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Newsweek
2 hours ago
- 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.
Newsweek
8 hours ago
- Business
- Newsweek
AI Impact Awards 2025: The Changing Human Role in Science and Engineering
Anuj Kapur, the president and CEO of software delivery company CloudBees, said artificial intelligence (AI) will help solve many of humanity's most pressing problems. But along with disruption and advancement must come responsible use and oversight. "There's already people equating what AI has been able to do with what Oppenheimer was able to discover, and the parallels are that once you create something that's so disruptive, let's just make sure that you have the frameworks and guardrails in place to be able to actually ensure that its impact is more positive than less," he told Newsweek. "And I think similar sentiments will actually come out around AI." AI Impact Awards: Science and Engineering AI Impact Awards: Science and Engineering Newsweek Illustration CloudBees is one of the companies recognized by Newsweek's AI Impact Awards, which highlights companies across a dozen industries that are adopting AI tools to improve both internal and external operations for their business and their clients. The 38 winners were chosen by a panel of AI and subject matter experts. The awards celebrate practical uses of AI that solve real problems and have measurable impacts and outcomes. In the category of AI Science & Engineering, the winners are using AI to boost efficiency and productivity, and to save lives around the world. CloudBees CloudBees is the winner of the Best Outcomes, Engineering award. In 2024, CloudBees acquired Launchable, an AI platform for software testing and quality assurance. CloudBees Smart Tests is a production-ready solution that supports development and testing workloads. With the integration of the AI, CloubBees Smart Tests reduces cycle time, improves triage accuracy and enhances visibility into test behavior across teams, according to the company's application. The AI has "reinforced CloudBees commitment to innovation, introducing the solution to its broad developer network—making the tool easily accessible through seamless integration into their platform." Kapur told Newsweek that CloudBees compresses the time it takes developers to work through higher levels of automation and machine learning. "AI is effectively the next inflection point in our journey that allows us to use best-in-class technology that has effectively been democratized over the last two and a half years and apply that under the hood to basically create the similar outcomes that we always had, but create them much more effectively, or to be able to solve new problems that are created as a result of widespread adoption of AI tooling," he said. He said the predictive testing enabled by AI helps clients prioritize and give visibility into successes and failures. CloudBees reinforces three things: where to focus when there is a failure, how to find it fast and how to do it faster. "Unnecessary tests and late-stage issue detection were dragging down productivity," the company's application said. "After implementing CloudBees Smart Tests, [customers] cut regression testing time by 80 percent and pre-commit testing by 66 percent—from six hours to two. The results: thousands of test hours saved annually, faster developer feedback loops, earlier code commits, and reduced cloud costs thanks to shorter test runs." CloudBees also recently introduced its newest tool: Unify. It centralizes control across all major CI/CD tools to unify analytics, standardize governance and secure workflows without switching costs, according to the website. "We are focused on helping our customers transform using the power of the tools and capabilities we have, regardless of where they are in their transformation journey," Kapur said. "We meet the customers where they are because the needs of a BMW are very different to the needs of Bank of we want to make sure that we are open, we are flexible, and we're secure in our platform that meets the needs of our customers, calibrated to their ambitions and their capabilities." Warp Warp is the AI Science & Engineering winner for Best Outcomes, Computer Science for its Warp Agent Mode. The 5-year-old software developer startup aims to empower developers to ship better software more quickly and reliably to free them time to focus on more creative and rewarding work. Warp integrates large language models (LLMs) directly into the terminal to understand commands in simpler language. "Warp is not the only tool delivering this kind of benefit, but Warp's solution can have that kind of impact because it takes you as a developer, from a world where you are largely doing things by hand [into] a world where you're using Warp [where] you're typing instructions to an agent at the level of English, and then that agent is producing all [these] coding commands for you," founder and CEO Zach Lloyd told Newsweek in an interview. Lloyd said that by using Warp as a developer, users can prompt it however they want—to write code, help set up new projects, debug problems in the software and production. This not only saves valuable time and resources but also democratizes access to complex systems, enabling junior developers to perform tasks without requiring senior oversight. The results are increased productivity and time saved, allowing developers to produce more software and write more lines of code. Agent Mode processes nearly 400,000 daily requests, growing at 25 percent weekly, according to Warp. This saves developers about 187,000 engineering hours monthly. The AI generates six million lines of code monthly and powers 2.3 million weekly Agent Mode requests. As a result, Warp is achieving 70 percent monthly revenue growth, the company said. This doesn't mean the AI agent will do all the work for you—it still requires the user to input the right commands and context. "We're not at a place in the technology where a product manager, designer, business person, is going to be nearly as effective using these as someone who is an experienced developer and pointed in the right direction," he said. "You're letting them use this technology to amplify the impact of them having that knowledge." Lloyd adds that he is optimistic that there will always be a human element to software development and that AI is something that "gets rid of a lot of the drudgery of work and lets people focus on more interesting stuff." "The problem-solving skills that make a great software developer have always been somewhat divorced from what language you write code in," he said. "It's kind of like you learn how to do arithmetic because it's important you do arithmetic. But at the end of the day, you're gonna use a spreadsheet or a calculator, and you as a thinking person [are] going to be able to focus on the harder, more interesting parts of the job." With the "infinite demand for software in the world right now," Lloyd said AI can increase the capacity and speed of software production by overcoming some limitations. "What I imagine happening is that the amount of software that is produced in the world goes up dramatically, and you'll probably have around the same number of software engineers, but each engineer being able to produce vastly more than they do today," he said. "And I also think the role of what an engineer does is going to change very much – from manual work to one where you're much more like an orchestrator of AI." Every Cure Every Cure is the overall winner of Newsweek's AI Impact Awards and it's using AI to advance drug engineering to treat some of the world's rarest and most aggressive diseases. After surviving Castleman disease while in medical school by repurposing existing drugs to find a new treatment, David Fajgenbaum and his co-founder, Grant Mitchell, started Every Cure to help save other people's lives. Every Cure is on a mission to "systematically identify, validate and deliver repurposed treatment to patients suffering from rare and undertreated diseases" using AI, according to the company's application. Mitchell told Newsweek that the approximately 4,000 FDA-approved drugs are "available to use and they're just like sitting on the one yard line waiting to be unlocked for further uses." The AI they use helps make predictions about which existing drugs can potentially treat which diseases. The AI engine, known as MATRIX (Therapeutic Repurposing in eXtended uses), is trained to analyze massive biomedical data sets to evaluate the viability of every possible drug and disease combination. Every Cure collaborates with tech companies, pharmaceutical companies, academics, researchers, patient advocacy groups and physicians. They also have a Scientific Advisory Board and a Technical Advisory Board to provide guidance. The company defines success by three main outcomes: accuracy and utility of the AI platform, advancement of promising treatments and building an ecosystem for broader repurposing. So far, 87 percent of the top 100 predictions from the MATRIX platform have aligned with known effective treatments, and more than eight promising repurposing projects have been identified. Additionally, partnerships with seven major organizations have been established. Every Cure also received new funding, including a $48.3 million contract from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) and $60 million in philanthropic funding through The Audacious Project. In 2025, Mitchell said the company is moving from a research phase into actual patient impact projects. One of the latest areas of success has been research into treatment for autism. The company was able to identify a precision therapy for verbal impairment by administering folinic acid, also known as leucovorin, to individuals with autism. This treatment helps bypass the blocked folate receptor, helping patients regain their ability to speak. "So if little Every Cure can be launching five or more projects a year [for] diseases of real unmet need, that's an amazing amount of impact for the size of our organization," Mitchell said. "I really think that drug repurposing is the highest ROI for dollars in lives saved." He adds that their model for AI drug discovery goes directly to patients, leading to an immediate feedback loop. "Not only are we helping patients in the fastest and most efficient way possible, we're advancing the field of computational biology by building models and improving on them at a faster rate than you could otherwise," he said. Many of the AI Impact Award winners will be present at Newsweek's AI Impact Summit later this month. The three-day event sponsored by will take place from June 23 to 25 in Sonoma, California, and will bring together diverse leaders across industries and expertise to share insights on how organizations can most effectively implement AI to achieve their goals. 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.
Newsweek
a day ago
- Business
- Newsweek
AI Impact Awards 2025: These Education Companies See a Bright Spot Amid Worries
Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. Within education circles, the conversation on artificial intelligence has been largely dismal. Many educators, parents and academic institutions have been left wondering whether children can still learn critical thinking skills and how to evaluate students when many are turning to generative AI to cheat en masse. But while those fears have paralyzed some, others in the education space see an opportunity to finally achieve educational equality. Among these optimists are education platform ClassDojo, online course provider Coursera and software company Salesforce—three of this year's AI Impact Awards recipients. Newsweek announced the full list of 38 award recipients on Wednesday, including four winners in the AI Education category, one of the more than a dozen industries represented. The winners were chosen by a panel of AI and subject matter experts. "It's such an interesting time for impact," Sunya Norman, senior vice president of impact, told Newsweek. "Folks understanding not only honing in on potential risks and challenges of AI, but also understanding the opportunities—it really helps to bring more balance to the public discourse." Salesforce, which launched its first education-focused accelerator in September 2023, received Newsweek's Best Outcomes, General Learning award. Norman recalled that a couple of years ago, Salesforce held a listening tour to understand what teachers, school administrators and students all thought of AI. "There was a lot of anxiety and fear at the time," she said. "Eighty percent of school districts didn't have AI policies, but kids were already using AI. Parents were confused. 'Should I let my kids do this? How should I govern this? What are the parental settings that need to come into this?" "Now, about 50 percent of school districts in the U.S. have AI policies," she said. AI Impact Awards: Education AI Impact Awards: Education Newsweek Illustration Salesforce's AI education program seeks to support nonprofits and academic institutions by equipping them with tools to build and deploy AI agents through its digital labor platform Agentforce. Salesforce said it has committed $4 million to help education organizations through its accelerator program. Different organizations can choose to use Agentforce in various ways. For example, College Possible, a nonprofit providing college preparation and assistance to low-income students, built an AI assistant aimed at answering questions about financial aid and college applications. As a result, College Possible's student-to-coach reach shot up four times what it was before the assistant, without any increase to its staffing, Salesforce said. "I love elevating education," Norman said. "More folks need to consider how deeply integrated education success is with broader societal success." "The possibilities [of AI in education] are endless," she added. "It'll really be about ensuring we don't leave behind public education, and students and educators in that space." Coursera was also recognized on Wednesday for its AI Impact on education. The course provider took home the Best Outcomes, Commercial Learning award for its launch of Coach, an AI-powered personal tutor designed to make online learning more personalized, interactive and effective. The tool was launched a few months after ChatGPT came onto the scene in November 2022. Greg Hart, the president and CEO of Coursera, described Coach as being a "natural extension" of the company, which seeks to provide global access to education in the most effective way possible. "The goal of Coach was to enable students and learners to have the ability to dive deeper on things that they might be struggling with, to gain deeper insight into concepts within the course," Hart told Newsweek. Since launching it, Coursera has found that learners who interacted with Coach have a nearly 10 percent higher likelihood of passing a quiz on the first try when compared to those who did not use Coach. Those who have interacted with the AI tutor also complete nearly 12 percent more items per hour, Hart said. Hart added that Coach furthers Coursera's mission because it's been an especially powerful tool for women and learners without degrees. For example, one main piece of feedback he hears is that Coach has created a safe environment for learners to receive feedback without fear of negative consequences. That suggests major strides for women, who are statistically less likely to ask questions than men in a physical classroom. "It really helps address global inequity, and it helps bring a more level playing field to our learners around the world," Hart said. Coach is also available in 26 languages, meaning the advantage of Coursera's personal tutor is not limited to those in the Western world. "AI is a really unique technology, in the sense that it is driving incredibly rapid change around the world, and that change sort of risks widening the opportunity gap into haves and have-nots," Hart said. "At the same time, gen AI is itself a tool that you can use to help address and narrow that gap." Hart also argued that the speed at which the world has adopted AI only emphasizes the importance of learning. He said that through Coach, Coursera leverages AI to "address that challenge, to help people learn more effectively, to help people learn more quickly and to help people be ready for what today's workforce needs." The next step in Hart's blueprint for Coursera is to expand its offering beyond text so that it can also level the playing field for learners who might learn better through video, audio or another type of modality. At the same time, Hart is also hopeful that as AI develops, it could become the answer to existing concerns about academic integrity. The share of teens who report using ChatGPT for schoolwork has doubled in the last two years. A Pew Research study published in January found that 26 percent of teens between the ages of 13 and 17 use the chatbot for school, compared to just 13 percent who said the same in 2023. Back in July, Coursera began rolling out features to verify authentic learning. Those tools limit access in high-stakes scenarios, prevent low-effort behavior, detect plagiarism and assess understanding by requiring students to show their work instead of just providing an answer. Also recognized in the education category of Wednesday's AI Impact Awards is ClassDojo. The communication platform received the Best Outcomes, K-12 Education award for its creation of Sidekick, an AI-powered teaching assistant aimed at cutting out what Sam Chaudhary, the CEO and founder of ClassDojo, referred to as "busywork" for educators. "I feel very grateful for it to be tied to our work in AI, because I really think this is the next wave for all of us," Chaudhary told Newsweek. "Dojo has a chance to lead and to take what could be a scary technology and demonstrate how it can be used to help people learn and grow and flourish." ClassDojo, which reaches 45 million kids across 90 percent of U.S. elementary schools, provides teachers with a way to easily share classroom updates and track student behavior all on one platform. Chaudhary and his co-founder, Liam Don, founded ClassDojo to remedy the "divorce" between the school communities that use education technology and the school districts that purchase that technology, Chaudhary explained. "We had this mini epiphany: Everyone here is building for the institutions. What if we built for the people actually doing the work?" Chaudhary said. "I've been a teacher, I've spent time in the classroom. We were like, 'Well, why don't we just go to teachers and kids and families and ask them what their biggest problems are, and build things that help with that.'" After hearing from hundreds of teachers, it was clear that many expressed discontent with the fact that there was a clear divide between what happens at school and what happens outside of it. And so Chaudhary and Don founded ClassDojo to close that gap and "reconstruct that village around every kid," Chaudhary said. And it was in that same vein that ClassDojo's Sidekick was born. When the platform's founder went back to more teachers to hear other concerns, they were met with a consistent message that educators were drowning in busywork. So, ClassDojo began building an assistant that could solve that problem. By generating lesson plans, seating charts and activities to send home for families to complete together, Sidekick would give teachers the chance to devote all their time to teaching. Just months after its launch, ClassDojo reported that teachers were using ClassDojo in over 28,000 schools across 55 countries. A separate survey conducted by the platform found that one-in-three teachers say they plan to use Sidekick next semester. Chaudhary said while the large-scale data is still coming in, "We've heard teachers say things like, 'I like that it does so much of the thinking with me, it's hard to keep up, thinking of 100 different things a week for all my students.' 'I love the ease of report card comments and parent-teacher conferences. It takes what I'm thinking and words it eloquently.' 'I really love how it rewrites my posts so they're easier for parents to read, even in different languages. I get so much more parent interaction when I use Sidekick.'" "Education, as a sector, is slow to change," he said. "Potentially, rightly so. You've got kids. It's a vulnerable population. But a good way to effect change is just to demonstrate success. And so, I hope more of the industry goes that way." Even as AI offers a new opportunity to achieve educational equality, Norman acknowledged its limitations. For example, while College Possible's AI Assistant would be extremely helpful in helping a first-generation college student pick the best schools in their state or determine what types of financial aid they might be eligible for, there are other questions that Norman believes are better suited for a real-life adviser. "We'd love for a human college counselor to be reserved for something like, 'I'm feeling scared because no one in my family has gone to college before. Can you talk to me about what it was like when you were on a college campus for the first time?'" she said. "That should go to the human." A fourth education award was also announced on Wednesday. To read more about MedCerts, which won the Best Outcomes, Higher Education award, check out Health Care Editor Alexis Kayser's story. 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.
Newsweek
a day ago
- Business
- Newsweek
AI Impact Awards 2025: These Tools Help Streamline and Personalize Marketing
In today's marketing world, rapidly evolving technology and consumer habits are pushing companies to stay on top of the latest trends and innovations in real time. To keep up with demands, marketing teams across all industries must continue to innovate with new tools to meet their business objectives. Newsweek's AI Impact Awards recognize companies across a dozen industries that are adopting AI tools to improve both internal and external operations for their business and their clients. The 38 award winners were chosen by a panel of AI and subject matter experts. The awards celebrate practical uses of AI that solve real problems and have measurable impacts and outcomes. For the AI Marketing category, the top three awarded companies have demonstrated that AI tools have helped them excel and grow in various aspects of the marketing process—both internally and for external clients and partners. Extreme Networks Extreme Networks is not a marketing company, but it has been using AI technology for years to streamline its internal workflow and make its teams faster and more productive. The company is the winner of Newsweek's AI Marketing, Best Outcomes, Content Creation Award for its internal sales and marketing AI tool to streamline workflow and make teams faster and more productive. The network infrastructure and management solution company delivers services that connect devices, applications and people—using machine learning, AI, analytics and automation—to 50,000 customers globally. Clients include Liverpool FC, Florida Gulf Coast University and MGM Music Hall at Fenway Park. "Our mission is to connect people with the latest and greatest networking technology so they can do great things for the organization," Chief Marketing Officer Monica Kumar told Newsweek in an interview. Kumar said the sales and marketing teams were being inundated with data and needed to do their work faster "without getting buried in endless resources." "Website data, competitive information, information internally from [requests for proposals] that we had published for many customers—all of that has great nuggets of knowledge and wisdom that we want the entire population of sales and marketing to be able to access," she said. "And it was an onerous task to do it without using AI—we did it before, but it just took a lot of manual time." The AI tool consolidates Extreme Networks' entire library of documents into a conversational AI interface, called Extreme Sales AI Assistant, that delivers precise, summarized answers to enhance productivity and significantly reduce day-to-day tasks from hours to minutes, allowing sellers to stay focused on working with customers, according to the company's application. Kumar told Newsweek that the company has been working toward a more "use-case-centric approach" that identifies high-value use cases within the organization to ensure there are measurable returns on investments. The AI is also trained on competitive intelligence—"giving every sales and marketing team member a 20-year industry veteran in their pocket, armed with all the right answers," according to the company's application. With the implementation of the new AI, Extreme Networks reports at least 60 to 120 minutes of work per week saved, reduced time to produce RFP by two to three hours on average with 90 percent accuracy. After seeing such a huge improvement in productivity within the sales and marketing teams, Kumar said, Extreme Networks started rolling out its internal tool to its partners in the last few quarters. "We are already hearing rave reviews from our partner teams," she said. "This is unlike anything they've seen from the competition because this tool gives them instant access to customer case studies." Extreme Networks is also working to build a better, more accurate AI tool by increasing the number of users to expand the knowledge base and quality of the tool. With these advancements, Kumar ensures that Extreme Networks is "AI-powered but human-driven." All information is vetted for accuracy by real people before it goes out to customers, Kumar said, adding that her team does not "blindly follow what the AI is spitting out." "I feel like AI is making marketing more human," she said. "Marketing as an organization is very customer-centric. We also have both internal and external customers, and this is an example of a tool where it helps us serve customers 24/7 and really gives us that extreme customer centricity, no pun intended. And this is only the beginning for us. We are going to be looking at many more use cases where we're using AI in the future, [and] I'm excited about the potential of that." AI Impact Awards: Marketing AI Impact Awards: Marketing Newsweek Illustration Beeby Clark + Meyler Beeby Clark + Meyler (BCM) is a full-service digital ad agency using AI products to help clients grow their businesses. They received Newsweek's award for Best Outcomes, Consumer Targeting and Personalization. As the marketing industry began to shift over the last few years, particularly with the rise in zero-click searches, there were fewer revenue growth opportunities for agencies and businesses, Max Cammarota, BCM's director of performance media told Newsweek in an interview. "There [are] all of these channels to expand to where we can reach our audiences effectively, but production costs and scalability is definitely a challenge for a lot of our clients and a lot of businesses in general," he said. "These platforms are fueled by algorithms. In order to win in that game, we identified [that] you need a lot of diversified creative to do that." That's when BCM started rolling out Ventas AI. Its AI-powered growth engine, Ventas AI, uses creative and analytics to drive deep learning and train algorithmically driven media platforms to deliver higher return on investment (ROI) for ad campaigns at greater speeds, according to the company's application. The tool identifies and converts the right customers at the right time, through personalized audience segmentation and creative optimization. This, in turn, lowers the acquisition costs for marketers. "The mission of Ventas AI will always be to grow client business and client revenue," Cammarota said. "We didn't want this to be some facade; we wanted it to be something that actually drives impact and actually works." Ventas AI's prelaunch optimization allows companies to make data-driven decisions before ads go live and delivers predictive analytics to score and rank each ad. It also allows for scaling and testing multiple versions of an ad to identify which will perform the best and scans ads in real time to provide insights on which elements of the ad are driving the best results. "We're seeing really strong KPI improvements on the platforms themselves," Cammarota said. "And because we were expanding into more channels and improving our incremental reach, we're actually measuring through incrementality testing real business revenue growth from our clients." He said that cost per clicks has been reduced and click-through rate and revenue growth have increased, which enables clients to unlock more channels to reach new users. BCM has also seen a 100 percent retention rate since developing Ventas AI, Cammarota added. Looking ahead, Cammarota said, BCM is "barely scratching the surface." "Where we solve this problem of smart, scalable, diversified ads, the market is soon going to catch up," he said. "So what we're looking toward now is, how do we make smarter, more scalable ads in multiple different formats—long form, video, UGC, audio—and really up-level the offering from what it is now to stay ahead of that market?" Clinch The third winner for AI Marketing is Clinch, which was awarded Best Outcomes, Programmatic Marketing. Clinch uses an agentic AI platform for omnichannel advertising called Flight Control for clients like Hyundai, Kroger, Mastercard, Sephora and Mattress Firm. Last year, Clinch introduced Flight Control Copilot, an AI-powered virtual team member that acts like a fleet of experts to guide users through each step of the ad campaign workflow, according to the company's application. It automates the process and provides insights and recommendations to get the most out of the campaigns. It helps build strategy, access account details, assist creatively and provide analytics. Advertisers input campaign objectives, KPIs and audience details, and Copilot translates that information into a visual, interactive decision tree that enables instant strategy implementation. CEO Oz Etzioni told Newsweek in an interview that Clinch identified a problem in the industry, where most companies focused on media and audience-building and ignored the creative side. "This whole industry is really about performance. ... You have KPIs you're trying to achieve and want to see measurable results," he said. "If you only manage two, and you ignore the third, you're missing one big variable that is actually impacting 60 percent of the outcome." Etzioni said the company has evolved, using the agentic AI to better optimize media, audience and creative. On average, brands that use Copilot reported a 75 percent reduction in resources required to manage a campaign, Clinch said in its application. This freed them up to focus on strategy and innovation, rather than time-consuming execution. "We're seeing around 80 percent increase in efficiency throughout the whole creative production process," Etzioni said. "Once everything is automated, you save on all the human errors and the frustration of people who have to do it manually as well. Automation always makes people happy, in a way." He added that it's a really exciting time for the industry, with the speed of how technology evolves and trends happen, "everything that happens in the world impacts the advertising industry." "Being recognized for innovation and then pushing the envelope with AI, for us, is a testament of everything that we believe in, and we take a lot of pride in that [because] it means that we're doing the right thing," he said. "The worst thing for us at the company is to be stagnant. We always continue to build and continue to evolve. And getting, you know, an award like this means that we're doing things." Many of the AI Impact Award winners will be present at Newsweek's AI Impact Summit later this month. The three-day event, sponsored by Cognizant and Google Cloud, will take place from June 23 to 25 in Sonoma, California, and will bring together diverse leaders across industries and expertise to share insights on how organizations can most effectively implement AI to achieve their goals. 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.
Newsweek
2 days ago
- Business
- Newsweek
AI Management Tools Promise to Drive Employee Satisfaction and Innovation
The impact of AI in the workplace is already profound, but that impact is expected to grow exponentially in the coming years, as recent breakthroughs have accelerated the vision for an AI-powered future of work. "AI's been around for a long time, but when ChatGPT hit the scene, it really captured everyone's imagination," Cheryl Johnson, chief product officer at Betterworks, said. Over the last year, we have seen an expansion in agentic and generative AI tools aimed at helping people save hours per day or week at work by automating reports, summarizing meetings, writing first drafts, improving drafts and helping people and teams stay on top of their performance and development goals. Best-in-class innovations in workplace AI are highlighted by Newsweek's AI Impact Award winners in the workplace categories: Zoom, Pfizer and Betterworks. Their new offerings are enabling smoother collaboration, reductions in meetings, improved goal-setting, time-saving for managers and better adoption of emerging technology. Workplace tools were just one industry represented. Across more than a dozen categories, 38 winners were selected by a panel of judges made of AI and subject matter experts. AI Impact Awards: Workplace AI Impact Awards: Workplace Newsweek Illustration "Hybrid and remote work have become super noisy," Smita Hashim, head of product at Zoom, told Newsweek. "How can we help people really automate away some of the more mundane things which they have to do, so they can focus on more strategic work, so they can focus on connecting with each other? That's where we want to take AI Companion." Better Performance Management Many are trying, but the performance management process remains a heavy burden for managers and direct reports, with many struggling to see the value in the process or in their ability to communicate the breadth and value of their accomplishments over the course of a year. At Betterworks, the solution was to address certain pain points in performance management with an AI tool to support goals that give feedback and prompt manager conversations around goals. "AI was used not to replace people but to enhance them—acting as a copilot to guide goal-setting, feedback and performance conversations. The objective was to free employees from administrative overload and focus their energy on growth, development and productivity. The result? More relevant and meaningful feedback to drive employee engagement and better data for HR teams to understand their workforce," a representative wrote in the company's award application. One of the organizations using Betterworks, the software company LivePerson, drove a 30 percent improvement in timely completion of performance reviews, and its employees reported 75 percent less time spent to complete them. Managers and employees also reported improved clarity and tone in performance feedback, in addition to value. "We saw immediate positive response for, especially, employees who were maybe not as great with communication," Johnson shared. "They felt like they could put their notes in, and it would be transformed into something that was more on point." For managers, especially those with 10 or more direct reports, reviewing goals for every employee and writing feedback can be incredibly time-consuming. Having the ability to give feedback to employees as they set their goals can prevent multiple rounds of edits with the manager and ensure better alignment with team and company goals. "The friction point is the blank page," Johnson said. "With Goal [AI] Assist, you click one button, and it's looking at your job title, past goals, company goals, your manager's goals. It's looking at all this information in the system. It's looking at your past feedback, your past feedback from your manager, and recommending professional and development goals." Before rolling out Betterworks, the team at LivePerson, an AI chat company itself, put a stress test on the technology as a means of vetting the new AI offering. "They build AI technology themselves, so they're pretty savvy," Johnson shared. "They had their team come in and essentially try to break our AI. They gave it some challenging scenarios to see what the response would be." After passing the stress test, LivePerson shared those results internally as it deployed the Betterworks tool to help its workforce know that it was thoroughly vetted. "You have employees really being supported to fire on all cylinders and show up as their best because they have clarity on what's expected, how they're performing, what the gaps are, how they might fill those gaps," Johnson said. In the future, Betterworks plans to expand on this offering with a "robust data set" around succession planning and "a manager homepage that kind of leads all the insights from the platform for their team and pulls out the same endpoints and allows them to take immediate and quick action on those points," Johnson said. As middle managers report rising burnout and trouble managing conflict across expectations between workers and executives, finding ways to save them time and manage better can pay large dividends. "We think a lot about the manager, and how to help them shine, really, fundamentally, is at the crux of what we're doing," Johnson said. A Zoom office location. A Zoom office location. Getty Images A Companion for Collaboration (and Fewer Meetings) The company that allowed many organizations to stay in touch and keep having meetings during lockdown has been working hard to make the meeting experience richer over the last few years, launching whiteboarding tools, live transcripts and added privacy and communication features. With the launch of Zoom AI Companion, people can attend fewer meetings while having more impactful communication with colleagues, and the AI tool can also help set tasks and calendar events during or after meetings. "How can you be more effective in your meetings, but how can you also maybe not have meetings if you don't need to have them? AI Companion does an amazing job summarizing meetings and converting it into next steps as well," Hashim said. Zoom also made AI Companion available at no extra cost to its enterprise users, to allow companies the widest possible aperture for experimentation and discovery around the possibilities of AI in different employees' workflow. During meetings, users can ask Companion questions on the side, like if they missed a segment of what was said or want to search the web for information to share in the meeting. Like a lot of the traditional generative AI tools, Companion is also helping employees across the board with first drafts of emails, outlines or memos and can incorporate information from meetings and other company documents to help build those drafts. "We are focused a lot on the process that we call 'from conversation to completion,' so you're having all these conversations. But then, how can you complete the work or how can you get more out of these conversations?" Hashim said. Zoom users in finance, sales, customer service, operations, HR, IT and product management are developing their own use-cases for how they can benefit from this tool. In most cases, it is being used to synthesize large amounts of information that they need to summarize and communicate to other parties. The speed of collecting and summarizing information that may be readily available in company documents and meeting summaries can have a profound impact on productivity and innovation. Hashim notes that some features are aimed at the general productivity of any employee, but all functions have different ways of collaborating that can be supported by AI Companion. Finance managers can collect reports from a variety of sources and ask prompts of the AI to determine their next steps for work rather than having to review all of the documentation. Product teams can collect user data and feedback and summarize it faster to accelerate their iteration cycles. Sales and account management teams can summarize their calls and get actionable feedback for product teams and client service plans. "We have a prompt library, which users can use in order to discover different ways of working with Companion," Hashim said. The company also makes best practices available. Among Zoom clients, 60 percent of its Fortune 500 users have AI Companion enabled. Gainsight, a customer success platform, noted that AI Companion offered the functionality of a premium AI assistant tool within a software it already has and uses, while also enabling privacy and data security in customer communications. Cloud security company Zscaler enabled AI Companion for all employees and reports healthy adoption with minimal training as well as success with customer-facing teams. BairesDev, one of the largest fully remote companies in the world, estimates it has saved employees over 19,000 hours with AI Companion since November 2023. "We will see a lot more people being able to do a lot more effective work and lot more strategic work in ways that are more relaxing and more energizing for them," Hashim said. AI Training Program Pfizer developed a proprietary generative AI platform called Vox, a tool meant to help its pharmaceutical and biotechnical development teams with functionality, like drafting patents, generating code and identifying new business opportunities. The company also made Microsoft's Copilot available to employees. Pfizer representatives told Newsweek that "despite Vox and Copilot's extensive functionalities, Pfizer encountered challenges in conveying the value and driving the adoption of these new technological tools to its workforce." The biopharma giant responded with the creation of a learning program "aimed at helping novice users grasp the concepts of artificial intelligence and generative artificial intelligence as well as the functionalities of Vox, Copilot and other tools available to all Pfizer employees." The program included introductory AI training, an "AI Academy" for those looking to reach mastery and external educational opportunities. Over 12,000 company employees have begun training with the academy, representing over 15 percent of Pfizer's global workforce, with a 96 percent positive feedback rating from a survey of learners, and 250 employees have begun graduate programs in this domain through partnerships with the Stevens Institute of Technology. Pfizer has also put over 200 high-potential company leaders through leadership development programs that include AI training as part of the curriculum. A Pfizer office location. A Pfizer office location. Getty Images In partnership with a consulting firm, Pfizer built out this program by identifying four key milestones in the AI learning journey: Exploring AI, Understanding AI, Practicing AI and Mastering AI. They then set out to develop a variety of learning opportunities in a wide variety of formats, including workshops, nanodegrees, "prompt-a-thons" and role-based training. They also developed resources for specific roles and departments, such as the AI Academy for Finance and Global Business Services, and later tapped members of an internal AI Champion Network and other employee volunteers to create role-specific resources and training for the most popular AI Academy workshops. Pfizer also put a special emphasis on launch and rollout with its Digital division, a group primarily consisting of tech workers. Today 46 percent of Pfizer Digital employees are active in AI Academy. For less technically inclined employees, Pfizer addressed skepticism around AI with its training, created badge credentials to mark progress and developed placement exams for determining which training pathways to pursue, in addition to the role-based guidance and resources. Pfizer also launched an in-person, three-day event called AI Academy Live for a more interactive experience that featured influential company speakers, including Yolanda Lyle, SVP and chief of staff to CEO Albert Bourla, and Mack MacKenzie, VP of Digital Client Partner, Business Innovation and PHI, "who discussed maximizing colleague potential through AI and ensuring a human-centered approach to AI transformation," Pfizer representatives said. Pfizer's AI Strategy Framework Tier 1 AI Adoption was credited with $163 million in ROI, thanks to the support of AI Academy efforts, with the company finding that participants were 68 percent more likely to use Copilot than non-learners and also completed twice as many actions using the tool. "Session has provided [me the] confidence to play around with GenAI tools and begin embracing these tools in my day to day," one of the participants wrote in their feedback. "Thank you for creating a fun, interactive Unlocking GenAI Potential training session! I can't wait to put this training to use and see the limitless potential of using AI in real-world applications." 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.
