Tag: AI

Singapore – Ahead of the 2023 NAB Show – the conference and exhibition for broadcast, media, and entertainment – Adobe announced several new innovations across its family of video applications, including AI-powered text-based video editing and automated color tone-mapping capabilities in Premiere Pro. In addition, significant GPU acceleration and dozens of workflow enhancements make this the fastest version of Premiere Pro ever released. 

The company said its latest innovations are designed to address the workflow needs of today’s professional editors and motion designers by automating time-intensive tasks, freeing creative professionals to spend more time “shaping the stories they want to tell.” Adobe also announced new innovations and partnerships that expand Frame.io, its video collaboration platform, with more features for photography and PDF documents.

Moreover, Adobe is celebrating 30 years of After Effects, its popular motion design software for video professionals, adding a context-sensitive Properties Panel for enhanced user productivity, consistent color support as well as performance optimizations.

“Today’s video professionals are racing to meet insatiable demand for standout content across platforms and surfaces,” said Ashley Still, senior vice president of Creative Product Group and Digital Media Growth at Adobe. “We are excited to advance workflows and inspire new creative expression with the latest cutting-edge Premiere Pro and After Effects innovations, empowering creative professionals to focus on the craft of creating, while cutting out time-consuming tasks that prolong content ideation, creation and delivery.”

Leveraging Adobe Sensei, Adobe’s machine learning and AI framework, Premiere Pro and After Effects now streamline video workflows and offer AI-powered editing that saves production teams hours and significantly reduces costs.

Key updates to Premiere Pro include:

  • Text-Based Editing represents a shift in post-production workflows. Premiere Pro is the only professional editing software to incorporate Text-Based Editing, revolutionizing the way creators approach their craft by making video editing as simple as copying and pasting text. Powered by Adobe Sensei, Text-Based-Editing automatically analyses and transcribes clips so editors, producers, and assistants can simply copy and paste sentences into any order they want and instantly see them appear on the timeline. Transcripts can be searched in the transcript window to identify exact words and phrases.
  • Automatic Tone Mapping and Log Color Detection lets editors mix and match HDR footage from different sources into the same SDR project and get great-looking, consistent colour. This means editors don’t need to use look-up tables (LUTs) or manually balance footage to get great-looking images.
  • Premiere Pro features significant under-the-hood improvements, and is the fastest version ever shipped. In addition to enhanced performance, new features include background auto save, system reset options and an​Effects Manager for plug-ins. GPU acceleration for AVC Intra and professional formats such as ARRI RAW, RED RAW, and Sony Venice V2, coupled with GPU-accelerated video scopes, transitions, and title templates, make the editing experience lightning fast and responsive so editors can now work with 8K footage in the timeline.
  • Collaborative editing enhancements include Sequence Locking, enabling the active editors to lock a sequence so it becomes view-only for other editors, Presence Indicators to provide visibility on who is working on shared projects, and Work While Offline to allow editors to continue to work offline, then publish changes without overwriting others’ work when they return online. Included with Creative Cloud, Frame.io support enables secure sharing, collaborative review and project management for Premiere Pro edits, including direct export, upload and Share for Review capabilities.
  • Premiere Pro also adds improved format support for RED V-Raptor X, ARRI Alexa 35 and Sony Venice v2 cameras; expanded Speech to Text support for Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish; GPU acceleration for debayering and transition effects; simpler track targeting; and the ability to export and render directly to Adobe Media Encoder.

New innovations in After Effects include:

  • The new Properties Panel offers quick and easy access to the most important animation settings in one convenient panel. The Properties Panel is context-sensitive, automatically showing users the most important controls needed based on selections, cutting down on the time needed to navigate through the timeline and reducing the learning curve for new users.
  • New ACES and OpenColorIO maintain consistent colors when sharing assets with other post-production apps to help users create more predictable and photo-realistic images in less time and with less effort.
  • Additional new features deliver performance optimizations including faster timeline layer selection and multi-frame rendering of shapes – plus new keyboard shortcuts for Selectable Track Mattes. After Effects now helps users fix common issues without the need for IT expert assistance, including in-app troubleshooting for potential workflow issues, system performance optimizations, simple interfaces for enabling and disabling plug-ins and diagnostics to fix bottlenecks in caches and preferences.

To empower partners to deliver creative experiences that inspire, transform and move the world forward, Adobe is launching a new Adobe Video Partner Program that provides a holistic, end-to-end approach across all Adobe video tools. The program offers access to exclusive benefits, resources and solutions designed to help grow and develop our partners’ businesses as they evolve.

Over 400 global partners are now delivering solutions for Adobe customers, including chipmakers AMD, Intel and Nvidia; camera makers Canon, Nikon, RED and Sony; and technology providers ranging from AWS to Fraunhofer IIS and Microsoft. Newly announced integrations with FUJIFILM expand Adobe’s leading collaborative video review and approval platform Frame.io to support end-to-end workflows for capturing, editing, reviewing and approving photos.

Adobe’s latest releases of Premiere Pro and After Effects, including beta versions of Premiere Pro’s Text-Based Editing and Automatic Tone Mapping, and After Effects’ Properties Panel, will be on display at the 2023 NAB Show from April 15-19 in Las Vegas and generally available in May 2023.

Sydney, Australia – Canva, today’s top all-in-one visual communication platform, has announced a new suite of brand management features and AI-powered design tools, built to help teams and organizations of all shapes and sizes to communicate visually and produce content at scale. 

“Ten years ago, we launched Canva driven by a vision to empower everyone to design anything, no matter their skills or experience,” said Canva Co-founder and CEO, Melanie Perkins. “Today, we’re thrilled to advance that vision by introducing a whole new range of features, focused on empowering brands to scale their creative outputs. As technology continues to advance, we are reimagining the design process by making it even easier to take what is in your head, get it onto a page, and out into the world, faster than ever before.”

At its most recent ‘Canva Create’, the platform’s dedicated event for announcing new product features, it has unveiled the new ‘Brand Hub’. 

Canva says the new range of tools and features was developed out of the augmented demand it saw for teams to produce incredibly high volumes of content which are often targeted at a global scale. May it be social media graphics to presentations or video content to documents, the visual communications imperative is at an all-time high, says Canva. 

The platform expands the capabilities of the Visual Suite with ‘Brand Hub’, specifically aimed at helping teams and organizations create with efficiency and stay on brand.

To serve as ‘the home for every brand’, Canva’s ‘Brand Hub’ offers the following: 

  • Brand Kit: Allows teams to create a Brand Kit with the right assets in their immediate arsenals such as logos, colours, fonts, icons, imagery, graphics, and brand guidelines.
  • Magic Replace: Allows teams to instantly update brand assets across one’s entire company with a single click.
  • Brand Templates: Allows teams to design and share Brand Templates for them to quickly create on-brand, compelling content. 
  • Brand Folders: Allows teams to set up Brand Folders to keep branding organized and accessible. 
  • Brand Guidelines: Allows an organisation’s brand guidelines to be automatically and contextually surfaced within the Canva Editor. 
  • Brand Controls: Allows teams to set brand controls and gain the confidence that they are always designing on-brand content. Admins are able to limit fonts and colours, eliminating the need to check hex codes or look out for unapproved fonts.
  • Approval Workflows: Allows admins can use approval workflows directly in Canva, ensuring designs are reviewed and approved before being published.

Aside from the new ‘Brand Hub’, Canva is also supercharging its Visual Suite by unveiling a collection of new AI-powered tools that aim to accelerate the design process whilst unlocking unprecedented capabilities. 

The new features are as follows: 

  • Magic Design: Simply upload an image then select a style, and Magic Design will create a curated selection of personalised templates ready for download to further customize. 
  • Magic Edit: Add or replace anything in an image. Identify where to add something, describe it to Magic Edit, and watch as it appears.
  • Magic Eraser: Clean up unwanted details in images with Magic Eraser. Brush over the area and watch as the distraction is magically removed. 
  • Magically generate new Presentations: Prompt the editor and watch as Magic Design generates a range of presentations with an outline and content on each slide.
  • Canva Assistant: Unlock the best of Canva with the tap of a button. Search for eye-catching elements, get recommendations for images and layouts, or generate custom AI content to elevate your designs.
  • Beat Sync: Automatically match video footage to the soundtrack.
  • Translate: With the click of a button, automatically translate the text in designs to over 100 different languages. 
  • Magic Write: Create content from a simple text prompt in seconds. Canva’s AI-powered copywriting assistant is now available across the entire Visual Suite including Presentations, Videos, and Websites.

Furthermore to the new ‘Brand Hub’ and AI-powered visual suite, Canva is debuting an array of highly requested features from its global community as well as sprinkling ‘extra magic’ into existing ones.

Here’s the list of the new capabilities:

  • Draw: Allows for freehand drawing, underlines, or annotations. 
  • Layouts: Allows to add content to a page and be recommended layout ideas for a design. 
  • Styles: Allows to develop a signature look and feel by matching current designs to previous work. Users may find inspiration by browsing suggested colour palettes and font pairings. 
  • Layers: Allows to adjust elements without affecting other parts of designs. Users can see all elements in one place – whether it’s text, shapes, images or video.
  • Gradients: Allows to quickly add gradients to any background, shape, table cell, or frame. 
  • Precision Position Tools: Allows to customise positioning, alignment, spacing, and sizing with ease. Users can select one or several elements, then open the new Position panel and customize everything from one place. 
  • Alt Text: Allows to create alt text for media, images and elements that describe what’s happening, providing extra context for those with visual impairment or accessibility needs. 
  • Smart Design Imports: Allows to drag and drop any file straight into the editor to transform it into an editable Canva design. Design Imports are now easier, faster, and more precise than ever. 
  • 953 New Fonts: 953 of the world’s most popular fonts are now available including Arial, Avenier, Courier, Helvetica, and Times New Roman.

Canva has been continuously bolstering its capabilities with customised value propositions for every type of creator. Just within the same month, the platform has also launched a new subscription offering for college universities. 

Called ‘Canva for Campus’, all college and university institutions across the globe can now obtain free access to Canva for their students when they begin purchasing Canva for Campus licenses for staff.

2023 will mark an exciting and transformative new phase for most businesses in the world as the economic environment and market situation evolves and enters a new normal. First-party data-centric solutions, online-merge-offline (OMO) services and applications, along with result-driven marketing focus with the emphasis on conversion and campaign result uplift, are set to help businesses build stronger resilience in a highly uncertain market environment. 

In the post-pandemic era, offline channels have been recovering steadily, but this does not mean that the influence of online channels will decline. Instead, with the nature of online marketing’s measurable effectiveness, the lines between customer acquisition, retention, conversion, and insight into the marketing funnel stages have started to blur, and this makes it more important to equip businesses with real-time first-party data collection and analysis capabilities to strengthen their online and offline data integration. Service providers with a strong AI know-how will continue to lead the trends of MarTech tool development and present more diverse applications to fit multiple scenarios. 

Following the incoming phasing out of third-party cookies, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as a leading technology that provides better results for organisations, supporting them to enhance their campaign performances with limited data sources. In response to the economic slowdown and inflation, results-driven marketing solutions will empower businesses to turn their marketing investment into predictable returns and leverage a ‘turning AI into ROI’ customer-centric mindset to help enterprises cope well with the new normal in 2023. 

To prepare for the new normal in the post-pandemic era in 2023, the following three strategies can help companies seize potential business opportunities and make wiser business decisions:

Theme 1: First-party data centric solutions 

With the rise in the awareness of data privacy, businesses are seeking first-party data centric solutions for digital marketing. Real-time analysis and predictions from small data are two unique features of AI technology which can unify user profiles and extrapolate user affinity more accurately and realize personalised communication with limited first-party data, whilst respecting user privacy. Moreover, first-party data can also enable auto-piloted intelligent advertising to generate greater investment returns for customers. 

Theme 2: OMO application of online and offline data 

Digital transformation is a continuously evolving process. Although offline sales have gradually recovered in the post-pandemic era, online shopping trends that took hold during the pandemic have convinced brands that OMO is the key to sustainability and to coping with uncertainties. 

To adapt to the new normal in the post-pandemic era, enterprises are actively seeking solutions to integrate and connect data across offline and online channels. Brands that unify customer data across different channels such as websites, apps, and social media can then leverage smarter insights to create seamless and personalised customer experiences.

Theme 3: Emphasis on conversion and effectiveness with result-driven marketing focus

An ever-changing market environment brings formidable challenges to enterprises and brands. Brands are spending their marketing budgets more precisely to specify marketing targets. AI can incorporate natural language processing, computer vision, and conversational commerce to help businesses keep up with these changes in real time, gain insights that humans cannot perceive, and recommend businesses to take immediate actions driven by data. 

For example, AI can target high-value customers and make predictions beforehand, and optimize the effectiveness of advertising and retargeting. It can also be used to make creative decisions about ad materials to improve advertising effectiveness. Combined with intuitive visualisation to quickly display users’ feedback at every touch point of the customer journey, AI can quickly predict and understand marketing performance in real time and take immediate actions. 

AI not only improves the efficiency and effectiveness of customer acquisition, it can also predict purchase intent. After a user visits a website, brands can leverage the power of AI to deliver a personalised coupon to hesitant shoppers to stimulate the checkout process or increase customer transactions, enabling enterprises to maximise the ROI of their marketing campaign without sacrificing profit. 

Due to the impact of the pandemic and uncertainties in the market, AI-driven MarTech solutions have become an indispensable tool to help companies enhance their competitiveness. There will be more relevant applications to be introduced in 2023, and be adopted extensively in multiple industries. MarTech solutions will also become more data-driven and result-driven to help enterprises make advances in the face of adversity. 

This article is written by Hongchia How, Vice President of Appier for APAC.

The insight is published as part of MARKETECH APAC’s thought leadership series under What’s NEXT 2023. What’s NEXT 2023 is a multi-platform industry initiative which features marketing and industry leaders in APAC sharing their marketing insights and predictions for the upcoming year.

If you are a marketing leader and have insights that you’d like to share on upcoming trends and practices in marketing, please reach out to [email protected] for an opportunity to be part of the series. 

Singapore – Recommerce platform Carousell has launched a new end-to-end service ‘Sell to Carousell’ in Singapore; the latest movement of the platform following its acquisition of Laku6, an Indonesian electronics recommerce platform, in the early part of H2 2022.

The new service affords users in Singapore an advanced option to sell their mobile phones directly to Carousell in under 24 hours from the comfort of their homes or by dropping off their phones at any iStudio outlet, the Apple premium reseller.

At the heart of the new solution is the quick on-the-spot diagnosis which is made possible through Laku6’s proprietary AI-first diagnostic technology. Carousell is able to inspect the condition of secondhand mobile phones in under two minutes and confirm the final quote through its own smart pricing algorithm.

Quek Siu Rui, Group CEO and co-founder of the Carousell Group, shared that since the integration of Laku6, they have seen a growth of 55% in the past half year alone in mobile phone transactions.

“There is huge potential for electronics recommerce in Greater Southeast Asia, which is slated to grow over 2.5X to US$18.6 billion by 2026, and Carousell Group is well placed to cement our leadership,” said Quek.

Founder of Laku6 Alvin Yap shared that since finding out consumers’ sentiment of seeing the activity of selling their mobile phones as burdensome through their own user research, they have been working on developing solutions tailored to local market needs.

“Since the soft launch in September 2022, the program has shown signs of a strong product market fit with thousands of phones processed,” said Yap.

The process for ‘Sell to Carousell’ starts with users filling in a short form about their phone condition on the app or website to get an estimated quote. Afterwards, users will be able to choose if they want to have a Carousell agent visit their home for device inspection and have an instant payout or visit a physical store themselves to complete the process.

This process has been made fully automated to remove the element of human error during assessment, at the same time, allows users the flexibility to change their minds on selling with no obligations upon receiving the final quote.

According to Quek, they would soon be launching similar products in Vietnam and Malaysia through its brands Cho Tot and Mudah.my respectively. He further revealed that the group’s next milestone is to provide an advanced option to buy certified mobile phones that would come with warranty for users who want to buy secondhand with peace of mind. 

“These will give our users more choice and flexibility on how they wish to shop secondhand,” Quek added

Bangalore, India – Global AI-powered credit decisioning platform provider Scienaptic AI has announced that Inditrade Capital, India’s digitally enabled lending, insurance and rural marketing enterprise is live on its platform. Through bureau, banking, and financial data, the Scienaptic platform can reliably estimate a customer’s risk level, as well as Scienaptic’s industry-tested expert scorecards. By using this solution, the Micro, Small, and Medium-Sized Enterprise (MSME) sector in India will be able to grow more quickly and more effectively.

Inditrade Capital leverages technology to enable progress for the under-served and marginalised. With an aim to create a sustainable social impact at the grass-root level of India’s enterprise ecosystem, Inditrade has lent over INR28B in cumulative loans to over 400,000 customers. Inditrade offers a Phygital channel to ensure last-mile connectivity. By enabling Scienaptic’s AI-powered credit underwriting platform and industry-tested expert scorecards, they will be able to provide better and faster credit access to a wider cross-section of the society and empower the 63 million MSMEs in India that often have limited access to financial assistance.

Sudip Bandyopadhyay, group chairman of Inditrade Group of Companies, shared, “When we see an individual’s entrepreneurial dreams actualizing, it is extremely satisfying. A young woman pressed by financial shortcomings and personal losses, getting back on her feet and supporting her family with the help of our MSME loan is extremely uplifting.” 

Bandyopadhyay added, “Scienaptic’s credit decisioning solution is now helping us make the most of our customer’s information to understand our customers’ risk better. As a result, we will be able to provide our customers with the right amount of credit, while ensuring our portfolio losses are minimised.”

Meanwhile, Joydip Gupta, APAC head of Scienaptic, commented, “It is an exciting time for FinTech in India. As an industry leader, Inditrade Capital provides the perfect platform for Indian citizens and MSMEs across urban and rural areas to achieve their entrepreneurial aspirations. Our credit underwriting platform along with our AI-based scorecards will enable Inditrade to extend its loans to more individuals and businesses who are often ignored under the traditional financial system, while balancing growth and profitability.”

Singapore – Global data and AI company and pioneer of the data lakehouse paradigm, has launched the first lakehouse platform for data-driven businesses in the media and entertainment industry. The Lakehouse for Media & Entertainment enables organizations across the media ecosystem to deliver better data and AI outcomes for consumers, advertisers and media partners with a single and collaborative platform for data, analytics and AI. 

Databricks customers like Acxiom, Warner Bros. Discovery, and SEGA are among the earliest adopters. With Brickbuilder Solutions, accelerators, and a powerful partner ecosystem, businesses can create tailored customer experiences, prepare for consumer analytics at scale, and empower increased cooperation among media teams. 

The Lakehouse for Media and Entertainment integrates data solutions and use-case accelerators for essential industry use cases such as AI-driven recommendation engines, customer lifetime value and churn, quality of experience, community toxicity analysis, advertising optimization and more.

Companies may use Databricks’ powerful analytics to build a holistic view of their audience and advertisers, make real-time choices, and spur innovation. Databricks enables media companies to use all of their data – including photos, video, and other unstructured data types – to establish a comprehensive understanding of their consumers by supporting real-time analytics, business intelligence (BI), and sophisticated AI capabilities on all data kinds.

Designed to jumpstart the analytics process, Lakehouse for Media & Entertainment Solution Accelerators offers a blueprint of data analytics and machine learning use cases and best practices to save weeks or months of development time for an organization’s data engineers and data scientists. 

Popular accelerators for Databricks customers in the media and entertainment industry includes recommendation engines to create more personalised customer experiences with AI-powered content recommendations that drive engagement and monetization opportunities, followed by consumer lifetime value models that easily identify and better understand the most valuable customers with CLV models that concentrate on spending patterns and retention. In order to ensure a high-quality streaming experience, it is important to examine both streaming and batch data sets to ensure a smooth experience for the user. Through the offering, it is also possible to create healthier gaming communities by utilising natural language processing to detect toxic language in in-game user comments and discussions, and this can be done in real-time.

Along with AWS, consulting partners like Cognizant and Lovelytics are accelerating the adoption of the lakehouse platform by developing Brickbuilder Solutions for the Media and Entertainment industry, tailor-made to combine the power of the Databricks Lakehouse Platform with the proven experience of partners. The Lakehouse for Media and Entertainment launches with additional support and capabilities from technology partners Labelbox and Fivetran.

Steve Sobel, global industry leader for media & entertainment at Databricks, said that executing a strategy around data, analytics and AI is more critical than ever for media companies to remain agile, competitive and data-driven as audience demands change with the rapidly evolving media landscape.

“We are thrilled to collaborate with industry leaders like AWS, Cognizant, Fivetran, Labelbox and Lovelytics to bring the Databricks Lakehouse for Media and Entertainment to the industry, and enable media leaders to personalize, monetize and innovate in delivering smarter, 1;1 experiences for consumer and advertisers across the globe,” Sobel said.

Singapore – Local based coffee shop Crown Coffee gets a new help for their shop duties—a robot barista developed by tech company Intel.

Named Ella after the wife of Crown Coffee’s CEO and founder Keith Tan, the robot does what a typical barista does: taking orders remotely via an online app, making a cup of coffee, notifying the customer when it’s ready, serving it, finalizing the bill and charging the customer’s credit card.

Built under the inspiration of Intel Singapore employees taking a break at the Crown Coffee, Tan gives thanks to Intel for materializing as to what he calls a ‘wild idea’.

“I have plenty of gratitude to Intel, as they helped me realize this idea. They listened to me, understood the problems I was trying to solve, and partnered with me to design and develop prototypes,” Tan stated.

With Ella being present at the Crown Coffee workspace, it solved many of Tan’s initial problems, including compactness of the unit, freeing up labor for efficiency, and coffee preparation safety: a vital feature put into use during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Ella opens new possibilities to food retailers to enable contactless futuristic service and develop alternate revenue models with the data Ella gathers,” said Santhosh Viswanathan, managing director for Intel Asia Pacific and Japan.

“What we are doing is transformational and will be part of the landscape of smart cities where AI-driven robots become deeply ingrained into our daily lives. Also, this is New Retail, which eases retail labor shortages while providing re-skilling employment opportunities for value-added technology and engineering people,” Tan added, citing that Ella is planned to be expanded across their 40 locations on the island, and eventually to Japan.

Singapore – With the meteoric rise in technology, it isn’t new anymore to hear of innovations from time to time – from robots to never-thought-of digital services, from the next rocking software to just about any tech that aims to automate and digitize every point of human activity. 

In the often dubbed ‘technological hub’ Singapore, homegrown supermarket operator NTUC Fairprice has launched a new branch under its cashless and zero-staff format for food mart brand Cheers, which is turning the ‘convenience’ business on its head. 

In the new Cheers store, a sign is displayed reading “no queues. no checkout. just walk out.”

The new branch is the fourth Cheers store to be opened of the type, where the first one was launched in 2017 at Nanyang Polytechnic in Singapore.

Having partnered with Visa, customers going to the store only need to pick out the items they wish to purchase and are good to go. Cheers uses an advanced A.I. system that is smart enough to detect the items that have been grabbed by customers, where payment will automatically be processed upon their exit. 

Cheers is a 24-hour convenience store with over 160 branches in Singapore. The new location is built in the integrated lifestyle hub Our Tampines Hub. Following the pilot cashless and unmanned branch at Nanyang Polytechnic, the two other tech-driven stores were put up at National University of Singapore.

NTUC FairPrice continues to embrace innovation and develop new service concepts to enhance the shopping experience for customers. We complement the efforts at promoting a self-service culture in Singapore through our unmanned store concepts along other initiatives that facilitate efficient service delivery. By collaborating with our strategic partner Visa, we are able to leverage on our respective strengths and experience to further propel the retail industry forward.

Seah Kian Peng, Group CEO, FairPrice Group

According to a Facebook post by NTUC FairPrice, to enter the store, customers need to download the Cheers SG mobile app, and add their Visa card details as their payment mode. At the gantry after the entrance, customers need to scan the on-screen unique QR code or they can use facial recognition which customers can register in the app. Purchases are automatically added to the virtual shopping cart, and charged to the Visa card upon exit.

This is the first time that Visa is partnering with our retail merchant partner to create this concept of kind in Southeast Asia, and we want to help our merchants power the future of retail and create innovative retail experiences so that consumers and businesses can pay and be paid effortlessly.

Kunal Chatterjee, Visa Country Manager, Singapore and Brunei

In 2014, Singapore announced its national Smart Nation initiative which aims to harness technological advancements to build Singapore’s status as an outstanding place of living. NTUC FairPrice said its efforts are in support of the said direction. 

Kuala Lumper, Malaysia – Hermo, a beauty and fashion e-commerce player in South East Asia, has chosen martech solutions Netcore to boost its omnichannel customer engagement and retention. 

According to an announcement by Netcore, it will be assisting Hermo through AI-powered personalization, omnichannel marketing automation, and AI-powered email delivery.

Netcore said that prior to the partnership, Hermo had a siloed approach to its engagement strategy with data scattered among tools and teams working in isolation. According to the company, during the proof of concept stage, it was able to increase the eCommerce’s revenue by 7% as well as a 50% lift in its add to cart.

Chief executive officer Ian Mok and cofounder of Hermo said, “We believe in a numbers-driven approach to marketing and our philosophy perfectly aligns with Netcore’s way of working with brands. The personalization module has been a game-changer for us, and we have the same level of confidence in Netcore’s marketing automation and communications cloud.”

Meanwhile, Group CEO of Netcore Solutions Kalpit Jain commented, “Delivering personalized experiences across all user touchpoints is a core mission of all our offerings. The team at Hermo is as cutting-edge as it can get and we are excited to arm them with the best possible Martech stack for customer engagement and retention. With our unique expertise of serving brands in the beauty and fashion niche we are confident of achieving astronomical results in an expedited time frame.”

Singapore – State-owned Thai telecommunications company TOT has collaborated with Genesys, a California-headquartered cloud customer experience and contact center solutions to accelerate its contact centers.

According to a press release by Genesys, TOT, as a company responsible for operating government contact centers in Thailand, experienced a surge in call volumes when the Coronavirus broke out.

To effectively manage the increase in calls, Genesys embedded machine learning and conversational AI capabilities with the use of Genesys Cloud and Google Cloud Contact Center AI (CCAI) into its system, allowing callers to now interact with AI-powered virtual agents who are able to accurately capture a customer’s intent easily, routing them to the agents most well placed to handle their needs.

Genesys Cloud is the company’s proprietary web-based unified communications solution, connecting contact center users, business users, vendors, partners, and customers; while Google Cloud CCAI is Google’s solution that helps integrate AI into contact center processes.

According to Genesys, one of the pain points it has also targeted for TOT in integrating the new solution is the company’s added complication of having less manpower to receive calls amid social distancing measures.

“The telecom provider needed a solution capable of scaling rapidly to meet the unexpected surges in call volume, address a constantly evolving set of requirements, optimize agent resources, and still deliver superior customer satisfaction with empathy,” said Genesys.

Senior Director for Cloud and Digital at TOT K. Santhiphap Phoemmongkhonsap said that customer experience remains one of the most significant measures of success for TOT as a government organization.

Phoemmongkhonsap also shared that with audiences increasingly utilizing digital channels, TOT has made it a priority to modernize contact center infrastructure and maintain high customer experience standards despite significant changes to customer requirements due to COVID-19.

“TOT and Genesys shares a common vision of improving lives with technology, and we look forward to continue serving businesses and consumers in line with Thailand’s digital transition vision with a like-minded partner,” said Phoemmongkhonsap.

Commenting on the partnership, Gwilym Funnell, senior vice president, and general manager at Genesys Asia-Pacific said, “Genesys is honored to assist TOT in serving the needs of local businesses and consumers, and more importantly, harness technology to make lives better amid the ongoing pandemic. We operate with a strong belief in the transformational potential of AI and Cloud technologies for modern economies. We are thrilled to have had the opportunity to collaborate with one of Thailand’s telecommunications pioneers to accelerate digital transformation within one of Southeast Asia’s fastest-growing internet economies.”

Meanwhile, Head of Product for Conversational AI at Google Cloud Antony Passemard said “The successful application of Google Cloud’s CCAI solution by Genesys for TOT is a tremendous example of how applied AI can help organizations digitally transform quickly, and ultimately drive stronger, more efficient experiences for their customers while maintaining control of their costs.”