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Newsweek
29-07-2025
- Business
- Newsweek
AI Impact Awards 2025: Media Execs Say AI Won't Replace Human Creativity
AI advances in industries like software development or health care are largely understood to improve efficiencies when dealing with numbers and data. But there is still concern about the use of automation and generative AI in creative industries, where a unique human touch is paramount. The winners of Newsweek's AI Impact Awards in the category of Arts & Media represented three different industries that are using this emerging technology. For them, using AI doesn't eliminate human input. It increases efficiency, democratizes their fields and allows for more creativity to hit the marketplace. Interdependence Interdependence is a PR and strategic communications firm, with offices in every major market across the U.S., that works with clients across industries, including entertainment, consumer and travel brands. It is the winner of Newsweek's AI Impact Award for Best Outcomes, Digital Media & Arts. In addition to traditional media relations, the company manages social media, influencer marketing, branding and SEO. Interdependence now uses generative AI on a platform called Interviewed to identify trends based on what customers are searching for online. "The trend alerts are based on click rates," Interdependence President Sarah Schmidt told Newsweek in an interview. "So when our AI determines that a click rate is spiking, that's when we know that a certain topic or trend is emerging to trend, and that's our cue to go out with it." For their client Overtone, a semipermanent hair dye company, Interdependence identified major hair trends on social media. When celebrities like Kylie Jenner, Busy Philipps and Megan Fox dyed their hair pink last year, Interviewed picked up a rapid spike in conversations around pink hair in both traditional media and social media, as audiences were eager to re-create the look. Interdependence gathered trend data and alerted beauty editors, journalists and influencers covering the trend to pitch Overtone's product that was relevant to the trend. Interviewed has a database of 25,000 journalists to identify who has written about emerging trends or similar topics. The AI tools' rapid response allowed Interdependence to "get ahead of" the trend in a way that was timely and relevant, Schmidt said. "By aligning with celebrity-driven beauty trends, we secured top-tier placements at the peak of interest, positioning Overtone as an industry leader in on-trend hair color," Interdependence said in its awards application. The "King Kylie Pink" hair trend garnered nearly 79 million impressions, and the brand's product was placed in eight major media outlets, including Byrdie, Glamour, MSN, Allure and Yahoo Lifestyle, according to Interdependence. Schmidt said the company is constantly adjusting the tool by updating specific keywords that will pick up trends quicker, "before they blow up," and track better data for clients. And when teams can spend less time tracking and making dashboards, Schmidt said, they can focus on higher-level tasks, like developing creative strategies to help clients continue to innovate and expand. Integrating technology internally will be "a game changer" for PR firms, like Interdependence, which, Schmidt said, relies on storytelling and personal relationships. AI Impact Awards: Arts & Media AI Impact Awards: Arts & Media Newsweek Illustration "We want to maintain our competitive advantage; we are continuing to push the boundaries, continuing to innovate, and we are committed to having the most advanced tech stack in public relations," she said. "We want our team to have every tool at their disposal that is going to make them efficient, optimized and smart so we can continue to add that value to our clients." Automation of lower-level tasks through AI tech is encouraged throughout the company, but, Schmidt said, there is still that human touch to everything teams do. "We really are living at the corner of tech plus human plus innovation," she said. "We never will downplay the importance of our humans and their strategy, their creativity, their ability to make relationships and connect. That's something that AI can never do. And so from that perspective, PR still needs to be uniquely human. We just power our team through these innovations to get to fully optimize them and make their work as strategic and propped-up with tech as possible." Spines AI is not only helping improve internal and external efficiency but also increasing accessibility in arts and media creation. Thirteen years ago, Israeli author Yehuda Niv encountered many roadblocks and inefficiencies when trying to publish his book. He later founded Niv Publishing, which grew into one of Israel's largest publishing houses, with more than 1,200 titles published annually. But still, the publishing process remained slow, costly and inaccessible for so many people. Using AI technology, Niv founded Spines, an AI-driven publishing platform that "removes the barriers that prevent authors from bringing their books to market," the company said in its application. Spines is now the winner of Newsweek's AI Impact Award for Best Outcomes, Written Media & Arts. A book normally takes six to 18 months to get published. But with Spines, Niv said, the process takes two to three weeks. And it costs thousands of dollars instead of tens of thousands of dollars. To circumvent those challenges, Spines deploys AI to automate key stages like spelling and grammar checks, page formatting, cover design and audiobook creation. Spines also offers marketing services to create and manage campaigns for authors across a wide distribution network. This drives down costs and saves time, while allowing authors to retain 100 percent of their net royalties and full control of their content post-publication. "We take care of everything, and then the authors can focus on what they are doing best, which is writing books," Niv told Newsweek in an interview. "We are ready to empower authors with the power of AI to help them to boost their writing, to boost their stories [and] to make them reach more." The company has published over 2,000 titles in 2024 and is on track to reach 8,000 by the end of 2025, the company said. Beyond revenue and volume growth, Spines also measures its success by author satisfaction and retention, noting a high percentage of returning authors who publish multiple books. Post-publication tracking also indicates that the platform is able to drive book sales and visibility to a wide range of audiences. One of the biggest challenges of the platform was resistance and skepticism from those coming from a traditional publishing background. But Niv assured Newsweek that Spines is not trying to replace the authors—Spines is here to help authors realize their dreams in the most efficient way. To those who assume increasing access to publishing will decrease the quality of the books, Niv says, "Who are you to choose what is high quality and what isn't?" "Because the publishing space was controlled for a very long time by the elite publishers who [decide] who is worthy and who isn't worthy to become an author," he said. "And I am here to say that if someone spent a year of his life writing a manuscript, he's worthy of getting his book published. Let the readers decide if it's good writing or not. Let's give him a chance." Moonvalley Like Spines, Moonvalley aims to eliminate the traditional barriers for filmmakers by cutting production costs and helping artists realize their vision faster. The company won Newsweek's AI Impact Award for Best Outcomes, Visual Media & Arts. It was founded to "make generative video technology" for filmmakers and creative professionals. It provides AI tools to creatives "that enhance their vision rather than replace their craft," the company said in its application. CEO Naeem Talukdar told Newsweek that Moonvalley is focused on the creators and building control for them to best execute their work. "We're building models that can go in and move cameras around, change the lighting and have people decide who's involved and where they're moving and how they're moving," he said, adding that this process is broadly defined internally as generative filmmaking. The company built Marey, an AI video model designed for professional filmmakers. It's also the first clean AI model, where the data, video and imaging used to train the models come from licensed content generated by a network of hundreds of creators, including film school students, independent filmmakers, international studios and film catalogues. Moonvalley recently announced that it is opening public access to Marey. In a recent press release, Moonvalley Chief Scientific Officer Mateusz Malinowski said Marey gives directors the same level of controls they expect on set and by working with filmmakers directly: "We built technology that amplifies and empowers their creative vision rather than replacing it." At Moonvalley's in-house studio, Asteria, filmmakers are incorporating these AI tools, which allow the company to "build technology that's actually built for creators, rather than just kind of being these abstract models," Talukdar said. Moonvalley built specialized interfaces that let filmmakers direct the AI model using sketches, storyboards, photos and camera controls. According to the company, working directly with professionals shaped the workflow and controls to ensure the technology would fit seamlessly into existing creative processes. The company likens the effect of this technology to the shift from silent film to talkies, the introduction of Technicolor or the advent of CGI in the ways it is "opening doors to a new creative renaissance where a broader range of voices and stories can be shared." "When CGI first came out, there were these fears that a lot of jobs just aren't going to be there anymore," Talukdar said. "And it's true: there are things that obviously you didn't need to do anymore post-CGI that you did before. However, studios have only increased in size since CGI came out, because now you have a whole new cascade of roles that have opened up in VFX and different things that you have to do." He said the proliferation of AI in filmmaking will allow independent filmmakers to make more films "What's going to happen is that you're talking about a 30 to 50 percent savings, and that alone is enough to cause this massive flourishing of creativity," Talukdar said. "I really think that you're going to see a golden age of cinema emerge from these independent studios now suddenly being able to punch above their weight and create AAA content, whereas otherwise, they would have just been making indie movies." There is plenty of pushback against the use of AI in the filmmaking process, but, he said, many of the fears are not the reality. "I'm not going to spend two hours watching a ChatGPT-generated movie," he said. "There's no quick fixes to it, like the industry is angry, and they're going to be hostile to the technology, as is completely natural." The solution, he said, is to ease in a "show, not tell" strategy to demonstrate that creatives can do the same things in a way that is more feasible than before. "With a generative videography model, these are just power tools," Talukdar said. "Expecting them to replace filmmakers is asinine. What they need to be is something that filmmakers can now use to realize their visions in a way that they couldn't before. It's not that you can make $50 million movies for $10 million, it's that the studio with a $10 million budget can now make that money go a lot further."
Newsweek
22-07-2025
- Business
- Newsweek
AI Impact Awards 2025: Meet the 'Best Of' Winners
Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. Newsweek announced its inaugural AI Impact Awards last month, recognizing 38 companies for tackling everyday problems with innovative solutions. Winners were announced across 13 categories, including Best of—Most Innovative AI Technology or Service, which highlighted some of the most outstanding cross-industry advancements in the practical use of machine learning. Among the five recipients in the Best Of category is Ex-Human, a digital platform that allows users to create customizable AI humans to interact with. Ex-Human took home the Extraordinary Impact in AI Human Interactivity or Collaboration award. Artem Rodichev, the founder and CEO of Ex-Human, told Newsweek that he started his company in response to the growing loneliness epidemic. According to the U.S. Surgeon General, some 30 percent of U.S. adults experience feelings of loneliness once a week. Those figures are even higher in young Americans. Roughly 80 percent of Gen Z report feeling lonely. The epidemic is also keeping college kids up at night, and studies show that a lack of connection can lead to negative health outcomes. To help bridge that gap, Rodichev sought to create empathetic characters, or what he described as "non-boring AI." "If you chat with ChatGPT, it doesn't feel like you are chatting with your friend," Rodichev said. "You feel more like you're chatting with Mr. Wikipedia. The responses are informative, but they're boring." What his company wanted to create, instead, was "AI that can feel, that can love, that can hate, that can feel emotions and can connect on an emotional level with users," Rodichev said. He cited the 1982 sci-fi classic Blade Runner and the Oscar-nominated film Her as two main forms of inspiration. AI Impact Awards: Best of Most Innovative AI Impact Awards: Best of Most Innovative Newsweek Illustration Trained on millions of real conversations, Ex-Human enables companies to create personalized AI companions that can strengthen digital connections between those characters and human users. Internal data suggests Ex-Human's technology is working. Their users spend an average of 90 minutes per day interacting with their AI companions, exchanging over 600 messages per week on average. "At any moment, a user can decide, 'It's boring to chat with a character. I'll go check my Instagram feed. I'll watch this funny TikTok video.' But for some reason, they stay," Rodichev said. "They stay and continue to chat with these companions." "A lot of these people struggle with social connections. They don't have a lot of friends and they have social anxiety," he said. "By chatting with these companions, they can reduce the social anxiety, they can improve their mental health. Because these kind of fake companions, they act as social trainers. They never judge you, they're available to you 24/7, you can discuss any fears, everything that you have in your head in a no-judgment environment." Ex-Human projects that it will have 10 million users by early next year. The company has also raised over $3.7 million from investors, including venture capitalist firm Andreessen Horowitz. Rodichev said while Ex-Human's AIs have been popular among young people, he foresees it becoming more popular among the elderly—another population that often suffers from loneliness—as AI adoption becomes more widespread. He also anticipated that Ex-Human would be a popular technology for companies with big IP portfolios, like Disney, whose popular characters may be "heavily underutilized" in the age of AI. Also among this year's "Best Of" winners is a developer-focused platform that allows users to create AI-generated audio, video and images. was the recipient of this year's Extraordinary Impact in General Purpose AI Tool or Service award. Co-founder Gorkem Yurtseven told Newsweek that the award was particularly meaningful to him "because it recognizes generative media as its own market and sector that is very promising and growing really fast." is almost exclusively focused on B2B, selling AI media tools to help other companies generate audio, video and images for their business. Essentially a "building block," the AI allows different clients to have unique experiences, Yurtseven explained. So far, the biggest categories for are advertising and marketing, and retail and e-commerce. "AI-generated ads are a very clear product-market fit. You can create unlimited versions of the same ad and test it to understand which ones perform better than the others. The cost of creation also goes down to zero," Yurtseven said. In the retail space, he said has commonly been used for product photography. His company's capabilities allow businesses to display products on diverse background or in various settings, and to even build experiences where customers are pictured wearing the items. Yurtseven believes that in some ways, he and his co-founder, Burkay Gur, got lucky. When large language models (LLM) started to gain steam, many thought the market for image and video models was too small. "Turns out, they were wrong," Yurtseven chuckled. "The market is very big, and now, everyone understands it." "We were able to ride the LLM AI wave, in a sense," he said. "People got excited about AI. It was, in the beginning, mostly LLMs. But image and media models got included into that as well, and you were able to tap into the AI budgets of different companies that were created because of the general AI wave." The one sector that he's waiting to embrace AI-generated audio, images and videos is social media. Yurtseven said this could be on an existing app or a completely new platform, but so far, "a true social media app, at the largest scale, hasn't been able to utilize this in a fun and engaging way." "I think it's going to be very interesting once someone figures that out," he said. "There's a lot of interesting and creative ways people are using this in smaller circles, but it hasn't reached a big social network where it becomes a daily part of our lives, similar to how Snapchat stories or Instagram stories became. So, I'm still expecting that's going to happen." There's no doubt that AI continues to evolve at a rapid pace, but initiatives to address AI's potential dangers and ethical concerns haven't quite matched that speed. The winner of this year's Extraordinary Impact in AI Transparency or Responsibility award is EY, which created a responsible AI framework compliant with one of the most comprehensive AI regulations to date: the European Union's Artificial Intelligence Act, which took effect on August 1, 2024. Joe Depa, EY's global chief innovation officer, told Newsweek that developing the framework was a natural next step for EY, a global professional services company with 400,000 employees that does everything from consulting to tax to assurance to strategy and transactions. "If you think about what that is, it's a lot of data," Depa said. "And when I think about data, one of the most important components around data right now is responsible AI." As a company operating in 150 countries worldwide, EY has seen firsthand how each country approaches AI differently. While some have more restrictive policies, others have almost none around responsible AI. This means there's no real "playbook" for what works and what doesn't work, Depa said. "It used to be that there was policy that you could follow. The policymakers would set policy, and then you could follow that policy," he said. "In this case, the speed of technology and the speed of AI and the rate of technology and pace of technology evolution is creating an environment where we have to be much more proactive about the way that we integrate responsible AI into everything we do, until the policy makers can catch up." "Now, it's incumbent upon leaders, and in particular, leaders that have technology prowess and have data sets to make sure that responsible AI is integrated into everything we do," Depa said. As part of their framework, EY teams at the company implemented firm-wide AI definitions that would promote consistency and clarity across all business functions. So far, their clients have been excited about the framework, Depa said. "At EY, trust is everything that we do for our clients," he said. "We want to be a trusted brand that they can they can trust with their data—their tax data, the ability to assure that the data from our insurance business and then hopefully help them lead through this transformation." "We're really proud of the award. We're excited for it. It confirms our approach, it confirms our understanding, and it confirms some of the core values that we have at EY," Depa said. As part of Newsweek's AI Impact Awards, Pharebio and Axon were also recognized in the Best of—Most Innovative AI Technology or Service category. Pharebio received the Extraordinary Impact in AI Innovation award, while Axon received the Extraordinary Impact in Commercial Tool or Service Award. To see the full list of winners and awards, visit the official page for Newsweek's AI Impact Awards.
Newsweek
15-07-2025
- Business
- Newsweek
AI Impact Awards 2025: Financial Services Need Efficient, Reliable Solutions
Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. In the world of finance, efficiency and accuracy are paramount for institutions managing billions in assets around the world. The three winners of Newsweek's AI Impact Awards in the Finance category are pioneering AI technology to help streamline operations, save time and money, boost employee well-being and protect against fraud. Principal Financial Group Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer Kathy Kay told Newsweek that the future of AI in financial services is both exciting and transformative. "I see it driving smarter decision-making, hyper-personalized customer experiences and stronger risk management," she said over email. "We will see problems being solved in ways we never thought possible so our people can continue to do their best work. But to realize that future responsibly, we need to invest just as much in data literacy, ethical frameworks and cross-functional collaboration as we do in the technology itself. It's not just about what AI can do — it's about how we guide it to create real, sustainable value." Principal Financial Group is a Fortune 500 investment management and insurance company with $712 billion in total assets under management around the world. In response to facing critical operation challenges and inefficiencies internally, the company created the Principal Artificial Intelligence Generative Experience (PAIGE) – an AI-powered assistant that automates content generation, training materials and marketing content through advanced analytics. "Like many growing organizations, we saw opportunities where smarter tools could make a real difference," Kay said. "More specifically, we knew that using technology in the right way could free up our employees' time and allow them to prioritize the most important things – like solving complex customer problems." Kay said teams were spending too much time on things like managing documents and onboarding new employees and there was a "persistent" challenge with explaining complex financial topics in clear, accessible ways. "We knew these hurdles were affecting both our internal teams and our ability to communicate consistently with customers," she said. PAIGE's main functions include creating compliant and efficient documents and training materials, breaking down complicated financial concepts into clear, approachable language and handling routine tasks to improve productivity and allow employees to "focus on what really matters," Kay said. The company is already seeing measurable results as PAIGE's growth has exceeded expectations, "expanding from initial pilot users to over 800 active users by year-end," according to the company. There is a 50 percent reduction in task completion time across diverse functions, including client inquiries, while maintaining accuracy metrics with a query acceptance rate exceeding 95 percent and negative feedback remained below 1 percent. Newsweek Illustration Customer onboarding time also decreased by 90 percent, down from over 20 days to just three days. This efficiency has enabled the company to service 40 percent more members over five years. Kay said that PAIGE helps break down barriers to make financial planning more accessible for everyone, exemplifying Principal's core value that everyone deserves a clear path to financial security. "Simply put, it's here to help us fulfill our promise: making financial security achievable for all," she said. "Whether it's helping our employees work more efficiently or making financial concepts less intimidating, it supports our vision of a world where everyone has the tools and understanding they need to pursue their financial dreams." ABBYY, a global tech company specializing in AI-powered document processing and automation, also understands the need for efficiency and accuracy when working internally and for clients and partners. The company has been around for over 30 years and serves over 10,000 customers, including several Fortune 500 companies, McDonald's, Volkswagen, Deloitte, DHL and the National Library of Latvia. CFO Brian Unruh told Newsweek in an interview that the company has "product superiority," but is hoping to improve its "operational excellence," which is key to really reduce the friction not only how we work team of teams, but how we engage with our customers." ABBYY is the winner of Newsweek's AI Impact Award for Best Outcomes, Accounting for its work helping Asia-Pacific vehicle part provider Bapcor and Australian dairy cooperative Norco with its advanced Document AI. According to the company's application, ABBYY was able to reduce the need for manual entry and matching, cut down on overtime and excessive labor costs related to invoice processing, and free up accounts payable employees' time for more fulfilling and value-generating tasks. ABBYY IDP was able to streamline Norco's invoices for shipping goods to various locations and reduce labor costs by about half, Unruh said. It also helped Bapcor move away from printed invoices and manual data entry to improve efficiency and eliminate overtime – both saving costs and boosting employee satisfaction. "These aren't edge cases, this is typical," Unruh said, "We find customers that benefit, especially in finance and banking, because they have fiduciary responsibilities for accuracy. And so we come in and we can cut their error rate, and that's hard savings for them." When adopting AI for business operations, Unruh said it's important to "walk the walk" and demonstrate how the AI solution addresses actual problems or opportunities. It is also important for that solution to be rooted in ethical and responsible practices. "It's really important that this isn't something that they are recklessly deploying, or it's not long term," he said. "It's one thing about going live, it's another thing [to have] maintenance and make sure that you continue driving the success that you intend." In the financial world, AI tools are not only helping financial institutions work better, more efficiently, but they are also helping protect against fraud. Instnt, a venture-backed insurance technology business, uses AI to mitigate fraud risks for businesses and transfers residual losses to the insurance market, saving businesses millions in operational and treasury costs. It is also the winner of Newsweek's award for Best Outcomes, Mitigating Fraud in the AI Finance category. "Globally, fraud is set to account for something like 4 to 5 percent of global GDP loss," Instnt founder and CEO Sunil Madhu told Newsweek. "If that fraud loss was a country, it'd be the third or fourth largest country in the world." When he started his previous company, a platform for digital identity verification called Socure, Madhu saw a larger problem around how fraud was being managed in the financial industry and decided to start a new company to address that. With the Instnt Fraud Loss Insurance Solution, the company helps customers detect fraud with AI-driven models. "Instnt is the first company that has managed to make fraud insurable," he said. "We are an AI for fraud loss insurance, so we built a machine learning and artificial intelligence system that allows us to uniquely price risk and shift that risk off their balance sheets onto the insurance market." By making fraud insurable, Madhu said these institutions can use insurance to offset losses, which improves their margins and allows them to grow faster because they aren't sacrificing growth to keep fraud under control. Current fraud solutions aren't doing enough, Instnt said. The existing solutions that do detect fraud don't eliminate the financial liability for businesses and risk management and the fragmentation of risk management forces businesses to rely on multiple, disconnected tools for fraud detection, compliance and insurance coverage. Additionally, banks often limit customer approvals due to fraud concerns, reducing revenue potential. "Our viewpoint is not so much that we have to try to stop fraud; our viewpoint is that no two types of fraud losses are created equal, and there's this difference in that paradigm where most fraud prevention tools would strive to stop the fraud binary, good or bad," Madhu said. "So we can make a more qualitative decision based on expected losses and that allows the businesses do some optimizations they weren't able to before in terms of how many customers they let in through the front door." Instnt's solution integrates machine learning-driven risk assessment with access to insurance-backed financial protection, according to the application. This allows businesses to offload fraud loss liability while approving more legitimate customers. The tool analyzes an organization's historical fraud patterns and creates a custom policy for fraud loss coverage. It can identify fraud signals in real time to prevent unauthorized transactions before they happen. If fraud does occur, businesses can file claims through Instant's platform and receive payouts within 30 days. By allowing Instant to absorb the financial impact of fraud, banks can focus on growth, customer acquisition and financial resilience, Instnt said. "One of the largest digital banks in the world. We can't name them because it's not public yet, but the one of the largest digital banks in the world is losing nearly $45 million in just one type of fraud loss, which is first-party fraud in the loan products that they provide to their customers. And we were able to show them that for $8 million they could take that $45 million of exposure off the books," Madhu said.
Newsweek
08-07-2025
- Business
- Newsweek
AI Impact Awards 2025: New Innovations Seek to Gamify the Shopping Experience
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. In the age of artificial intelligence, it feels like AI knows more about our shopping habits than we do. It knows what we want to buy before we add it to our shopping carts. It knows how many consumers are going to want a product before businesses begin restocking their shelves. It even knows how much we're willing to pay for items before we punch in our credit card information. Innovations across the industry, however, suggest AI knows much more. To recognize businesses that are using these capabilities in new ways, Newsweek announced three winners in the Brand & Retail category of its inaugural AI Impact Awards. The recipients of this year's awards are software company Perfect Corp., tech company Trax Retail and beauty incubator Maesa. "It's super exciting," David Gottlieb, Trax's chief revenue officer, told Newsweek. "We really feel this is a validation of a decades-long strategy that we've had in building this company on the back of AI before it was cool." Trax took home the award for Best Outcomes, Product Development and Innovation, for its image recognition technology. The company, which operates in more than 90 countries and works with the top 100 consumer goods companies, has trained computers to identify items in shopping aisles to generate real-time data and metrics that could help manufacturers do a better job of selling their products. "The industry has an incredibly high appetite for better understanding execution," Gottlieb said. "[CPG companies] want to know, What's my share of shelf? Am I at eye level? Do I leave the aisle? How do I stack competitively? What's happening with private label?" AI Impact Awards: Brand & Retail AI Impact Awards: Brand & Retail Newsweek Illustration According to the company, integration of its technology has resulted in 95 percent accuracy in in-store data capture. Trax has also become a pioneer in the image recognition space by deploying representatives to visit retailers and execute tasks on behalf of manufacturers as well as by offering consumers a fun and budget-friendly way to engage with its technology. Shoppers can download Shopkick, an app that gamifies the shopping experience by offering different discounts. Say a shopper watches a video at home about a product, this would earn them a small reward. But if they were to go to the store and actually hold the product and scan the barcode, they'd earn a bigger reward. And if they were to buy the product and scan the receipt, they'd get the maximum reward. "We're driving shopper engagement, awareness and, ultimately, purchase behavior," Gottlieb said. In the future, he hopes Trax will dramatically expand its insights with augmented reality (AR), so that instead of taking pictures, users can just walk up to the shelves and look through their phone cameras, capturing real-time insights as they scan the aisles. This new way of interacting with products will help users more quickly identify the goods they're looking for—for instance, picking out only gluten-free beers or beers brewed in Canada—by just panning the shelves instead of individually scanning every item. "It's going to unlock a volume of information and a scale of collection that hasn't really been possible before and can create a lot of value for all the brands that want to better understand [consumer data], especially in independent stores and places where it's not as easy to get that information," Gottlieb said. Another company that has been developing AI to gamify the shopping experience is Perfect Corp., the recipient of this year's Best Outcomes, Customer Experience, award. The company, which focuses on AI and AR in the beauty and fashion industries, won this year's award for its new Real-Time Skin Analysis tool—a technology used by major brands like Sephora. The tool helps identify skin type, tone, sensitivity, texture and conditions to help come up with customized product recommendations. "The interesting thing is skin analysis is not a new idea. The dermatology industry has existed for many, many years," Wayne Liu, the chief growth officer and president of Americas at Perfect Corp., told Newsweek. "The true problem here is accessibility," he said. "The machine is pretty expensive—the cheapest one is probably $20,000—and it just sits there, so that makes it challenging for many people to get the assessment. When we talked to these doctors, we realized another problem: Because it's a big machine, you have to go to the site to do the analysis, and that's why some people just give up on treatment." Liu said Real-Time Skin Analysis has not only solved the accessibility problem but also turned a medical-like assessment into a "fun, gamified, playful" experience that is still profitable. Take makeup brand Benefit for example. The brand uses Real-Time Skin Analysis to power its Pore Analysis Tool, which, according to Perfect Corp., has been found to boost product sales 14 times over normal among those who use the technology. Customers who engaged with the Pore Analysis Tool reportedly spent twice as long on Benefit's website as well. Skinsight—another custom tool powered by Real-Time Skin Analysis and used on cruise lines like Royal Caribbean International, Carnival Cruise Line and Virgin Voyages—also prompted a 35 percent increase in AI-recommended product sales, Perfect Corp. reported. And Dr. Eunice Park, a New York–based plastic surgeon and an early adopter of Real-Time Skin Analysis, told Liu that the latest capabilities have led to a 36 percent conversion among her patients. Liu noted that Park, who had just one office when she started implementing Perfect Corp.'s technology, has now expanded to four locations. Using Park as an example, Liu argued that while AI has upended employment, it also has the potential to create new jobs. "Dr. Park probably doesn't need that many receptionists now, but in the grand scale, she actually expanded her business," Liu said. "She's actually hiring more people." "That's the high-level effect of AI. It creates more opportunities. It will probably replace current jobs, but it will create new jobs," he added. "We want to make sure AI is making this world a beautiful place. That's what we've always believed." Perfect Corp. was not the only company in the beauty space to win an award in the Brand & Retail category. Maesa received the Best Outcomes, Marketing and Creative, award for its content creation around fragrance brand Fine'ry. For Fine'ry, which launched exclusively at Target in 2023, Maesa decided to experiment with generative AI in response to its viral success on social media. "This level of engagement required high-quality content produced at scale," Maesa said in its application to Newsweek's AI Impact Awards. "Traditionally, producing creative assets of such quality required significant time and financial investment, often involving large teams of designers, editors and creative." "The introduction of AI technology enabled Maesa to cut 90 percent of the time spent and significantly reduce production costs for a similar output," the company said. "The ability to generate assets quickly and at scale allowed Maesa to allocate resources more strategically, investing in other areas of growth and innovation." Leveraging AI, Maesa's creative team helped Fine'ry revolutionize its marketing strategies by leaving creative assets to generative AI, by enhancing its user experience at pop-up exhibits, by launching a visual experience on gaming platform Roblox and by releasing AI-driven video campaigns for the Fine'ry fragrance line. To see the full list of winners and awards, visit the official page for Newsweek's AI Impact Awards.
Newsweek
25-06-2025
- Business
- Newsweek
AI Impact Awards 2025: What Is the Future of Customer Service?
Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. Being unable to reach a customer service representative the moment you encounter a problem feels almost archaic. And yet, 24/7 assistance only became the norm some 30 years ago, when globalization and the internet drastically transformed our expectation for around-the-clock customer service. Now, the industry is evolving again. This time around, artificial intelligence is redefining the way businesses connect with their customers. This year, 85 percent of customer service leaders will explore or pilot a customer-facing conversational generative AI solution, a December survey from Gartner, a research and advisory firm focused on business and technology, found. Respondents also identified customer service leaders as having more responsibility than their IT counterparts when it comes to driving adoption, identifying new AI opportunities and road-mapping the evolution of AI activities. The industry's path ahead, however, remains uncertain. For some, like Pipeliner CRM's Nikolaus Kimla, it's humans who need to drive machine learning forward. For others, like Intercom's Eoghan McCabe, its the capabilities themselves that will shape the future of customer service. This year, both Intercom and Pipeliner CRM were recognized for their customer service innovations as part of Newsweek's AI Impact Awards 2025. Customer service was just one of more than a dozen industries recognized with 38 winners chosen by a panel of AI and subject matter experts. "Winning the Newsweek AI Impact Award is both an honor and a powerful validation of the vision we've held at Pipeliner from the very beginning," Kimla, CEO of the customer relationship management software company, told Newsweek. "This reinforces the idea that technology, especially AI, should serve to elevate people, not replace them." AI Impact Awards: Customer Service AI Impact Awards: Customer Service Newsweek Illustration Pipeliner CRM received the Best Outcomes, Analyzing Customer Data award for its 2024 launch of Voyager AI Assistant Gen II. The second generation of the tool aims to help sales team by automating time-consuming tasks, like data analysis and reporting, but it was still built with Pipeliner CRM's core values of "human empowerment, transparency and usability" in mind. "Innovation at Pipeliner always serves people first," Kimla said. "Our AI is built not to replace the salesperson but to support them, offering intuitive insights without adding complexity." Kimla said because many AI tools often end up overwhelming users with excessive data, Pipeliner CRM sought to ensure that their assistant would serve sales teams without "adding friction." So far, the response to Voyager AI Assistant Gen II have been positive. Kimla said he was surprised by how quickly sales professionals embraced the tool once they realized its ability to help them work smarter and close deals faster. Metrics from Pipeliner CRM also show that the AI led to a 30 percent reduction in time spent on administration tasks, as well as an increase in lead conversion rates. The platform's CEO said teams that use Voyager Recommend to surface upsell and cross-sell opportunities have seen lead conversion rise by 20 to 40 percent. "AI's future in customer service is about becoming a proactive partner, understanding context and emotion to deliver personalized support while enabling human agents to handle complex issues," Kimla said. "At Pipeliner, we're dedicated to developing AI that strengthens human connection, not replaces it." Customer service leaders who want to implement AI successfully should "avoid chasing the hype and stay grounded in your core values." "Make sure your AI enhances the human element, not erases it," Kimla advised. "If you do that, you'll build not only a better product but a more loyal and empowered customer base." McCabe, on the other hand, sees a customer service future that is going to be driven more by what AIs is capable of than what humans want AIs to accomplish. "We'll reach a point where AI can do more service than the company, the business, the brand, wants to do," McCabe, the CEO of Intercom, told Newsweek. Intercom won the Best Outcomes, Customer Satisfaction award for the development of Fin 2, the latest iteration of Intercom's customer service AI agent Built on proprietary in-house AI technology, Fin was designed so that companies could coach, train and monitor their AI customer service just like they would their human team members. McCabe said the biggest innovation with the newest generation of Fin is the AI's ability to pull disparate pieces of information and synthesize an answer, much like a human service representative can. In practice, that means a customer who ordered a package to the wrong address could not only find out if delivery is available in various states, but have that package rerouted to a different address entirely. "It's these pivotal steps These big leaps forward" that distinguish each iteration from the next, McCabe said. According to Fin's resolution rates (the percentage of problems that the agent can solve), Intercom's AI has been extraordinarily successful. Fin 2 now resolves up to 91 percent of a businesses' total customer support volume and reaches an average of 56 percent resolution rate, up from 23 percent in the previous version. McCabe added that while 56 percent is the average resolution rate, that number can get as high as 80 percent for many of Intercom's customers. Some are even approaching 90 percent. The success of Fin 2 is also reflected in Intercom's portfolio of customers. Among the clients: Anthropic, one of the market's fastest-growing AI startups and the company behind Claude. "We're now solving tens of thousands of customer queries [for Anthropic]. We've saved their human support teams," McCabe said. "Fin is now involved in 96 percent of their support conversations." "Anthropic is one of the most sophisticated and successful AI labs in the world, and the fact that they're using Fin to do their service, as opposed to using their own AI speaks volumes," he said. McCabe attributes Intercom's success to its early investment in AI. While other companies did not begin hiring AI scientists and engineers in response to the 2022 launch of ChatGPT, Intercom was already ahead, having staffed an AI team for many years before. Today, Intercom has 47 highly-experienced senior AI engineers, scientists and researchers. "It's a product of this AI group," McCabe said. "If you look at any of our direct competitors, they don't have the level of sophistication and seniority and scale that we have." Despite his eagerness in seeing how AI will guide humans on how to implement new capabilities, McCabe forecasts that human agents will be around for at least another decade and acknowledged that human beings are never going to cease real-life interactions. Still, he believes there will come a time where agents will be so ubiquitous, humans will no longer realize they're even there. "Agents will be used strategically and deliberately, even when they're not needed, because there will be value," he said. "So, that's something that we get to reckon with in the future. But that's a bit of ways away." To see the full list of AI Impact winners, visit the official page for Newsweek's AI Impact Awards. Newsweek will continue the conversation on meaningful AI innovations at our AI Impact Summit from June 23 to 25 in Sonoma, California. Click here to follow along on the live blog.
