execution, and multi-channel activation, DemandScience enables organizations to transform market intelligence into measurable pipeline outcomes and predictable revenue growth. Learn how modern marketing technologies are reshaping customer acquisition, retention, and engagement.
marketing 23 Jul 2026
How the 2026 World Cup affected Internet traffic
For 96 years, the World Cup has been a global phenomenon, uniting nations and communities through a shared love of sportsmanship. While its popularity is nothing new, what is novel today is how rare a truly collective global experience has become. In an era defined by microtrends and algorithmic bubbles, it is increasingly uncommon for people across most countries to engage in the exact same event. That is precisely the unifying power of the World Cup. Fans from all over the globe reshape their daily routines around these once-in-a-lifetime matchups and storylines — and because Cloudflare operates a global network with 330+ points of presence worldwide, we are in a unique position to see exactly how this global ritual reshaped the world’s online activity throughout June and July 2026. Cloudflare Radar tracks HTTP traffic, DNS, security, and more to highlight global Internet trends. In this blog post we’ll use that data to explore how the World Cup impacted global traffic patterns throughout the tournament’s run. How did the World Cup change our behavior online? To understand how traffic changes throughout a match, we had to establish what it is “normally.” One way to do this is by looking at raw request volumes, or the amount of traffic we see on our network per country. But these amounts vary per country (the amount of daily traffic in the United States is always a larger number than the traffic in Portugal), which makes it difficult to establish a globally applicable baseline. Instead, we defined "normal" using the median traffic of the four preceding weeks: a month-long window that provided a stable, per-minute reference and smoothed out day-to-day noise. We also wanted to know whether traffic rose or fell relative to that baseline, but a plain difference wouldn't let us compare a high-volume country against a low-volume one. Instead, we used the ratio of current to baseline traffic, expressed as a log? value: the log makes increases and decreases symmetric around zero (+1 = twice normal, −1 = half). In other words, a score of zero means traffic is perfectly normal, a positive number shows a spike, and a negative number shows a drop. Whether you’re staying up late or waking up early, kickoff time impacts traffic One factor shaping how traffic changes is simply what time the match kicks off locally. The largest changes in activity happen when a match is played in the overnight and early-morning hours — roughly midnight to 8am local time. These are the hours when very few people are normally online, so fans staying up (or waking early) to watch push traffic well above its usual level, more than doubling it in some cases. As the graph shows, this is where the deviation peaks on both workdays and weekends. By contrast, matches played during normal daytime and working hours — around 9 a.m. to mid-afternoon — don’t show such an impact: traffic stays close to its usual level, likely because the people watching would already have been online anyway. In the early evening there's a smaller, second lift, most visible on weekdays, as a match keeps people connected at a time when usage would normally start to wind down. Weekends follow a similar shape, with the strong early-morning rise but a gentler evening bump. The impact of kickoff time is easiest to see when comparing matches within a single country that take place at very different hours. Bosnia and Herzegovina provides a clear example. As seen in the graph shown above, when Bosnia played at 2 a.m. local time, people stayed awake to watch and traffic during the game jumped to well above its normal level, at times more than doubling. When Bosnia played in the evening, the opposite happened: traffic dipped below normal (falling to about 70% of typical value), as people put their devices aside and focused on the match itself. When Brazil played Japan in the Round of 32 (Brazil won 2–1 on June 29, 2026), the two countries watched the very same game 12 hours apart: kickoff in Brasília (GMT−3) fell during normal waking hours in Rio de Janeiro (GMT−3), while in Tokyo (GMT+9) it landed in the dead of night. The result is two nearly parallel curves for the same 90 minutes: one higher than normal, one lower. Japan's traffic (red) sits well above normal, around +1, roughly double its usual level, because the match aired in the small hours, when almost no one would ordinarily be online. Brazil's traffic (green), by contrast, runs below normal, around −0.4, as the game fell in the middle of an ordinary active day. In this case, watching the match pulled people away from their usual browsing rather than adding to it. Which matches moved the Internet most? One of the most compelling aspects of the World Cup is seeing which storylines and teams capture the attention of fans across the world. We’ve discussed how regional traffic patterns change as a result of matches. But who are they watching? Which matches made the most impact on Internet traffic? Here's how we calculated this: for each match, we took the two-hour window after kickoff and, for every country with enough baseline traffic to give stable measurements (small, noisy markets are excluded), computed how far traffic strayed from normal. We then took the absolute value of each country's deviation, so we're measuring how much traffic changed, not in which direction (a surge and a drop both count as impact), and for each match we took the median of those absolute deviations across all countries. Because several group-stage matches were played simultaneously, making it impossible to attribute a country's traffic swing to one game or the other, we dropped those concurrent matches to avoid ambiguity. The result is this ranking of the matches that moved the Internet most, worldwide. And there's a surprise: the very top spot wasn’t snagged by a final or semifinal. It was Argentina vs. Switzerland on July 11, a quarterfinal that saw Argentina win 3-1 — and that moved Internet traffic by a factor of about 1.26. That put it ahead of the France vs. Spain semifinal, which had a factor of 1.21. The rest of the top matches were a mix of quarterfinals, round-of-16 and even round-of-32 ties. The teams that moved the Internet: Argentina, followed by France, Spain and Norway To decide which team the world watched most, we looked at each team's matches and aggregated the median worldwide impact across all countries. In other words, when a given team took the field, how much did the typical country's traffic move away from normal? Not surprisingly, Argentina topped the list at 1.17x, meaning that when Argentina played, the typical country's traffic swung about 17% away from its normal level, the strongest global pull of any team. This comes as no surprise, since they were the defending champions and each knockout game could have been Lionel Messi's last dance for his national team. Love them or hate them, people were watching them. Not far behind were nations packed with superstars such as France, Brazil, Portugal, Morocco, Spain — and Norway, fueled by the Erling Haaland phenomenon. Haiti and Iraq appear in the top as outliers due to their high deviation scores relative to their typical traffic, suggesting matches against major teams drove disproportionate engagement. Sharp increase in traffic to sports betting sites Compared to HTTP request data in the month preceding the World Cup, there was an overall increase in requests to gambling industry websites since the opening game. Additionally, whereas pre-tournament traffic followed a clear weekly pattern, after the Cup’s opening game, the trend flattened into a more constant profile, likely a consequence of the high, near-daily regularity of matches. Divergent Behavior: Why Traffic Patterns Varied by Country. Because Cloudflare is present in 120+ countries and handles traffic from Internet users worldwide, we can see distinct behavioral patterns across the globe. For example, when examining the deviation trends during the Algeria vs. Austria group stage game on June 28, we noticed something peculiar: Austria’s traffic (in red) increased during halftime, while Algeria's (in green) decreased. The former follows the pattern described above of people spending more time online while not watching the game, while Algeria’s is the complete opposite — and they’re not the only ones. Algeria, in green and denoted as DZ, saw a much higher uptick in Internet traffic during the match than Austria, in red. Countries clustered by behavior To understand patterns in behavior across countries we grouped every country's match-day behavior by the shape of its traffic curve and let the patterns cluster together. Grouping match-day traffic shapes this way, three distinct patterns emerge. The largest group (44 countries playing 101 matches) shows Internet usage rising during hydration breaks and halftime, the natural pauses in play, as people reach for their phones. A second, smaller group (8 countries playing 18 matches)) is its near mirror image: traffic falls at exactly those same moments, dipping during the breaks instead of climbing. The third group is a clear outlier, made up entirely of Iran's three matches. The explanation is simple: the May baseline was measured while Iran was still coming back online after the shutdown, so its match-day traffic sits far above that depressed reference, producing a deviation unlike any other country's. You can read more about Iran’s Internet shutdowns and partial restoration throughout 2026 on our blog. Streaming makes some countries appear more online To better understand the second cluster, which included Algeria, Tunisia, Jordan, Egypt and DR Congo, we looked more closely at the traffic mix for these countries. We broke down traffic patterns by Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, or MIME type, and grouped it in families to easily distinguish clusters of content types. MIME types act like digital labels that tell browsers exactly what kind of file they are receiving, whether it's an HTML page, a JPEG image, or an MP4 video stream. By tracking these labels, we can infer what kinds of content users are consuming. Our hypothesis was that this behavior could be explained by a disproportionate amount of people watching the games via streaming in those countries. To test this, we compared traffic pattern distribution in games with teams of both clusters. In the following example, we see traffic distribution of Algeria and Austria respectively in the match between both countries. In Algeria, traffic was far above normal, then dipped at halftime. Note the large increase in streaming traffic, in orange. In Austria, where streaming services were used less, Internet traffic increased at halftime. In the Algeria graph above, we can see that the bulk of the increase during the match window indeed was driven by requests to multimedia and streaming services. This supports our hypothesis that the traffic trendlines correlate with use of streaming to watch the match. In Algeria, traffic rose sharply at kickoff, dropped during half-time, and returned to elevated levels once the second half began. Hydration breaks, by contrast, had little to no visible effect, which suggests that viewers don't meaningfully change their Internet or social behavior for short, in-play pauses, but do so during the longer halftime interval. Other countries in this cluster show similar behavior. This might be because a viewer is unlikely to close a stream for a three-minute cooling break, but a fifteen-minute halftime is long enough to close the stream and step away. What do people do during halftime? A minority of countries, including Tunisia and Algeria, disconnect during halftime, with traffic dropping below its in-play level (the blue boxes, sitting under the 1.0 line). The majority of countries go the other way: traffic rises during the break as people pick up their phones the moment play stops, then settles again when the second half begins. Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina show this most strongly, with halftime traffic running well above their in-play baseline. And hydration breaks? Halftime is a long, familiar pause, but what about the much shorter hydration breaks? These last only about three minutes, taken midway through each half. Is three minutes really enough to change how people behave online? It turns out it is. Just as at halftime, the moment play briefly stops, traffic in most countries ticks up before falling again when the game resumes. We measured this by taking, for each match, the peak number of requests in a window around the middle of each half (where the hydration break falls) and comparing it to the five minutes immediately before the break. The pattern lines up with everything we've seen so far: the same audiences that surge at halftime also spike during these brief pauses, while the few countries that tend to disconnect during breaks show little or no lift. Even a three-minute gap in play is enough for a large share of viewers to glance back at their phones. The final matches At the scale of Radar’s global HTTP requests, it is genuinely hard for any single event to leave a visible mark. Even so, the 2026 World Cup Final, which pitted Europe’s and American football champions against each other, had enough social impact to affect the Internet’s footprint. When looking at the volume of HTTP bytes from June 20 to June 22 we can immediately identify the final match kicking off at 21:00 UTC on June 19, as well as England vs. France for the Bronze medal at 23:00 UTC on June 18. During the final match, Argentina and Spain's traffic volume increased up to 20 percentage points when compared to a similar period. The bronze medal match also coincided with a traffic increase, although at a smaller scale. HTTP request volume during the final match also appeared correlated not only with the timeline of the game, but with each individual stage as well. Looking at the graph, we can roughly pinpoint moments such as the kickoff, halftime break, hydration breaks, as well as the final whistle. Keep up with world events on Cloudflare Radar Across every time zone, match, and goal, Cloudflare Radar provides a front-row seat to how the world connects during landmark cultural moments. To explore more interactive traffic insights and track how major worldwide events shape internet activity every day. Discover the latest marketing technology, automation, and customer engagement strategies driving business growth.
customer acquisition 22 Jul 2026
SurveyMonkey reintroduces GetFeedback, our easiest website feedback collector yet
SAN MATEO, Calif., July 22, 2026 – SurveyMonkey, the world’s most popular platform for surveys and forms, today announced GetFeedback by SurveyMonkey, a newly simplified self-serve experience that makes it easy for marketing, product, and digital customer experience teams to collect customer feedback directly on their websites. Website analytics tools can show teams where visitors drop off, but not why they leave. GetFeedback captures feedback at the exact moment visitors hesitate, encounter friction, or abandon their journey, revealing why visitors behave the way they do. The revamped GetFeedback is now available as a do-it-yourself offering that allows teams to sign up, choose a plan, create a form or button, and add it to their website using a single line of code, putting in-the-moment customer feedback within reach of more teams. "Every company is looking to improve its website, but most are making decisions based on incomplete information. Analytics can tell you what happened, but not why," said Eric Johnson, CEO at SurveyMonkey. “GetFeedback helps teams connect data to the customers behind it by capturing feedback in the moment. That built-in listening is what turns abstract numbers into actionable insights." GetFeedback empowers teams with ? Quick and easy setup: Choose a plan, create a feedback experience that best fits your needs, and add a simple code snippet to your website, with no complex implementation required. ? Flexible feedback collection: Capture feedback through always-on feedback buttons, forms triggered by specific user behavior, or embedded forms that appear naturally within your website experience, giving visitors multiple ways to share feedback when it's most top of mind for them. ? Built-in analytics: Analyze feedback from multiple forms in a single dashboard to identify trends and set priorities. ? Self-serve simplicity: Get started immediately with a streamlined purchase and setup experience. GetFeedback is designed for the teams closest to the digital experience. Marketing teams can optimize landing pages and conversion funnels, product teams can uncover onboarding friction and improve activation, ecommerce teams can identify what's driving cart abandonment, and UX teams can continuously improve digital experiences. Whether reducing drop-off, increasing conversion, or improving customer experiences, GetFeedback helps teams connect what website visitors do with why they do it. About GetFeedback GetFeedback helps teams improve website experiences by capturing in-context feedback at key moments across the customer journey, from landing pages and checkout flows to onboarding experiences. It helps organizations connect visitor behavior to direct human feedback and fix the experience issues hurting their business. About SurveyMonkey SurveyMonkey helps teams understand people and make better decisions. Every day, businesses, governments, educational institutions, and nonprofits use SurveyMonkey products to continuously gather feedback from real humans, conduct research, collect information, and improve experiences. The SurveyMonkey portfolio includes SurveyMonkey, the world's most popular platform for surveys and forms, built for business and loved by users; SurveyMonkey LaunchPad for ready-to-run market research solutions; SurveyMonkey applies to application and program management, GetFeedback for digital experience feedback; and Wufoo for online forms and payments. Millions of users around the world—from startups to Fortune 500 companies—rely on SurveyMonkey to turn feedback into action, validate ideas with confidence, strengthen customer and employee experiences, and make decisions that drive growth. Explore MarTech innovations helping brands optimize campaigns, improve customer experiences, and boost ROI.
customer experience management 22 Jul 2026
Survey shows that the live fan experience at the 2030 World Cup needs to be about more than just what happens in the stadium
LONDON, 21st July 2026: The biggest opportunity to improve the live fan experience at the 2030 FIFA World Cup lies in creating more personalised, inclusive and connected experiences, beyond the stadiums, according to a new survey from Wipro’s experience innovation company, Designit. Two in five poll respondents (40%) identified personalised fan experiences as the single biggest opportunity to improve the 2030 tournament, which will be the first in FIFA’s history to be hosted across three continents (Europe, South America and Africa). Accessibility and inclusion ranked second at 27%, followed by seamless digital journeys at 20%. However, only 13% said immersive stadium experiences were the biggest opportunity. The findings come as host nations and FIFA continue to invest heavily in stadium upgrades ahead of 2030. Yet the experience and design experts surveyed suggest the real opportunities lie before and after the 90 minutes rather than during them, and treat fan experiences as one connected journey, rather than a series of separate interactions. With the next World Cup taking place across Spain, Portugal and Morocco, alongside matches in Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay to mark the tournament’s centenary, delivering that connected experience will be particularly complex. Nick Merritt, Executive Director, UK and Ireland at Designit, said: “Modern stadium infrastructure across major tournaments has reached a consistently high standard, so it is increasingly the baseline expectation rather than the differentiator. “What varies is everything else: how fans get there, how included they feel, and how well the experience is personalised to who they are and why they’ve come. That starts long before they reach their seat and continues for hours, even days, after the final whistle. “The bigger challenge for 2030 will be connecting everything around the match: ticketing, public transport, accessibility services, and hospitality. These services may be delivered by different organisations, but fans experience them as one journey.” With studies showing that fans are investing more than ever, financially and emotionally, to attend the World Cup, getting the experience right before and after fans go through the turnstiles is what they will remember. Merritt continued: “Instead, it's the ‘grey space’ in between, the queues, the walk to the fan zone, and the journey home that get overlooked. That's exactly where the opportunity sits, and personalisation is where it starts. “Digital platforms should be part of that same experience. An app cannot compensate for a fragmented physical journey, and good transport infrastructure means little if the information fans receive is confusing or disconnected. The two need to be designed together. “Two fans might look identical on paper - same age, same demographic - but their interests and personalities can differ massively. Design one generic experience built on generic assumptions for both, and it won't work well for either. “Understanding the individual fan, not predicting them based on broad assumptions, is what actually improves the experience. Organisations that get this right will earn the kind of lasting fan loyalty that no stadium, however impressive, ever could.” The findings also carry a lesson for brands planning their involvement in future tournaments. Merritt concluded: “For brands, this isn’t about putting another activation outside a stadium. Instead, they should be considering more broadly where they can add something useful to the fan journey. “That opportunity may come weeks before the match, elsewhere in the host city or through a digital service that makes the experience easier to navigate. The brands that make a meaningful contribution will be those that understand where they have a credible role to play, rather than simply trying to be visible at the biggest moment.” Explore MarTech innovations helping brands optimize campaigns, improve customer experiences, and boost ROI.
digital transformation 21 Jul 2026
Genesys Research Finds AI Becomes a Strategic Imperative as Customer Expectations Rise in Australia and New Zealand
SYDNEY, 16 July, 2026 – New research from Genesys®, a global cloud leader in AI-Powered Experience Orchestration, found that customer expectations continue to rise across Australia and New Zealand (ANZ), placing increasing pressure on organisations to rethink how they deliver customer experiences. The fifth edition of the State of Customer Experience report found that 90% of ANZ consumers want every organisation to deliver experiences on par with the best experience they have ever had, while 95% say a company is only as good as its customer service. The findings reflect a growing expectation among consumers for faster, more seamless experiences. AI investment accelerates as expectations rise As customer expectations rise and patience for poor experiences declines, AI has become central to CX strategy. The research found that 85% of CX leaders view AI investments as critical or very influential to achieving their strategic CX goals, with nearly half (48%) of ANZ organisations reporting that they’re already using agentic AI virtual agents for customer interactions. Further, in the next 12 months, businesses in ANZ plan to spend 30% of their CX budget on AI-powered CX technologies. The opportunity for AI extends beyond operational efficiency. Consumers are increasingly focused on outcomes rather than who delivers them. Nearly two-thirds (62%) of ANZ customers don’t care who resolves their issue as long as it’s solved quickly and completely, while 97% value efficiency as much as empathy. Together, this reinforces the opportunity for organisations to combine AI with human expertise to deliver seamless, personalised experiences at scale. Despite strong momentum, organisations still have work to do to deliver the connected experiences customers expect. While 96% of consumers expect information to be remembered across channels, over a quarter (39%) of organisations do not automatically pass information between virtual and human agents. Nearly 41% consumers in ANZ mentioned having to repeat themselves to different human agents and nearly a quarter (23%) also said they had to repeat a conversation they’ve had with a virtual agent to a human agent in the past 12 months. This disconnect has tangible consequences. More than half (57%) of consumers say they would rather do anything else than contact customer service, while 21% have waited more than an hour to speak with a human customer support representative – more than four times the global average (5%). The findings reinforce that delivering seamless experiences requires more than faster service – it requires connecting AI, people, customer data and enterprise systems to reduce customer effort and create more connected customer journeys. At the same time, maintaining service quality with aging infrastructure has become the top internal operational challenge for CX leaders. Combined with budget constraints, these legacy systems make it difficult for organisations to scale AI and deliver the seamless experiences customers expect. “Customer expectations are rising rapidly across Australia and New Zealand, creating an opportunity for organisations to rethink how they deliver customer experiences,” said Mark Buckley, Vice President, Australia & New Zealand, Genesys. “As agentic AI becomes more deeply embedded in customer engagement, organisations that can orchestrate AI, human expertise, customer data and enterprise systems around a single customer journey will be best positioned to reduce customer effort, deliver more seamless and personalised experiences, and build stronger customer trust and loyalty.” Additional key findings for ANZ Consumers are embracing AI — but expect it to deliver. One-third (33%) are comfortable with AI making decisions on their behalf if it improves speed and resolution. Consumers expect AI and human support to work together. More than three in five (61%) ANZ consumers say they would react negatively if they couldn’t connect with a human agent after interacting with a virtual agent or chatbot. Poor experiences have real business consequences. Sixty-nine per cent of consumers would switch to a competitor after three or fewer bad experiences with a brand. For 19% of consumers, it only takes one bad experience before they switch, lower than the global average (21%). Together, the results show that the future of customer experience depends not only on agentic AI adoption, but on how effectively organisations connect AI, human interactions, data and systems across the customer journey. Methodology Genesys worked with an independent research firm to survey 5,811 consumers and 1,560 CX and business leaders in more than 20 countries. The study includes responses from 1,426 (24%) consumers and 508 (14%) CX leader respondents across Asia Pacific (APAC), providing regional insights alongside the global findings. The survey was conducted in March and April of 2026. Among the business respondents, the industries represented were airlines, automotive, banking, government, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, media and entertainment, professional services, retail, travel and hospitality, technology, telecommunications and utilities. About Genesys Genesys® empowers more than 8,000 organisations worldwide to create the best customer and employee experiences. With agentic AI at its core, Genesys Cloud™ is the AI-Powered Experience Orchestration platform that connects people, systems, data and AI across the enterprise. As a result, organisations can drive customer loyalty, growth and retention while increasing operational efficiency and teamwork across human and AI workforces. © 2026 Genesys. All rights reserved. Genesys, the Genesys logo and Genesys Cloud are trademarks, service marks and/or registered trademarks of Genesys. All other company names and logos may be registered trademarks or trademarks of their respective companies. Explore MarTech innovations helping brands optimize campaigns, improve customer experiences, and boost ROI.
customer experience management 16 Jul 2026
DemandScience Appoints Chris Moody as Chief GTM Evangelist
DANVERS, Mass., July 15, 2026 — DemandScience, the AI-powered B2B Precision Performance Marketing platform, today announced the appointment of Chris Moody as Chief GTM Evangelist. In his role, Moody will drive market education and thought leadership around the profound changes reshaping B2B go-to-market execution. As AI, fragmented buyer journeys, and declining signal quality challenge traditional platform-centric approaches, Moody will help marketing and revenue leaders navigate what comes next. "The martech industry is promising that AI agents and natural language processing will magically fix all of the GTM challenges B2B marketers face today,” said Moody. “The problem is, if your underlying data and signals are weak, a suite of AI agents will just help you make terrible decisions at lightning speed. I joined DemandScience because the team sees the exact same massive market transition that I do, and they are actually built to solve it.” Moody brings more than two decades of B2B marketing leadership to DemandScience. Most recently, he served as chief evangelist at Demandbase, where he helped shape the industry’s understanding of account-based marketing strategies. Prior to Demandbase, Moody held senior roles at Gartner (via the TOPO acquisition), Stax, Cheetah Digital, GE Digital, Oracle, and Red Hat and has advised hundreds of B2B marketing and sales organizations on revenue strategy. He is based in Raleigh, North Carolina. "The B2B go-to-market landscape is undergoing one of the biggest shifts we’ve seen in years,” said Bill Hobbib, CMO of DemandScience. “Organizations are rethinking how they connect data, intelligence, and execution to drive growth. Chris has spent his career helping companies navigate those kinds of transitions, and we’re excited to have him help shape the conversation around what’s next.” Moody's appointment reflects DemandScience’s belief that the B2B market is approaching a major inflection point. As organizations reassess sprawling technology stacks and seek more effective ways to turn data into revenue, success will increasingly depend on combining trusted signals, AI-powered intelligence, human expertise, and coordinated execution. Moody will help shape that conversation through research, customer engagement, and industry education. About DemandScience DemandScience is a global leader in precision performance marketing, helping B2B marketing and revenue teams turn fragmented data and disconnected execution into predictable pipeline outcomes. Trusted by more than 900 global brands, DemandScience delivers marketing that actually performs. Explore MarTech innovations helping brands optimize campaigns, improve customer experiences, and boost ROI.
business intelligence 15 Jul 2026
Sandler Launches First-to-Market Sales Performance Ecosystem to Measure, Coach, and Sustain Excellence Across the Entire Revenue Organization
ANNAPOLIS, MD – July 8, 2026 – Sandler, part of Trilliad’s Sales Performance Solutions service line, and a global leader in sales training and performance improvement, today announced the launch of the Sales Performance Ecosystem, a complete system for defining, measuring, training, and sustaining sales performance across the full revenue lifecycle. The Sales Performance Ecosystem is the industry's first solution that evaluates skill execution inside real buyer conversations and aggregates data into actionable, benchmark-grade performance intelligence to drive measurable impact on seller productivity, pipeline performance, and revenue outcomes. Key capabilities include: Real-Conversation Skill Measurement: The only solution that evaluates selling skills inside actual buyer conversations, going beyond transcript uploads and self-reported assessments to give organizations an objective view of how sellers perform in the moments that matter most. Behavior-Based Performance Evaluation: Skills are assessed based on meeting type and the direction of buyer language, measuring what actually drives results. Not whether a seller has conceptual understanding of a skill, but whether they can execute it under the pressure of a live deal, producing credible performance data that reflects real selling behavior. Measurable Link Between Training and Revenue: Skill performance is measured continuously, providing progressive insights connecting training adoption directly to revenue outcomes, including movement in revenue per rep over time. Personalized Coaching: Performance data from real conversations integrates with reinforcement tools, including AI roleplay, to deliver coaching and practice which is targeted to each seller's specific skill gaps, replacing generic feedback with observable, behavior-based guidance. Sales training is one of the most significant investments a revenue organization can make and sustaining its impact over time is where the greatest opportunity lies. Research shows that 84% of training content is forgotten within three months, and only 8% of organizations feel confident measuring training ROI. The root cause is not retention, but a lack of visibility into what actually happens in front of a buyer. The Sales Performance Ecosystem solves that by measuring seller skills inside real conversations, establishing continuous performance benchmarks, and aligning coaching to observable behaviors so revenue teams can sustain performance, not just train for it. "Sellers are not forgetting what they learned. They are choosing whether to use it. That is the real performance gap, and it has been hiding in plain sight for years,” said Seth Marrs, Chief Strategy Officer at Sandler. “We built the Sales Performance Ecosystem because organizations deserve a system that makes that gap visible, gives them the tools to close it, and drives the outcomes that matter most, including more consistent seller execution, stronger pipeline, and revenue growth that compounds over time.” “Varicent's revenue leadership operating model needs to connect business performance with the behaviors and skills that drive it,” said Jessica Ryker, Director of GTM at Varicent. “The Sales Performance Ecosystem does this, helping leaders move beyond compiling results to diagnosing performance gaps, delivering targeted coaching, and improving outcomes.” Sandler is the foundation of Trilliad's Sales Performance Solutions service line, providing the methodology and expertise that anchors Trilliad's mission to drive predictable revenue growth for its clients. As Trilliad continues to build one of the most comprehensive growth services portfolios in the market, Sandler's global leadership in sales training and performance improvement sits at the center of that capability.
marketing 13 Jul 2026
Xero announces new AI innovations at Xerocon London as it powers five million customers globally
Melbourne — 9 July 2026 — Xero (ASX: XRO), the global small business platform, today announced new AI-powered features within its agentic platform JAX that make it easier for small businesses and accountants and bookkeepers to keep their books clean, automate time-consuming financial workflows, and stay on top of cash flow. Also showcased were recently introduced integrations with Microsoft 365 and Anthropic which bring Xero financial intelligence and data into the everyday tools small businesses and accountants already use. Additionally, Xero highlighted at Xerocon London that it serves five million customers worldwide. This demonstrates the scale of Xero built over the company’s 20 years of operating and reinforces the global impact of Xero’s continued innovation and industry leadership, providing small businesses, accountants, and bookkeepers with the end-to-end financial management platform they rely on to run their business. “When Xero moved the ledger to the cloud, we completely reimagined what was possible for small businesses and their advisors. Today, we’re at a similar inflection point as we define the agentic era for small business finance,” said Diya Jolly, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Xero. “Our vision for AI innovation is deeply grounded in Accountable Intelligence – where we automate routine, time-consuming tasks while firmly elevating human judgment. With the power of JAX, we are streamlining complex workflows and turning insights into immediate action so small businesses and their advisors can focus on what matters most.” End-to-end AI accounting and stress-free compliance Book health starts with data health, and Xero is making the entire end-to-end journey from preparing books to filing taxes happen seamlessly in one unified platform with the following innovations: Xero Partner Hub is evolving to bring live book health, work status, and month-end readiness into a single view connected directly to tax and advisory. This will allow practices to seamlessly manage their entire portfolio's books-to-tax compliance workflow in one centralised place Smart Document Capture is where the journey starts. JAX reads source documents and automatically extracts relevant data and information directly into Xero. Over the coming months, Xero will introduce capabilities to extract data from bank statements, and auto-create transactions Auto bank reconciliation powered by JAX automates one of the most time consuming manual tasks in bookkeeping by matching transactions to bank feeds automatically, in real-time. It will soon automate complex cases, such as splitting a single payment across sales and fees Document chasing is coming soon where JAX will automatically identify transactions missing a receipt, so you don’t have to search through files to determine what’s missing AI-powered financial workflows, wherever you work Xero has also introduced new native capabilities and third-party integrations that securely connect Xero data with apps and tools small businesses and accountants and bookkeepers use every day to remove operational complexity and turn fragmented tasks into streamlined, automated financial workflows. To help businesses and practices turn manual financial tasks into durable, scalable workflows, Xero introduced XeroForce, a natural language custom AI agent builder powered by Xero OS. Without writing code, accountants and small businesses can use simple prompts to build custom AI agents that connect Xero to the third-party apps they already use Through advanced integrations with Anthropic’s Claude and Microsoft 365 Copilot, Xero is orchestrating workflows wherever a small business or accountant works. These integrations allow customers to securely access and query their live Xero financial data directly from their everyday productivity suites Expanded capabilities for growing businesses: Introducing Xero Ultra As small businesses scale, their financial operations naturally become more complex, often forcing them to outgrow their favourite tools. Xero is changing that trajectory with Xero Ultra, bringing enterprise-style financial control and reporting, without the enterprise-style cost, disruption or implementation burden – on the Xero platform finance teams and their advisors already know and trust. JAX: Helping customers end more months cash flow positive Cash flow is critical for any business and it all starts with getting paid. Xero Payments is already helping customers end more months cash flow positive and new JAX innovations introduced today aim to automate even more of the payments flow to further improve cash flow for businesses. Payment follow ups: JAX will analyse a customer’s unique payment history and automatically execute tailored collection plans. Whether consolidating multiple invoices, sending perfectly timed nudges, or pivoting to SMS for non-responsive clients, JAX dynamically adapts to payment behaviour to secure faster payouts Bill protection: JAX will automatically inspect every bill before payment, flagging unusual amounts, altered bank details, or unfamiliar suppliers, catching anomalies that manual reviews might miss Cash flow actions: JAX actively builds preventative plans and can suggest delaying non-critical bills, protecting payroll, and bridging remaining gaps. Because everything lives on the same ledger, businesses can review, adjust, and execute the plan without leaving Xero All of the features announced today sit within the AI-native Xero OS, which gives small businesses and accountants the financial control and clarity they need in one unified platform. Stay ahead with insights on AI-powered marketing, data-driven strategies, and digital transformation.
business 9 Jul 2026
Anteriad Recognized by Business Intelligence Group with 2026 Sales and Marketing Excellence Award, The Sammy
New York, NY - Anteriad, a global leader in AI and data-driven, tech-enabled B2B marketing, today announced that the company has won The Sammy, the Business Intelligence Group's award for excellence in sales and marketing, for the second year in a row. Anteriad earned top honors in the Growth Catalyst Product/Service for AI Powered Marketing and Sales category. "The 2026 Sammy winners are not just great marketers, they are accountable ones. What set this year's honorees apart was their ability to connect strategy to outcomes and show exactly what moved the needle. Anteriad is a strong example of that standard in action," said Russ Fordyce, Chief Recognition Officer at the Business Intelligence Group. More marketing and sales teams are embracing buying groups, using data to inform a more coordinated approach to driving pipeline, but there is ample opportunity to increase the use of buying group intelligence. Anteriad’s recent research with Ascend 2, “The 2026 B2B Marketing Edge: Control is the Competitive Advantage,” finds that only 38% of B2B marketing teams have fully implemented buying groups. Most companies are still nascent in their use of buying group data to inform sales and marketing strategies. Anteriad provides the AI-powered solution to close that gap. Using Anteriad's proprietary verified contact records, firmographic intelligence, behavioral signals, engagement and intent data, the Anteriad Marketing Cloud dynamically identifies and assembles complete buying groups tailored to the product being sold and the organization being targeted. Marketers can build buying groups dynamically using AI or map the known persona, titles and roles manually, then activate them immediately across multichannel campaigns, content syndication, and BDR outreach in 25+ languages. Anteriad received a 5 out of 5, the highest score possible, in the Buying Group Detail criterion in The Forrester Wave™: Marketing and Sales Data Providers for B2B, Q1 2026. In the company’s view, this score speaks to the buying group capabilities Anteriad has been delivering to customers since Q4 2025 through its AI-Driven Buying Group Profiles in the Anteriad Marketing Cloud. “We are delighted to receive recognition of our AI-powered Buying Group solution with this Sammy award. Our full-funnel buying group capability combines audience discovery, planning, campaign orchestration and measurement using AI to increase insight, efficiency and performance. As more B2B marketing and sales teams embrace buying groups, Anteriad is the partner that gets them further, faster, with less guesswork along the way,” said Rob Sanchez, CEO at Anteriad. The Sales and Marketing Excellence Awards honor the organizations, campaigns, teams, technologies, and individuals setting the standard for what sales and marketing can accomplish when strategy, execution, and accountability converge. This year's program attracted nominations from organizations across more than 20 industries worldwide and was evaluated by a panel of experienced business executives using objective scoring benchmarks. For the complete list of 2026 Sales and Marketing Excellence Award winners, visit www.bintelligence.com. About Anteriad Anteriad empowers B2B marketers to get in front of their next customer faster through full-funnel marketing programs powered by responsible AI and deep human expertise. Our unique global data and award-winning Anteriad Marketing Cloud drive advanced analytics engagements, managed service multichannel brand and demand campaigns, programmatic audiences, and BDR-as-a-service programs. Ambitious marketers and agencies including ServiceNow, JustGlobal, Microsoft, KPMG, RTIC, and Havas trust our data-driven approach to maximize impact and ROI. Learn how AI-powered marketing solutions improve campaign performance and ROI.
business 9 Jul 2026
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