Bill McDermott, SAP CEO:

Our cloud business is growing faster than anyone else’s, but we are also partnering. If you look at Microsoft and the Azure Cloud, of which Microsoft has been a great partner of ours for four decades now. If you look at AWS with Amazon or if you look at the Google Cloud platform or if you look at Alibaba in China, we have partnerships with all of these hyperscalers.

It’s All About an Open Initiative For Customers

Our reference architecture, our software, can also run in there cloud which gives us another set of distribution channels around the world to expand our market-leading software. They’re all going to grow fast and we’re going to grow fast.

It’s all about an open initiative for customers. Customers really need to manage their business in real time and the cloud is a great way to do it. It’s lower cost, faster innovation, easier to consume, it’s a winning formula.

Bill McDermott On the Economy

It’s really amazing. I’ve been obviously all over the world and if you go to China right now, things for us and all solution oriented tech companies are very strong. The Asian region is outstanding.

John Kerry and I hosted a meeting in Bankok and we met with 35 CEOs that simply could not possibly be more positive about the economic scenario.

Shortly thereafter, I was in Israel with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Chancellor Angela Merkel talking about Industry 4.0, venture capital, and tech investment. Yesterday, in Canada with Prime Minister Trudeau where there is a huge AI opportunity with great young people highly skilled in AI. Everyplace you go there’s nothing but optimism.

Thank you Prime Minister @JustinTrudeau for your statesmanship and leadership. SAP is strongly committed to a bright future in Canada. We have outstanding customers and colleagues! https://t.co/idBVmXQUPJ

— Bill McDermott (@BillRMcDermott) October 16, 2018

McDermott tweeted:

“Thank you Prime Minister @JustinTrudeau for your statesmanship and leadership. SAP is strongly committed to a bright future in Canada. We have outstanding customers and colleagues!”

Trade Tensions Have No Impact on the Tech Industry

The trade tensions are something that is obviously concerning, business people don’t like uncertainty, but in terms of the real impact of the business volume, new orders, global pipeline, I don’t see any impact at this stage for the tech industry.

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Companies leverage Vlocity Industry Cloud apps to extend the power of the Salesforce platform.

Vlocity CEO and founder David Schmaier discussed his companies amazing rise in an interview at Dreamforce:

Vlocity Has 5 Industry Verticals Built on Top of Salesforce

Vlocity is the single fastest company ever built on the Salesforce AppExchange and the Salesforce platform. The app exchange has 4,000 companies that do basically everything you can do possibly with the world’s number one CRM platform and cloud platform Salesforce. What we do is we build five industry verticals on top of the Salesforce platform; communications and media, insurance, healthcare, government, and our newest addition is the energy business. We take what our regulated businesses and we make them digital.

I came to my first Dreamforce in 2013 and I was looking around for opportunities. Some friends had built a company called Veeva, which is the biggest company ever built on the Salesforce platform and they do pharmaceutical and life sciences CRM. I came to Dreamforce to find the next Veeva and when I found was astonishing. Back then there were around 2,700 companies on the AppExchange and I saw CPQ, CGI, Middleware and Document Management, but no other industry vertical applications.

There was only one back then and yet it was the largest company ever built on the Salesforce platform and the only one to go public. You didn’t need to be a Ph.D. in computer science to figure out that there was an opportunity to build another Veeva, a bigger Veeva, which we call Vlocity.

Vlocity Transforms Industries to be Modern, Digital, and Customer Centric

We named the company Vlocity because we’re fast, but we try and we’re trying to improve the agility of our customers. A good example of this is last night we were with New York Life Insurance which has rolled out about 18,000 users of Salesforce and Vlocity in about a year and they do it all in a mobile-first way.

Before they would go in and talk to you about life insurance in your kitchen with pen and paper and now they just tap on their phone to sell life insurance. We’ve taken the whole process and made it mobile first and made it digital so they can connect with their customers in a whole new way. That’s the kind of capabilities that we provide for people. We call it digital, we call it agile and it’s all available now on the mobile device.

Vlocity Announces New Mobile Products

We’re announcing two new mobile products. The first is a visual studio where I can point and click and drag and drop and I can put in a companies logo and I can build high fidelity rich mobile apps and I can deploy them really really fast versus having to custom build them. We simplify the development process and allow you to point-and-click and put your colors and your branding and your logo and roll out very high fidelity mobile apps.

The second part is we’re coming up out with a new app for consumers so that when I want to browse my bill or look at my usage or add devices or buy the new iPhones that just came out I can do that all from a branded consumer mobile app that’s that comes out of the box and ready for use. We’re doing a lot of things in the mobile-first area.  

Vlocity Integrates AI and Siri

I’m excited about Salesforce’s big announcement this week where Einstein and Siri are now best friends. We were in parallel working on these mobile apps and because our software’s all built 100% native and additive on the Salesforce platform all that great work Salesforce is doing with Einstein and Siri we get for free.

Now we can ask Siri questions about paying the bill or understanding usage or adding the new iPhone and I can do that all through the voice capabilities that Salesforce has added to the platform. The platform keeps getting better with analytics, with Einstein, now Einstein meets Siri, and we’re just thrilled to be part of this great ecosystem.

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Marc Benioff provided some interesting details of the Marriott and Apple partnership and in a discussion with CNBC’s Jim Cramer at the Dreamforce conference:

Marriott Using Salesforce Technology to Reinvent the Hotel Experience

Every company has to rethink who they are in the fourth industrial revolution. This includes Marriott, that’s why Arne Sorenson is here, the CEO of Marriott, and you are going to see in the keynote a whole new vision for the future of Marriott. All the technology, everything they need to do to connect with their customer in a whole new way via Salesforce.

That includes the ability to check into a Marriott with your digital key right on your phone, and then the ability to talk to Siri and order your favorite sandwich. In the Salesforce customer database, we will know you want a turkey sandwich and we are going to bring it to your room. Then if you tell Siri to lower the lights and put the room temperature to 67 degrees the lights go down and the temperature adjusts.

Salesforce Einstein Radically Empowering the Customer

How does it know, where does it get all the data, how does it have the customer background, it comes from Salesforce, we’re the backend. This is what the conference is about, helping these incredible people, our trailblazers, know how to build these systems. We had to build something amazing first. This isn’t voice recognition that we did. We had to build something called Salesforce Einstein, the number one artificial intelligence platform in enterprise applications. We now are doing billions of Einstein transactions every day giving the ability for our customers to radically use artificial intelligence to make them more productive and smarter about their customers.

We are connecting Einstein to Siri or Einstein to any other voice platform, then we take that voice recognition and we are able to move it to the database. Don’t forget, when I say I want my favorite sandwich, Siri knows what I’m saying with my voice, but then we have to take that and retrieve it or insert into the customer database. That’s the magic, that’s Einstein Voice, it is the glue, the middleware that links all the voice systems that you are using in your home and your phone with the number one CRM in the world Salesforce.

Marc Benioff Say the Economy is Ripping

The economy is ripping. There is incredible demand from customers to rebuild their systems, they’re benefitting from the tax breaks, they are benefitting from a huge economy that is growing at rates they’ve never seen before. Even here in San Francisco, our unemployment now is below 3 percent. That’s amazing!

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Appian CEO and founder Matt Calkins says that their code writing platform is a generational improvement that will literally, according to an independent study, enable developers to write code 10-20 times faster because it takes the code writing out of code writing.

Matt Calkins explains how their revolutionary code writing platform works in an interview this morning on Squawk Box:

We Can Write Code 10-20 Times Faster

These days companies compete based on the software they write, that’s how they impress us. As customers, every company has to be more efficient but also more appealing. It used to be just back office and now it’s front office too, now it’s appealing to everybody and differentiating from their competition.

Every company’s got to write a lot of software and they need a faster way. We can write code 10-20 times faster because instead of writing it by lines you draw it like a picture. It’s a flowchart with boxes and arrows and you depict your intentions in the software and then we translate that into code. It’s an interpretation layer, you could think of it as a code already existing but it’s not blocks of code because that wouldn’t be smart.

Built-In Artificial Intelligence

The is absolutely AI in there, but AI is not the translation it’s just an augmentation. AI isn’t smart enough yet to actually write your code. The important thing here is there’s never an authoritative layer that you can go down to and modify. We’re interpreting your instructions, so you express what you want in software and then we interpret that on every mobile device and on any cloud in a scalable way.

You write something in Appian and it’s going to end up being in a native app on your phone. It’s going to be a native app on every phone and every device. Appian is going to translate your intentions that you expressed in a flowchart in drag and drop ways into a piece of software that’ll run on your phone.

What’s Missing in Code Writing is Simplicity

Over the years there have been a lot of attempts to create an easy way to write software and this is the latest generation and I think it’s gone a lot further than the other generations. You can tell that because we’re being run by the biggest organizations in mission-critical ways, unlike these old attempts that kept it simple and weren’t powerful enough to do the top job. We’ve got some of the top firms in almost every industry around the world running multi-million dollar applications on the Appian platform which shows that it’s really industrial strength stuff.

My mission is simplicity, with the organization too, everything about creating code should be simpler in order to allow people to develop more of it and change it faster. I think that’s what’s really missing in code.

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One strategy on the forefront of mobile advertising is in-app marketing. As the name implies, in-app marketing is any campaign or message that’s specifically designed to appear within a mobile application while the consumer is using the app. Unlike emails or push notifications, which engage the consumer outside of the company’s app, in-app ads take advantage of the moment and hook customers in real-time.

Digital marketing strategies, like geo-targeting, are still important but brands and marketers believe that in-app advertising is the way forward. As a matter of fact, it has been estimated that global in-app revenue will reach $189 billion by 2020.

Worldwide in-app advertising and app store revenues of mobile apps and games in 2015 and 2020 

[Graphic via Statista]

Aside from the fact that in-app marketing is a money-maker, there are also other benefits to utilizing this strategy.

Benefits of Using In-App Marketing

Consumers Spend A Lot of Time on Apps

Brands should take advantage of the fact that the majority of smartphone users are spending a lot of time on apps. According to a 2017 US Mobile App Report, people are spending about 87 percent of their time online on mobile apps compared to just 13 percent on the Web. This gives companies that use in-app ads an opportunity to focus on a large market, boost their brand visibility, and improve lead generation and conversion. 

Higher Click-Through Rates

Another advantage in-app ads have over mobile ads is their higher click-through rates (CTRs). As it stands, CTRs for mobile web ads is at 0.23 percent while in-app ads are at 0.58 percent. In-app ads also perform 11.4 times better than conventional banner ads. This means that in-app advertisements not only raises lead generation numbers, they also help capture and convert these leads.

More Focused Targeting

Advertisements displayed in the brand’s application are designed within the app’s context, making them look natural and more organic. Many apps also opt for interactive formats, which gives advertisers the option to choose when it will be shown. This ensures a seamless transition for users. In contrast, other types of mobile advertisements, particularly pop-ups, can be quite disruptive. They interrupt the prospective consumer and could cause them to be annoyed, thereby dissuading them from making a positive decision.

Marketing inside company apps also gives advertisers a specific view of their target market due to geo-location data and the apps’ capacity to pull in the exact demographics. This increases the chances that the audience reached is aligned closely with the company’s advertising and marketing efforts. Highly targeted marketing also means that less money is wasted on consumers who are unlikely to make a purchase via the ad.

Ads are More Memorable

Research has shown that in-app ads are more effective because they’re more memorable when seen on the application. This is due to users being more engaged in the app right from the start, particularly in the social network and gaming niches. The personal nature of mobile gadgets, which people use during their leisure time, also gives people a more positive attitude towards brands they see advertising in-app.

With in-app marketing, marketers can move away from generalized ads and instead focus on ads that are designed specifically for the brand’s demographic. This marketing strategy also reaches a lot of people in a very short time, thereby giving brands more reach and higher ROI.

The post Benefits of Adding In-App Advertising to Your Marketing Strategy appeared first on WebProNews.

1. Differentiate “ECM: Use-Cases

“The basics of ECM involving managing large amounts of structured and unstructured information is really differentiating itself into two significant work and use cases,” notes Ludlow. He said that the first one he would consider is the digital workplace, all the tools to make end users more productive in their day to day work, in particular around ad-hoc collaboration and communication. The other side of that is all the things around the digital business in order to make your business process more productive. That’s typically where we see content services being used to extend into business processes and business applications.

2. Amazing User Experience

“We think we need to provide an amazing user experience in order to drive user satisfaction, but also to drive efficiency for the end user and by doing so drive adoption of content services,” says Michael Sybala, VP of Product Engineering and Product Management at OpenText.” This is an area that OpenText has excelled at in my experience.

3. Workspaces Instead of Taxonomies

“If you ask me the taxonomy organizations that have deployed have ruined more ECM projects in the world than anything else I know of,” said Ludlow. “How many people have dealt with an enormous set of folders that have been created to try and organize permissions, to create and organize metadata and try and organize information? Everybody’s been through that sort of scenario.” He says that unfortunately this typically models the business rather than the business processes. for success Ludlow recommends that you use a workspace instead of a taxonomy to organize your information. “Using a workspace approach will make your users more effective,” notes Ludlow.

4. Extend Content Services and Ux Into Business Applications

“The concept of workspace is fundamental to build the integrations, we call it the extensions, into leading business applications,” says Sybala. “In large part that’s actually the secret sauce of our (OpenText’s) success over the last couple of years. It’s centered around how do we integrate into leading applications in order to serve those leading applications and the processes which are driven by them.” Applications may be in finance, procurement, HR, etc., but the key is to embed content management natively into the process so that the employee, partner or even customer can work seamlessly, possibly not even noticing that they are task jumping from platform to platform.

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“A big part of what we need to be able to do at a call center is to help our clients gain that insight to go away with something they didn’t even know they needed before they came into the situation,” noted Rob High, Chief Technology Officer of IBM Watson. “Creating a conversational system within a call center is not something that you simply drop into place and expect on day one to have everything answered that you are trying to accomplish.”

What Are Businesses Trying to Accomplish with Conversational AI Customer Support?

1. Automating tasks better and faster.
2. Augmenting experiences in order to orchestrate activities.
3. Transform and improve your business.

“Ultimately, what many of us are looking for the ability to transform our businesses, to really achieve something greater than what we are able to do today,” says High. “This is to address our clients needs in ways that perhaps haven’t really been considered in the past or that will result in us being able to differentiate ourselves as a business.” That progression, he says, is one that needs to be taken a step at a time because as each step is taken you are increasing the complexity and the data that are needed to bring value.

Evaluating the Conversational Support Option

It’s a long (and often expensive) process to implement AI-powered conversational support into your business call center. So how does your company justify going down this road? IBM’s Rob High thinks there are five concerns to consider:

1. Business Value – Address a clearly recognized business opportunity or pain point. “Do you really have a business value proposition that you are trying to address?” asks High. “Is there value that you can identify out of the results that you are trying to create? Can you measure that both quantitatively as well as qualitatively? Are there quantify values that you can associate with the outcome of this effort, such as reducing the first customer time to resolution or increasing net promoter score? Any of those kinds of qualitative and quantitative measurements that are important to you that you can identify use to measure value will allow you then to determine that this is a worthwhile effort.”
2. Viable Data – You will need to analyze the availability, accessibility, and quality of your data. It is absolutely key to the implementation of successful conversational support that you think about your data first.
3. Technical Feasibility – IBM’s CTO asks, “Do you have access to the technologies that are necessary to achieve the results you are producing? Are you able to get access to the AI systems, the conversational services, and even the data processing that is necessary in order for you to have a successful project.”
4. Speed to Implement – The longer it takes to do something and the longer it takes to generate a result can kill support for a key project like conversation AI support. It not only raises costs but it also drives concerns within the enterprise that it will ultimately be successful and critical to future success. “Finding a way of delivering this project quickly by starting simply and getting those results back so that you can build on the value that you are creating is a key element to success here,” said High.
5. Alignment with Corporate Initiatives – This comes down to reviewing existing company initiatives to see if AI-powered conversational support is already in alignment. Can you join an existing initiative? If you can it is often the quickest way to get things started.

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Because of AI’s efficiency and ability to give consumers a one-to-one experience, its use will continue to grow. A Gartner Study predicts that by 2020, as much as 85 percent of all customer interactions will be done without humans.

If you own an eCommerce store, it’s essential to make yourself aware of these trends and decide on how you will apply them to your business.

Take a look at some of the ways AI is changing eCommerce:

Provides More Personalized Customer Experience

One big advantage of using AI is how much it can personalize a customer’s shopping experience. A good example is The North Face’s collaboration with IBM to assist customers in finding the right jacket.

[Image of user interface via TheNorthFace.com]

When customers visit The North Face website, IBM’s Watson pops up to ask where and when the jacket will be used. The AI will also ask follow-up questions based on the answers the customer gives. Once it has enough data, it will scan The North Face’s inventory and recommend several jackets based on its relevance to the client’s answers.

Boosts Customer Trust and Exposes Fake Reviews

Online reviews have a big impact on whether a consumer will make a purchase. Unfortunately, not all reviews are made by people who legitimately bought a product. This can affect a site’s algorithms and result in mistrust between buyers and sellers. AI can combat this dilemma. Let’s take Amazon’s example. Its AI puts more weight on verified customer purchases while also taking into account reviews that are marked “helpful” or new.

Making sure that the reviews consumers read on your site regarding your products are trustworthy is essential to building your reputation and brand loyalty. Customers will also be more willing to return and buy more if they know the reviews they’re reading are genuine.

Makes Search Easier and More Customer Focused

As a consumer, you’ve probably experienced seeing something that you want but have no idea what it’s called, who makes it, or even if it’s on sale. AI is now making it easier for you to find the information you need, thanks to its enhanced capabilities to interpret, classify, and understand images.

Pinterest has already been making use of AI technology with its enhanced visual search tool. Now, if a cool pair of shoes catches your eye while looking at Pinterest, you’ll be shown items that are visually similar to it.

The tool reduces the time a consumer will spend searching for an item. It also boosts conversion rates and retargeting options for businesses that market their items via the platform.

Improves Inventory Management

AI is also making a big difference in how companies manage their inventories. People who work in retail understand how difficult it is to keep shelves stocked, track everything accurately, and ensure that inventory is up-to-date.

Inventory management traditionally utilized a hindsight perspective, something that doesn’t work in today’s dynamic online marketplace. AI technology uses predictive analysis to assess what demands will likely rise and gathers key information about factors that are driving this demand.

AI’s machine learning feature also means that the longer the company uses it, the more it learns about the business, its customers, and site visitors. It will then get better at accurately predicting what items the company requires in its present inventory and what it will need in the future.

AI is becoming a driving force in how businesses cater to their clients’ interest and needs. With it, eCommerce platforms can give more personalized services, provide better recommendations on products and improve trust between the customer and the brand. 

The post How Artificial Intelligence Will Affect eCommerce in the Future appeared first on WebProNews.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Gmail users that have signed up for some services, specifically travel and shopping price comparison tools, have agreed to terms and conditions that enabled the developers of this software and services to read their emails.

Third-party app developers could be reading your Gmail https://t.co/AEp04dLdmm

— Engadget (@engadget) July 3, 2018

Gmail’s access settings do allow app developers and data companies to see the user’s emails and the private details that go with it, like the recipient’s address and time stamps. They can actually even view the whole message. And while application does require user consent, the permission form is admittedly vague on letting humans read emails instead of just machines.

These third-party developers claim to only use the information gathered from Gmail account holders for advertising purposes and targeted shopping suggestions. Google asserted that it has extensively vetted these developers, a process that entails checking that the company’s identity is represented by the app, that the data requested is in line with the service it offers, and that its privacy policy clearly states that it will monitor emails.

The Wall Street Journal report mentioned two specific apps that had access to said emails – Edison Software and Return Path. The former reportedly had employees read thousands of emails to assist in the training of its “Smart Reply” feature while the latter also allowed staff to read private messages to help in the development of the company’s software. Both companies said they have permission from users and that their actions were covered in their terms and conditions.

In a blog post, Return Path gave assurances that they “take great care to limit who has access to the data, supervise all access to the data.”

Meanwhile, Edison Software CEO Mikael Berner clarified the context in which their engineers read “a small random sample of de-identified messages” by saying it was for R&D purposes. He also revealed that the company stopped the practice some time ago and that all the data has been expunged “in order to stay consistent with our company’s commitment to achieving the highest standards possible for ensuring privacy.”

It’s not certain yet what kind of blowback the news that Google has allowed third-party developers access to user emails might have on the company. In all likelihood, it will be scrutinized the same way Facebook was after the Cambridge Analytica issue.

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The company recently rolled out ‘Ping,’ for iOS devices. The standalone app can streamline customer interactions from SMS, Facebook Messenger, or a company website.

A free mobile app that brings customer conversations, marketing workflows and more together in a single place. Shopify Ping is available now on iOS. pic.twitter.com/vJ2oNmBw1f

— Shopify (@Shopify) June 21, 2018

Shopify is putting more focus on mobile solutions for businesses as half of its estimated 600,000 retailers are already using its mobile application. Most of these merchants currently use the shopping platform to process their business needs and handle their payment system.

Communicating with Ping

The Ping app will enable retailers to communicate directly with clients and respond quickly to their requests. All conversations a company has with their clients on any messaging app can be accessed using Ping.

The fast response time is a great way to assist companies in delivering excellent customer service and building better relationships with clients.

Shopify explained in its blog that the company developed Ping as another means for online merchants to run their company. With the app, retailers “can spend less time shuffling between separate tools” and spend more time on essential things like serving clients and expanding their business.

What Can Kit Do

Ping comes with a built-in virtual assistant dubbed Kit. This little helper can help you conceptualize, develop, launch, and manage your marketing plans. Shopify explained that Kit is designed to run your Instagram and Facebook ads, manage your email marketing campaign, retarget clients, and more depending on the information collected from customer messages.

Kit can also implement complicated workflows, like touching up product images and searching for new products to expand your inventory.

The marketing bot was purchased by Shopify in 2016 and an upgraded Kit Skills API is slated to be released later this year. Some improvements expected to be introduced is a natural language processing system that will provide business owners with more insights and the capacity to represent their company in a chat environment. The built-in assistant will be able to respond to frequently asked questions and shipping inquiries. Of course, there will still be instances when human intervention is needed, like when dealing with a large order from a client.

The Ping app and Kit will also be able to do other AI processes like flag conversations that could lead to big deals or alert the owner of a customer complaint regarding an order.

Retailers big and small can now download Ping for free on iOS. However, it’s not clear just when the app will become available to Android users.

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