Zoho on Thursday expanded its CRM Plus collection of software applications to include tools for customer service teams such as Zia, an intelligent assistant that uses voice recognition features much like Apple’s Siri to address critical questions or complaints. Although Zia (which stands for “Zoho intelligent assistant”) has been available to CRM Plus customers for […]
Showpad on Wednesday will announce an acquisition that will bring artificial intelligence-based voice recording and transcription analysis to its customer base of sales professionals as a way of boosting their productivity and effectiveness. The Chicago-based firm, whose software offers a range of sales enablement capabilities to B2B firms, said it has purchased Voicefox, a two-year […]
Infogroup CMO Tony Marlow has some advice for his peers: the only way to effectively target B2B audiences is to mirror the seamless, personalized shopping experiences that consumers have grown to crave. A provider of data, analytics and marketing services based in Papillon, Nebraska, Infogroup announced the hiring of Marlow as well as four other […]
PwC estimates that AI will add $15.7 trillion to the world economy by 2030. IBM predicts that blockchain technology’s contribution will have reached $3.1 trillion by then. Clearly, both technologies have the potential to be extremely valuable. Even more intriguing is their convergence. Today, AI is still a limited technology that can be said to […]
Lots of CEOs in the AI space show off examples of robots that look and sound a bit like human beings. Suzanne Gildert, CEO of Sanctuary AI, may be the first to show off one that is designed to look exactly like herself. Speaking at the Canadian Innovation Exchange (CIX) conference in Toronto on Monday, […]
HR services firm Morneau Shepell is trying to tackle some of the biggest challenges affecting the mental health of business professionals by improving the artificial intelligence capabilities of a chatbot it introduced earlier this year. Speaking at the IBM Innovate conference in Toronto on Thursday, Morneau Shepell CIO Michael Lin said the chatbot, dubbed Ava, […]
Recruiting is hard. Recruiting great leaders is even harder. Managers are arguably one of, if not the most integral function within an enterprise, and therefore investing the time and resources into finding the right talent is essential. According to a Deloitte survey, 81 percent of respondents named talent acquisition the most important challenge last year. […]
Customer relationship management provider Affinity is using artificial intelligence technology to sift through employees’ e-mail and calendar data in hopes of easing the search for “warm” introductions to prospects and customers. San Francisco-based Affinity described Alliances, which was released on Monday, as a tool that will create a “relationship graph” to help those in sales […]
As Microsoft’s chief data scientist, Ozge Yeloglu’s job is not to develop specific products but simply help further customer success with tools like artificial intelligence. There are some occasions, however, when she just has to say no. Speaking at last week’s Elevate Tech Fest in Toronto, Yeloglu — who works for the software giant’s Canadian […]
SAP used the TechEd 2018 conference to introduce a new version of its Data Hub that will bring together different kinds of business applications and information no matter where it sits so organizations can improve the way they do things like upsell, cross-sell and conduct account-based marketing campaigns. Speaking to customers and partners in Las […]
Concured has already brought artificial intelligence to augment the creative creative stories brands tell through content marketing. Its next chapter will focus on sales enablement. Based in London, Concured uses AI to address a lot of the unknown questions that make the creative process in content marketing so difficult. Its technology ingests data to help […]
A few days ago, Randy Guard was sitting in a quiet boardroom in San Diego’s Grand Hyatt where, only steps away, some of his biggest and most marquee customers were discussing their IT and business strategies as part of his firm’s Analytics Experience. The SAS CMO didn’t need any software, however, to know what was […]
A pair of smart glasses using duct tape and zip wires that allowed an artist with Lou Gehrig’s disease to draw again. An artificial arm made via 3D printing that brought mobility back to bombing victims in Sudan. A vibrating wristbrand that may be able to stop those with Parkinson’s from trembling. If you have […]
The Six Sigma methodology of improving processes includes, as a first step, capturing the voice of the customer (VOC) and using it as a guideline to provide the best experience and quality. The VOC is essential since it includes both stated and implied requirements. It varies continuously and requires frequent updating. With the rise of […]
The manufacturing environment has always been one in which people often perform tedious, repetitive tasks. If you ask any manufacturing operative about the monotony of quality inspection, sorting or grading, and moving materials or components from A to B, you’ll soon know why these tasks are eminently suitable for automation. However, the reason these activities […]
Despite the introduction of natural language processing, machine learning and other technologies into major software packages, nearly half of B2B marketers say artificial intelligence plays no role in their current strategy, according to research from EverString and Heinz Marketing. In ‘The State of Artificial Intelligence in B2B Marketing,’ EverString and Heinz surveyed 300 marketers, mostly […]
B2B companies that offer customer service primarily through e-mail and chat can get a better sense of their emotional state through a sentiment analysis feature TeamSupport is introducing to enterprise versions of its software. Dallas-based TeamSupport said the sentiment analysis functionality will be based on the natural language processing (NLP) technology used by IBM’s Watson […]
Unbounce has been helping marketing teams develop and generate better performance from landing pages since its inception, but now the firm is using comparative data to show customers how machine learning could improve their results even further. In a series of event appearances starting last Fall, Vancouver-based Unbounce has been staging “Machine vs. Marketer,” where […]
About 10 years go, long before she took the lead at the Omnia artificial intelligence practice of Deloitte, Shelby Austin was working as a partner in a law firm, reviewing documents and preparing for trial. The documents — all 30,000 of them — were in binders, and they were being divided “relevant,” “privileged” and “hot […]
Companies need to move past using analytics and artificial intelligence to merely inform business decisions and allow the technologies to actually make decisions on their own across all functional areas, according to the director of data science at Samsung. In his keynote at the Big Data Toronto conference on Tuesday, Matthew Fitz suggested enterprises are […]
