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Fashion Network
20-06-2025
- Business
- Fashion Network
UK retail weak in May says ONS data, fashion lags but reasons for June optimsim abound
Non-food stores sales volumes — the total of department, clothing, household and other non-food stores — fell by 1.4% over the month, mainly because of falls in clothing and household goods stores. Retailer comments mentioned reduced footfall and consumers having completed home projects earlier than usual this year because of good weather, leading to lower sales in May. Meanwhile online spending values fell by 1% month on month and 2.5% year on year. Total value spend across in-store and online fell by 2.4% over the month and as a result, the proportion of sales made online rose from 26.8% in April 2025 to 27.2% in May. So nothing to write home about there. But what did analysts and industry insiders think of it all? Deann Evans, MD EMEA, at online shopping giant Shopify, said retailers will be disappointed, especially after consecutive rises. She said the 3.4% inflation rate may have been partly to blame, or perhaps the lasting effects from April's increases in annual domestic bills and National Insurance contributions. But she also sees 'reason to be optimistic that the summer months and warmer weather will inspire increased consumer spending and a return to sales growth. According to our Shopify data for May, UK consumers were busy preparing for aquatic fun with sales of Pool Floats & Loungers (+101%), Child Swimming Aids (+74.7%) and Swim Goggles & Masks (+62.4%) all rising significantly compared to April. 'Perhaps even more impactful will be the cultural moments that summer brings. Just like we saw with Taylor Swift's Eras tour last year, the 'Beyoncé Effect' is in full swing as she brings her Cowboy Carter tour to the UK. Our data reveals a significant increase in the sales of western fashion items last month compared to May 2024, such as denim shorts (+52%), cowboy hats (+288%) and belts (+62%). With Glastonbury Festival and the Oasis tour close on the horizon, there is a significant opportunity here for retailers to capitalise — provided they have the right tools and systems in place. A strong digital presence and social media strategy are particularly key to winning the lottery ticket of celebrity influence and having the right people notice your products, and retailers must keep this front of mind this summer.' And Jim Rudall, regional director EMEA at email and marketing automation platform Intuit Mailchimp also said it was a disappointing month, 'especially with high expectations for a boost around the May bank holidays — which our New E-Commerce Calendar report ranks as the top two shopping moments for UK consumers in May (based on spending propensity).' But he too sees some bright spots on the horizon given the aforementioned cultural moments plus Royal Ascot and the FIFA Club World Cup. That New E-Commerce Calendar he mentioned revealed major entertainment events and music festivals prompted 15% of shoppers to make purchases in the last two years, 'offering brands the chance to ride a cultural wave and flex their personalities'. And of course Father's Day will impact June with Intuit Mailchimp research having identified it 'as the most significant shopping moment for June'. Meanwhile, Oliver Vernon-Harcourt, head of retail at Deloitte, said:'For the first time this year, retail sales fell more than expected, as two bank holidays and further good weather were not enough to entice spending. A late Easter combined with the sunniest April on record brought some seasonal sales forward, [and] continued inflationary pressures from food, furniture and household goods hampered sales volumes. 'Overall, consumers remain cautious in the face of persistent inflation, increased utility costs and ongoing geopolitical uncertainty. While this transpired into fewer purchases in May, there is a broader picture of improving household finances. Consumers have been saving at one of the highest levels on record, and with robust real wage growth, this could generate some helpful tailwinds for the retail sector throughout the rest of 2025. With warm weather set to continue, retailers will hope to see a boost from the sale of summer food, clothing and outdoor offerings, resulting in a return to growth in the months ahead.' And Jacqueline Windsor, Head of Retail at PwC UK highlighted how the 'gloomier weather also impacted demand for new season's fashion, with clothing retailers reversing a quarter of improving sales performance, making it the worst-performing category in May. 'The fact that retail sales fell back in May was not a surprise given the unusually strong performance the previous month. However, it does underline the fragility of consumers' spending power and the retail sector in the current economic climate.'
Martechvibe
11-04-2025
- Business
- Martechvibe
Honeycomb Acquires Grit to Accelerate Customer Value
The acquisition will help customers instrument complex software systems for end-to-end observability, enhancing customer value. Honeycomb , the creators of observability, announced the acquisition of Grit, a powerful open-source query system and AI agent for customer value. The acquisition will help customers instrument complex software systems for end-to-end observability. The company also announced the appointment of two executives to its leadership team, with Julie Neumann joining as Chief Marketing Officer and Matt Nelson as Chief Revenue Officer. These announcements follow significant revenue growth and customer expansion in 2024, driven by the launch of Honeycomb Telemetry Pipeline and Log Analytics as well as Frontend Observability. One substantial hurdle companies often face as they implement modern tooling is instrumenting existing code to emit telemetry data using OpenTelemetry. Grit developed an open source query system and AI agent that can programmatically search and modify codebases. With this acquisition, Honeycomb will be able to make it dramatically easier to adopt custom instrumentation. Grit's founder, Morgante Pell, is joining the Honeycomb engineering team to lead development of even more AI features that can combine Grit's codebase knowledge with Honeycomb's rich observability data to build better software. ALSO READ: Intuit Mailchimp Launches Generative AI Tool For Email Marketing 'Honeycomb is committed to helping engineering teams realise the full potential of AI, while delivering the system reliability and exceptional experiences their customers expect,' said Christine Yen, CEO and Co- Founder. 'Grit's technology solves major OpenTelemetry adoption hurdles, delivering the comprehensive observability our customers need to effectively manage their software systems and AI-powered applications.' Additionally, Honeycomb has made strategic executive hires to accelerate its go-to-market functions and expand into new markets. Julie Neumann, CMO: Neumann, a veteran storyteller who drove market expansion at Sinch, Testlio, and Snow Software, will spearhead efforts to bring the transformative value of Honeycomb to a global audience of developers and executives Matt Nelson, CRO: Nelson, with a history of driving substantial revenue growth at Forter, VMware, and Pivotal Software, will lead the global revenue organization, including sales, customer value, and strategic partnerships 'Julie and Matt's combined decades of experience in the enterprise, as well as their unwavering commitment to driving impactful growth at developer-oriented organizations, will be instrumental to Honeycomb's success,' said Yen. 'In a new era of software development, they will ensure more businesses are ready for tomorrow's engineering challenges, including taking advantage of AI while mitigating the inherent risks.' ALSO READ: WPP, Instacart Partner For Advertising Solutions, Measurement Tools The Martechvibe team works with a staff of in-house writers and industry experts. View More Blue Prism is a global software provider, offering ROM 2, an intelligent automation implementation methodology that empowers teams to scale their digital workflow. One of its use cases is sales and marketing solutions, which is powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms. VISIT WEBSITE Pega is a combined business process management and robotic process automation (RPA) platform that comes with workforce analytics features. It offers a wide variety of tools such as Pega Email Bot to automate repetitive tasks with personalised customer replies at scale. VISIT WEBSITE EdgeVerve, a subsidiary of India-based IT company Infosys Technologies, offers RPA software for major enterprise companies. Its AssistEdge Robotic Process Automation provides machine learning and AI tools called Infosys Nia. Its AssistEdge RPA enables global marketing and distribution companies to automate 970+ manual tasks at scale. VISIT WEBSITE Clevertap is a comprehensive platform that allows global marketers to get unified customer data analytics and omnichannel engagement in one place. VISIT WEBSITE UseResponse is a fully customisable customer support and feedback software, helping companies to better understand the needs of their customers. It provides the capabilities of multichannel ticketing, live chat with messengers aggregator, chatbot, feedback community portal, and knowledge base. VISIT WEBSITE Survicate is a drag-and-drop, multichannel survey builder, helping brands effortlessly collect and analyse customer feedback. It offers 23+ one-click, native integrations, enabling advertisers and marketers to create follow-up campaigns based on real-time customer feedback. VISIT WEBSITE SAP Sales Cloud comes with end-to-end solutions and offers AI-fueled insights for understanding customers' preferences. It helps build customer profiles at scale. It also empowers users to automatically manage contact information, which streamlines clients' journeys. VISIT WEBSITE Freshsales by Freshworks is an AI-powered software that streamlines the sales cycle by automating mundane tasks and personalising customer engagement. It generates quality leads and nurtures relationships by understanding visitor intent in real-time. VISIT WEBSITE Developed for midsize enterprises and large organisations, Creatio offers end-to-end CRM software solutions, allowing users to manage sales, marketing, and services all in one place. 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With Nycte, data and marketing teams can pre-define events such as attributed campaign performance to evaluate their efforts with live notifications. VISIT WEBSITE CleverTap is a customer engagement and retention platform that offers the functionality to integrate app analytics and marketing. Powered by TesseractDB, a purpose-built database for engagement & retention, it combines the features of audience analytics, omnichannel engagement, and product A/B testing for marketing functions. VISIT WEBSITE Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience (CX), lets advertisers personalise their campaigns. Its flagship product, Oracle Moat, a comprehensive analytics and measurement platform, provides a suite of solutions across marketing and ad intelligence. Moat helps reach prospective customers, capture consumer attention, and measure the outcomes to unlock business potential. VISIT WEBSITE Meta Ads is a social media advertising platform leveraging the user base from Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp to deliver personalised ads at scale. It offers Meta Business Suite and Meta Business Manager for managing and tracking ad performance. Utilising its AI-powered tools, advertisers can partially or fully automate with complete control over their ads. VISIT WEBSITE WebEngage is an end-to-end customer data platform, helping brands to strategise their customer engagement and retention functions. It supports third-party integration for use cases including customer segmentation, omnichannel engagement, and survey & feedback. VISIT WEBSITE ServiceNow features Robotic Process Automation Hub (RPA Hub), a scalable genAI-powered platform for orchestrating and managing a robotic workforce to execute various business processes. Its workflow automation enables tasks like lead management and campaign execution and supports integration with popular marketing tools to streamline processes. VISIT WEBSITE Tealium is a comprehesive customer data platform helping brands orchestrate and manage their data activation from a marketing standpoint. Its AudienceStream CDP functionality enables marketers to create custom campaigns via 1300+ integration options for several use cases. VISIT WEBSITE Qualaroo is a saas-based online survey creator offering Qualaroo Nudge, a proprietary technology for uploading custom properties for airtight targeting. It enables marketers to 'nudge' when user clicks on a page element, helping them to target visitors on their real-time activity. VISIT WEBSITE Zendesk is a Danish-American company that offers software-as-a-service products with the capabilities of omnichannel integrations. Its omnichannel messaging platform enables sales and marketing teams to easily track and consolidate customer tickets from various sources, ensuring enhanced customer experiences. VISIT WEBSITE WebEngage is an all-in-one marketing platform that integrates omnichannel engagement with live analytics features. It offers AI/ML-driven product recommendations engine that enables marketers to boost conversion for all channels, including the web and mobile apps. VISIT WEBSITE Sprinklr is a comprehensive enterprise software company offering omnichannel support capabilities for all customer-focused marketing functions. It provides no-code, easy-to-build API integrations to access real-time customer data from multiple sources — such as CRM, CDP and ecommerce platforms. VISIT WEBSITE SAP provides omnichannel marketing capabilities through its flagship product: SAP Emarsys. By accessing its purpose-built reports, teams can determine the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns, segments, and channels in achieving sales goals. Its B2B account engagement features let brands deliver predictable and personalised marketing-led B2B insights at scale. VISIT WEBSITE MoEngage is a global AI-driven marketing platform that enables brands to orchestrate omnichannel campaigns from a single intuitive interface. Utilising MoEngage's User Path Analysis capabilities, marketing teams can target customers across 10+ channels, depending on their purchase behaviour. VISIT WEBSITE Intuit Mailchimp is an AI-powered omnichannel platform that offers email and marketing automation functions. With its customised pre-built audience segments, marketers can scale their campaigns based on individual contacts' demographic information and shopping behaviour. VISIT WEBSITE Hubspot is a cloud-based, scalable customer platform that offers various marketing automation solutions with omnichannel support capabilities. It enables marketers to create omnichannel campaigns to connect and interact with customers across multiple channels in real-time. VISIT WEBSITE Bloomreach is an all-inclusive marketing automation platform that comes with omnichannel orchestration supports for various use cases, such as marketing campaign personalisation, and headless CMS commerce platform experience. VISIT WEBSITE Agillic specialises in offering global brands a comprehensive Omnichannel Marketing Automation Platform that enables them to create personalised marketing campaigns. Its multichannel marketing capabilities support multiple integrations, such as Playable and Sleeknote for lead generation, Zapier for automating routine processes, among others. VISIT WEBSITE Adobe Experience Cloud features Adobe Campaign, enabling marketers to synchronise their customer data from various channels for omnichannel marketing. By leveraging its omnichannel integration with Adobe Journey Optimiser, brands can build multi-step journeys, campaigns, and personalised real-time moments that follow their customers across channels. VISIT WEBSITE ActiveCampaign is an intelligent multichannel marketing automation platform that enables marketers to seamlessly connect campaigns across the channels that matter most to them. It helps enterprises streamline personalised marketing, transactional emails, and one-to-one CRM interactions throughout the customer lifecycle. VISIT WEBSITE UiPath offers a comprehensive AI-powered robotic automation platform, enabling marketers to streamline recurring functions, such as lead automation and customer engagement. Utilising its capabilities, marketers can personalise and automate customer interactions, depending on their needs and preferences. VISIT WEBSITE SAP is a composable marketing automation technology provider, offering SAP Intelligent RPA solutions to automate repetitive, rules-based business processes, including marketing and sales. Using its tech stack, marketers can automatically extract product data from manufacturers' websites, update online inventory and import website and email sales. VISIT WEBSITE Microsoft offers Power Automate, a low-code and AI-powered RPA software that helps marketers streamline tasks like lead management, email campaigns, social media management, data analysis, content publishing, and customer feedback. Leveraging its capabilities, businesses can automate repetitive tasks, such as lead capture and email marketing workflows. VISIT WEBSITE IBM offers AI-powered Robotic Process Automation capabilities for CRM and marketing functions. It enables users to automate workflows with integrated OCR and intelligent chatbots, distribute work across multiple bots without human interventions and manage emails via low-code authoring tools. VISIT WEBSITE Hyland offers an AI-powered comprehensive robotic automation software suite, enabling marketers' teams to automate their campaigns. Its Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology allows businesses to automate repetitive marketing functions, such as execution of targeted and personalised strategies in near real-time. VISIT WEBSITE Datamatics is an intelligent automation platform, offering TruBot RPA designer, a low-code bot design tool for marketing teams to create customised bots quickly. It provides 500 pre-built components, enabling low-code design and rapid deployment capabilities with drag-and-drop options. VISIT WEBSITE Automation Anywhere offers Automation Success Platform powered by Vertex AI, enabling enterprises to develop a cloud-based digital workforce at scale. Leveraging its bots, ML, and AI technologies, marketers can automate their marketing and sales processes. One of its popular offerings is Automation Co-Pilot, a genAI-powered assistant that empowers businesses to create and summarise content. VISIT WEBSITE Appian is a global technology provider, delivering end-to-end process automation with RPA, AI, IDP and API integrations. Utilising the readily available APIs of this low-code platform, teams can create a series of connected digital business applications including customer management and marketing. VISIT WEBSITE Powered by Zoho Corporation, Zoho Analytics enables marketers to track all critical metrics in a single platform to enhance marketing outcomes. The company offers 75 pre-built data visualisation reports and dashboards on marketing performance for collaborative analysis. With its AI-powered assistant, marketers can generate automated insights, predict future trends, and configure smart alerts. VISIT WEBSITE Semrush is an online visibility management and content marketing SaaS platform, offering marketing analytics tools to global businesses. Its open-source analytical tools include Market Explorer and Traffic Analytics for understanding market trends and website traffic respectively. VISIT WEBSITE Nielsen is a global audience insights, data and analytics solution provider, helping marketers measure what people listen to and watch. It offers a comprehensive, AI-powered Nielsen Marketing Cloud platform with sub-products such as Audience Segments, Scarborough, and Advanced Audiences to understand audiences for different targeting initiatives. VISIT WEBSITE MoEngage is a full-stack marketing automation platform, offering consumer insights and analytics solutions for marketers to understand customer LTV. With MoEngage Analytics, they can measure user engagement, spot behavioural patterns, and act on retention to prevent app uninstalls. VISIT WEBSITE Microsoft Clarity is a behavioural analysis tool that helps marketers understand user interaction with their website. It supports features like Session recordings, Heatmaps, and ML insights in real time. Processing more than a petabyte of data from over 100 million users per month, Clarity accommodates limitless traffic for various marketing measurements at scale. VISIT WEBSITE Powered by AI-led insights, Merkle offers scalable marketing analytics and CX technology solutions, helping brands to optimise their campaigns. Some of its flagship solutions are Measurement & Media analytics, Consumer & Experience insights, and Product & Market intelligence. VISIT WEBSITE Hubspot offers marketing analytics and dashboard software, enabling businesses to make data-backed decisions for use cases, such as revenue generation, site analytics and detailed reporting. Leveraging the capabilities of its multi-touch revenue attribution model, marketers can monitor real-time website traffic via unique tracking codes. VISIT WEBSITE Google Analytics is an open-source analytics tool by Google, enabling marketing teams within organisations to better understand their customers via valuable insights. Consequently, businesses can use those insights to take action, such as website improvement and tailored audience list creation. VISIT WEBSITE Adverity is an integrated data analytics platform, enabling marketers to automate their customer's data integration and visualisation functions. It offers 600+ pre-built data connectors to popular marketing platforms, social media networks, SEO tools, and marketing automation solutions. The platform also provides pre-build dashboards to generate tailored reports. VISIT WEBSITE Adobe Experience Cloud offers Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target within its analytics tools solutions, enabling marketers to execute in-depth analysis of their customer data. Adobe Analytics allows the sales and marketing teams to mix, match, and analyse data from any digital point in the customer journey. VISIT WEBSITE Ahrefs features a suite of analytics tools under its Ahref Enterprise offering. It offers API and Looker Studio connectors, enabling marketing teams to elevate their SEO strategy with enterprise-grade and insights. Some of the criteria for its API endpoints include Backlinks, Organic & Paid Traffic, SERPs, Website health score and more. VISIT WEBSITE StackAdapt is a multi-channel programmatic advertising platform, enabling digital marketers to customise their strategy. It offers open and flexible DSP (Digital Signal Processing) capabilities for executing tailored ad campaigns. Furthermore, its ad previewer lets marketing teams preview video, display and native ads on desktop or mobile across 500+ publishers, covering 23 verticals. VISIT WEBSITE Rakuten is a global affiliate ad technology company, enabling advertisers to optimise their marketing strategies with data-driven insights. It offers AI-powered forecasting and benchmarking capabilities and dynamic multi-touch commissioning tools, allowing advertisers to customise their campaigns. It also supports first-party data collection integrations for both B2B and B2C marketers. VISIT WEBSITE Nielsen offers Nielsen Ad Intel, a cross-platform advertising intelligence platform with actionable insights to identify prospects, analyse brand strategies and learn from past advertising campaigns. It offers various advertising intelligence features such as ad spend monitoring, competitive benchmarking, global competitive insights and expert data harmonisation. VISIT WEBSITE Magnite is an independent sell-side advertising technology provider, enabling publishers to monetise their content across all screens and formats. It offers Magnite Streaming, a singular supply-side platform that merges technology from the Magnite CTV and SpotX platforms. Utilising this functionality, marketers can identify their potential audiences to restructure their targeting strategies. VISIT WEBSITE IBM offers a comprehensive suite of Watson Advertising to agencies and marketers. With Watson Advertising's AI-powered assistant, advertisers can customise their advertisements, based on real-time ad results. It also supports functionalities of cookieless advertising, ad fraud management and brand safety measurements. VISIT WEBSITE Google features a comprehensive list of AI-powered Ad tools under its Google Ads offering. Some of its popular tools include Keywords Planner, Ads Editor, Reach Planner, Ads Mobile App, Insights Finder, Ads API, and Recommendations Page. Additionally, it offers Google AdMob to help businesses plan their in-app revenue generation strategy. VISIT WEBSITE Criteo is an all-in-one connected commerce media platform, enabling marketers and agencies to scale their digital and physical assets. Leveraging the capabilities of its AI-powered technology, brands can develop strategies for intent-based product recommendations, multi-prolonged accessibility, contextual advertising, and more. VISIT WEBSITE Basis Tecnologies (formerly known as Centro), is a programmatic advertising platform, offering ad management tools for search, social and site direct via a single interface. Its flagship products are Basis Assistant and Basis Automate+. Basis Assistant is a Chrome extension, connecting 20+ platforms and tools, and Basis Automate+ is a digital advertising automation tool for simplifying campaign process. VISIT WEBSITE AppsFlyer is a mobile attribution company, helping mobile advertisers to identify their ad network. It offers a measurement suite, giving app marketers full visibility into their customer journeys while preserving their privacy. Utilising its AI-powered Creative Optimisation platform, marketers can formulate their creative strategy. VISIT WEBSITE Adtriba is a cross-channel digital marketing management platform based on data-driven attribution modelling. Its solutions include Adtriba Triangulation, enabling advertisers to witness the integration of diverse measurement methods, such as Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM), Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) and Incrementality Testing. VISIT WEBSITE Adobe Experience Cloud offers connected advertising solutions with its natively integrated Adobe Advertising platform. Its consultancy-based reporting options come with AI-powered optimisation features, helping advertisers analyse their ad performance via 200+ measurement metrics. Utilising its connected TV (CTV) and search, social, and commerce tools, marketers can optimise their customer acquisition strategy. VISIT WEBSITE specialises in Conversational AI, generating autonomous conversations that appear human-like. These conversations form the foundation of brand engagement. Their AI-powered, no-code Dynamic Automation Platform manages around two billion conversations from a multitude of channels in numerous languages. VISIT WEBSITE Sprinklr offers a comprehensive suite of 250+ AI-intent bot templates for various industry verticals to accelerate bot development. Its specialised AI and compliant rule engine enables marketers to modify and automate their promotional campaigns for better engagement via suggestion-based personalised bots. VISIT WEBSITE Meta's new class of generative AI features and creative tools allow users to create and share custom stickers or update the visual style of their photos with a simple text prompt. They can also chat with 28 different AIs and get unique perspectives on topics like travel, games and food. VISIT WEBSITE is a UI-based platform that allows marketers to create a chatbot quickly and deploy it easily on multiple channels. Leveraging the capabilities of its conversational builder, enterprises can build the Dialogflow using dialogue messages. Some of its popular offerings include XO: Experience Optimisation and GALE(Beta). VISIT WEBSITE IBM watsonx Assistant is an interactive virtual agent that utilises natural language and AI, enabling users to set it up on their app and website. It offers fast and accurate responses to customers, enhancing their overall experience and satisfaction with its adaptive learning capabilities. VISIT WEBSITE Haptik helps enterprises manage their customer lifecycle with generative AI-powered conversational solutions to boost marketing and sales. It offers Contakt and Interakt to enhance overall CX, where Interakt enables marketers to send hyper-targeted and personalised campaigns to drive customers to take action on WhatsApp. VISIT WEBSITE Dialogflow is an all-in-one platform for developing chatbots, voice bots, and virtual agents using natural language understanding and Google AI. It helps marketing teams create conversational agents that can handle common customer requests and issues, such as FAQs, and order status at scale. VISIT WEBSITE Dialpad is a fully integrated unified conversation intelligence platform that utilises ongoing ML(Machine Learning) algorithms and does not require coding to configure a chatbot. It offers real-time insights and tips, helping marketing teams customise their approach for every customer. VISIT WEBSITE is a low code-no code, enterprise-grade generative AI platform offering readily available LLMs for CX transformations. Its omnichannel reporting and analytics suite for marketing enables organisations to streamline their customer journeys. VISIT WEBSITE is a global conversational AI technology provider optimised for operational efficiency at scale. It offers self-learning AI capabilities that emphasise Natural Language Understanding (NLU) along with intent suggestions. VISIT WEBSITE Avaamo is an all-in-one conversational AI platform for enterprises offering a suite of industry-specific skills developed to automate and resolve common use cases. It offers Outreach, which enables marketers to educate and engage with customers across existing touchpoints through proactive and personalised communication. VISIT WEBSITE Amazon Lex offers fully managed conversational AI interfaces with advanced natural language models to design, build, test, and deploy conversational interfaces in applications. It enables sales and marketing teams to automate user tasks in their applications like the CRM and across any digital channel. VISIT WEBSITE Zendesk is an AI-powered customer feedback software provider, offering customer satisfaction (CSAT) software to businesses across multiple industries. Its marketplace offers 1600+ apps and integrations, enabling marketers to create a complete customer feedback system. VISIT WEBSITE UserVoice provides product feedback management software for SaaS businesses. Its UserVoice Validation tool delivers actionable user insights to inform roadmap strategy. From testing ideas to ensuring satisfaction with released features, it helps research and marketing teams gather quick user feedback throughout the entire product lifecycle. VISIT WEBSITE Twilio provides integrated Mindful Feedback functionality within its Flex offering, enabling marketers to automatically take action based on real-time customer feedback. It automatically collects customer feedback after Flex interactions by capturing feedback over post-call voice IVR, outbound voice IVR, conversational SMS, Web SMS, email, and web surveys. VISIT WEBSITE Trustpilot offers ML and AI-powered feedback management tools, helping marketers build trust and loyalty through customer reviews. Its AI-driven Review Insights tool enables marketers to identify growth areas from negative feedback, whereas its Image Generator tool lets them enhance social media engagement. VISIT WEBSITE Survey Monkey is a global online survey and forms tech stack provider, offering AI-fueled market research solutions to businesses. Its enterprise feedback management program provides 250+ templates with the capabilities of customisation, allowing organisations to build tailored survey forms. VISIT WEBSITE Sprinklr is a unified customer experience platform (CXM), offering AI-powered feedback management capabilities with its flagship product: Sprinklr Surveys. It integrates solicited customer feedback with unified-CXM data, enabling brands to derive meaningful, actionable insights. Utilising its genAI-powered survey builder, marketers can create conversational surveys to streamline their NPS strategies. VISIT WEBSITE Salesforce is a comprehensive customer-oriented technology provider offering a feedback management suite. Salesforce's survey responses help marketers create personalised surveys based on their existing customers' data. Some of the supported applications of its feedback management platform are genAI-powered survey form development and sentiment-insights-based survey collections. VISIT WEBSITE QuestionPro is an online feedback software provider, offering ready-made survey templates to businesses across 40+ countries. Leveraging the capabilities of its customer satisfaction templates, advertisers and marketers can create and gather tailored questions. VISIT WEBSITE Qualtrics is an all-in-one customer experience solution provider, offering website & app feedback tools for organisations to collect customer feedback efficiently. Its digital experience analytics capabilities combined with DXA integrations, bring together verbal and behavioural data for in-depth analysis of user feedback. VISIT WEBSITE HubSpot is a one-stop marketing platform, providing customer feedback software under its Service Hub offerings. Its pre-built APIs include net promote score (NPS), customer effort score (CES), and customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys, allowing marketers to strengthen their customer loyalty strategy. VISIT WEBSITE Medallia is a comprehensive platform, enabling marketers to capture feedback from all customer touch points. Some of its popular feedback management software capabilities include Sense360 for analysing consumer spending, Medallia Video to automatically extract meaningful insights from customer's feedbacks and Agile Research for creating branded surveys in real-time. VISIT WEBSITE Zeotap lets brands integrate, unify, segment and orchestrate customer data, fostering a cookieless future. It offers a 'Non-Customer Entity Data' feature that helps marketers to integrate both customer and non-customer entity data. VISIT WEBSITE Twilio provides, Twilio Segment, an AI-powered CDP, enabling marketers to streamline their personalised customer engagement journeys. It brings together clean, consented customer data for real-time insights with 450+ pre-built connectors. VISIT WEBSITE Syntasa provides data-ready CDP capabilities, equipping marketers with essential tools to prepare their customer data. It offers real-time sentiment analytics capabilities, helping enterprises derive behavioural insights from unified user profiles to foster hyper-personalised experiences. VISIT WEBSITE SAP is a company-wide customer data management platform, helping marketers improve engagement, conversion, and retention. It offers a genAI-powered data model, enabling enterprises to unify their B2B and B2C customers' profiles to reach their personalisation goals. VISIT WEBSITE Oracle is a global database management company, providing CDP solutions, under its flagship product: Oracle Unity. Its AI-powered models enable marketers to create hyper-personsalised campaigns with predictive insights by streamlining real-time customer data from heterogeneous sources. VISIT WEBSITE Growthloop is a composable CDP platform, allowing marketing and sales team to action their data at scale. It offers GrowthLoop Audience Builder, enabling marketers to initiate their lead generation functions. VISIT WEBSITE Adobe Experience Cloud offers a real-time CDP, letting users create high-value audience segments for B2C and B2B use cases across their marketing funnel. It follows a cookieless marketing approach to automatically unify customer data across various online and offline channels in real-time. VISIT WEBSITE ActionIQ is a composable CDP platform that offers audience segmentation, acquisition marketing, and Customer 360 capabilities. It integrates analytical tools, enabling marketers to collect and analyse their first-party customer data at scale. VISIT WEBSITE Zoho CRM leverages automation and comprehensive analytics to empower any sales team, fostering stronger customer loyalty. Ideal for both small businesses and enterprises, this software enables enhanced productivity and tailored solutions through predictive intelligence. VISIT WEBSITE Zendesk offers Zendesk Sell, an easy-to-deploy CRM platform that is simple to deploy and navigate, catering to businesses of any scale. Its mobile-friendly Sell app has the functionalities of geolocation, helping sales and marketing teams. Offering an all-in-one CRM platform, organisations can implement use cases like prospecting, engagement, lead generation and communication capabilities. VISIT WEBSITE SugarCRM is a global CRM software provider, helping marketing, sales, and service teams improve efficiency through automation, data, and intelligence in near real-time. It offers Sugar Market, an all-in-one marketing automation platform that helps marketers to automate their campaign with higher ROI. VISIT WEBSITE Salesforce is a one-stop sales and support CRM software that regularly updates customer records, tracks emails and calls, and creates organised support processes for quicker customer responses. Its simple and scalable infrastructure is ideal for businesses of all sizes. VISIT WEBSITE Pipedrive stands out with its emphasis on automation, tailorability, and seamless integration. Purposefully built to enhance the efficiency and productivity of sales professionals, this CRM solution has an intuitive setup and robust capabilities. It facilitates lead generation, comprehensive sales analytics, and seamless business expansion. VISIT WEBSITE Oracle NetSuite CRM, a component of Oracle's business software suite, is for all midsize and booming businesses that want a comprehensive, integrated CRM solution with ERP capabilities. Using it, customers and partners can directly interact with the platform, freeing the additional work load for their sales team. VISIT WEBSITE Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales represents a robust cloud-based CRM solution brimming with features such as pipeline assessment, relationship analytics, and conversational intelligence. It utilises AI-powered insights to provide actionable intelligence via predictive analytics, lead scoring and sentiment analysis. VISIT WEBSITE Less Annoying is a CRM software that utilises a straightforward search feature within its contact management system, making it easy to track contacts. It is ideal for small-sized businesses and offers a highly intuitive and user-friendly interface. VISIT WEBSITE Insightly offers CRM software solutions for enterprises looking to understand their audience data across various marketing functions. It integrates seamlessly with third-party apps, streamlining workflow automation, including bulk emailing and report generation. VISIT WEBSITE HubSpot's sleek dashboard with consolidated CRM tools simplify complex customer data, further transforming it into meaningful insights. Complementing typical CRM functionalities, HubSpot provides tailored options, including conversation intelligence and email monitoring. VISIT WEBSITE Apptivo delivers adaptable and web-based CRM solutions, enabling marketing and sales teams to streamline all customer service requirements across various devices and browsers. Despite its focused feature set, it encompasses over 65 interconnected applications alongside a robust sales pipeline management tool, ensuring efficient tracking of potential leads without any downtime. VISIT WEBSITE Sitecore offers composable cloud solutions with its flagship products, Sitecore Experience Platform(XP) and Sitecore Experience Manager (XM). They help marketers to overcome scalability challenges. Some of its features include intuitive visual editing, headless delivery, marketing automation, scalable personalisation, data and machine learning capabilities. VISIT WEBSITE Salesforce Experience Cloud is a platform that helps enterprises link clients, partners, and employees to securely exchange information and documents. Built on its Customer 360 platform, Salesforce's DXP ensures seamless integration with any solution in the Salesforce ecosystem. VISIT WEBSITE Oracle Cloud offers a comprehensive suite of platform-based marketing automation solutions for personalised B2B and B2C automation campaigns. Some of its featured products are Eloqua Marketing Automation, CrowdTwist Loyalty and Engagement, and Unity Customer Data Platform. VISIT WEBSITE Optimizely is a digital experience platform (DXP) provider that offers Optimizely One, an easy-to-use and fully integrated suite. It provides a single, unified workflow with thoughtfully embedded AI and machine-learning algorithms, accelerating work across the entire marketing lifecycle. VISIT WEBSITE OpenText offers a cloud-native, scalable platform for enterprises to streamline their marketing functions. It provides fully composable content management, digital asset management, creative workflows, personalisation, targeting and customer data technologies in one place, ensuring a holistic approach to B2B, B2E and B2C experiences. VISIT WEBSITE Neptune DXP is a PaaS(Platform-as-a-Service) provider, helping marketing teams build custom apps based on modular, reusable application building blocks. The company offers flexible environments to businesses across different verticals, further providing personalised digital solutions at scale. VISIT WEBSITE Magnolia is a composable DXP that comes with no-code connector packs and low-code micro-frameworks for third-party integrations. It also offers an open-source version alongside its commercial plans enabling enterprises to build tailored use cases. VISIT WEBSITE Liferay DXP helps marketers deliver personalised and connected digital experiences across a broad range of channels, including customer portals, websites, intranets, mobile apps, and connected devices. It offers intuitive CMS, user analytics, and site management tools that businesses need to launch, test and optimise digital experiences for faster go-to-market. VISIT WEBSITE Powered by IBM Consulting, IBM iX offers a composable DXP, providing a comprehensive solution to make enterprises' systems future-ready. Utilising its data-driven insights and intelligent workflows, marketers can design and deliver human-centred experiences across the customer lifecycle. VISIT WEBSITE HCL Digital Experience (DX), forms part of a wider HCL Customer Experience (CX) product portfolio, offering core capabilities such as content management, DAM, CDP called Signals, and low-code application development. It provides services in government, life sciences, insurance, financial services, and other verticals. VISIT WEBSITE Contentstack is a headless CMS and Composable Digital Experience Platform (DXP) solution provider that helps marketers gain a competitive edge. It recently launched into Google Cloud Marketplace, and is also available on Microsoft Azure and AWS. It seamlessly enables mid-market brands to adopt its omnichannel campaign engine to drive higher conversions and sales. VISIT WEBSITE Bloomreach Commerce Experience Cloud provides businesses an edge with its modular capabilities: Content Management System (CMS), Discovery features for search and merchandising optimisation, and Engagement tools such as Customer Data Platforms (CDP) for personalisation and analytics. VISIT WEBSITE Adobe Experience Cloud offers a comprehensive set of services specifically designed to address the day-to-day requirements for personalised customer experience at scale. Its platform helps manage different digital content and assets to improve customer satisfaction. Some of its products include Adobe Gen Studio, Experience Manager Sites, Real-time CDP, and Marketo Engage. VISIT WEBSITE Acquia offers DXP solutions, comprising of two main elements: Acquia Drupal Cloud and Acquia Marketing Cloud. It can be accessed in both platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) with additional components such as Site Factory for multisite management, digital asset management (DAM), CDP, personalisation, and Campaign Studio. VISIT WEBSITE
Axios
06-03-2025
- Business
- Axios
"Humans in the loop" make AI work, for now
There will — and must — always be "humans in the loop," tech leaders reassure the world when they publicly address fears that AI will eliminate jobs, make mistakes or destroy society. Why it matters: Who these humans are, what the loop is and where exactly the people fit into it remain very much up for grabs. How the industry answers those questions will shape what work looks like in the future. Here are three ways of thinking about what "humans in the loop" can mean. 1. AI assists humans Chatbots need us to prompt them or give them instructions in order to work. Agents are also assistants, but they require less supervision from humans. As agents' abilities grow, keeping humans in the loop ensures "that AI systems make decisions that align with human judgment, ethics, and goals," Fay Kallel, VP of product and design at Intuit Mailchimp, told Axios in an email. "By automating tedious tasks, we create space for creative and strategic work," Kelly Moran, VP of engineering, search and AI at Slack, told Axios. "Our data shows that AI use leans more toward augmentation (57%) compared to automation (43%)," an Anthropic spokesperson told Axios in an email. "In most cases, AI isn't replacing people but collaborating with them." "Humans aren't always rowing the boat — but we're very much steering the ship," Paula Goldman, chief ethical and humane use officer at Salesforce, wrote last year. 2. AI hands over the wheel at key moments As agents grow more common and more capable, systems are likely to build in checkpoints for human involvement. In a demo last month, Operator, OpenAI's ChatGPT-based agent for accomplishing online tasks, made dinner reservations, called an Uber and purchased concert tickets. But at key moments, Operator switched into a "takeover mode" to let the human user enter login credentials, payment details or other sensitive information. 3. Humans review AI's final work Most chatbot users have learned by now that genAI needs a fact-checker. Bots can make things up, misinterpret data or make incorrect recommendations. Even as models get smarter, humans are often still required to audit an AI's work. "By design, systems must be built with checkpoints for human experience and judgment, allowing for verification when appropriate without losing the efficiency gains AI provides," Allan Thygesen, CEO at Docusign, said in an email. Because of "the probabilistic nature of the technology," George C. Lee, co-head of the Goldman Sachs Global Institute, told Axios that the company uses human "checkers," especially for sensitive workflows. Reality check: The idea of keeping "humans in the loop" assumes that humans are better at making decisions than AI, which isn't always true. "We're accustomed to trusting humans," Stefano Soatto, professor of computer science at UCLA and VP at Amazon Web Services, told Axios — but "not all humans are trustworthy." Between the lines: The ability to provide oversight and to understand what tasks should be handed off to AI are the skills that human workers will need in the future, says Kelly Monahan, managing director of the research institute at Upwork. As a freelance platform, Upwork is able to see trends of how work is shifting faster than you might see at a job level. Monahan told Axios that Upwork's clients are searching for more "high-value work" and that includes people with "the ability to read context, to be creative, to be empathetic, all those unique qualities that actually make us intelligent." The intrigue: Most modern generative AI systems have been trained, in part, by humans. Humans select, clean and label data to fine-tune AI models to teach them how to answer questions or understand images. Humans decide what they want the model to achieve and what safeguards or values an AI model has. OpenAI also uses humans to score AI answers, which is a key way models get better. This is known as reinforcement learning with human feedback. Zoom in: It's becoming increasingly unclear when human oversight is necessary, when AI should take the lead and what risks we're willing to take along the way. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman explored this dilemma from a military AI perspective at a Brookings Center discussion last year. "I've never heard anyone advocate that AI should get to make decisions about launching nuclear weapons. I've also never heard anyone advocate that AI shouldn't be used to intercept inbound missiles where you have to act really quickly," Altman told the moderators. "And then there's this whole area in the there's like a plane coming to bomb South Korea and you don't have time to have a human in the loop, and you can make an intercept decision or not, but you're very sure that it's happening, like how sure do you have to be? What would be the expected impact on human life? Where do you draw the line in that gray area?" "I hope this is never an OpenAI decision," Altman added. What we're watching: As AI's abilities improve and the gap between human and machine intelligence narrows, today's "humans in the loop" promise could end up as just a placeholder.
