Press

february 12

These 15 Sunnyvale Startups Are Taking on Tech's Toughest Challenges

Sunnyvale seems like the right place to establish a startup, with its prime Silicon Valley location and palpable work-life-balance vibes. As its namesake suggests, Sunnyvale boasts year-round mild weather, as well as a quaint downtown district that beckons to young families and professionals. In this sense, the town could be called the quintessential Silicon Valley city, with its California sunshine and strong tech community feel. So unsurprisingly, many startups have decided to carve out spaces for themselves within Sunnyvale’s growing tech community... Read more

february 19

Constellation ShortList Sales Productivity Solutions

Sales productivity solutions are software or applications that help optimize seller performance and productivity. They can provide insights that facilitate meaningful buyer-seller conversations, automate administrative customer relationship management (CRM) tasks, and analyze email and calendar activity to recommend next-best actions. These solutions reduce the busywork associated with researching potential clients, communicating with them and performing administrative data entry... Read more

january 31

Honeywell is 5th Fortune 500 Organization to Invest in Tact.ai

Tact.ai’s substantial AI platform offerings caught the attention of their fifth Fortune 500 organization. Honeywell invested into the human-friendly customer relationship management (CRM) company via Honeywell Ventures and is planning to fully deploy the Tact.ai assistant to their sales teams. Previous investors include Salesforce Ventures, M12 Ventures, as well as venture firms like Accel Partners and Upfront Ventures... Read more

january 28

Tact.ai Receives Investment from Honeywell

Tact.ai, the human-friendly CRM company, announced it has received an investment from Honeywell... Read more

january 28

Tact.ai Receives Investment from Honeywell

Tact.ai, the human-friendly CRM company, announced it has received an investment from Honeywell... Read more

january 27

Tact.ai Receives Investment from Honeywell

Tact.ai, the human-friendly CRM company, announced it has received an investment from Honeywell... Read more

december 24

3 Ways Tech Startups are Using AI to Revolutionize Customer Experience

Artificial intelligence is the latest trend in technology, and its application cutting across all fields. It’s all about technology mimicking biological intelligence. Here are three ways tech startups are using AI to revolutionize customer experience... Read more

october 7

The Revolution Of AI In Sales: Why And How To Adopt It In Your Organization

As a general partner at a company that helps Israeli companies penetrate new markets and an advisor to companies on go-to-market strategies, I see remarkable innovation from startups, but I also see an astonishing lack of adoption and fear of artificial intelligence (AI) within companies. In the sales and marketing departments, specifically, I see this as a huge disadvantage. Here is why — and some steps you can take today to start adopting AI within your organization... Read more

July 4

Meet the 9 executives behind tech's corporate venture capital funds

Intel, Google, and Salesforce top the list for most active corporate venture capital investing in 2018... Read more

June 19

RIP big data... rise of multi-cloud

The Era of Big Data passed away on June 5, 2019 with the announcement of Tom Reilly's upcoming resignation from Cloudera and subsequent market capitalisation drop. Coupled with MapR's recent announcement intending to shut down in late June, which will be dependent on whether MapR can find a buyer to continue operations, June of 2019 accentuated that the initial Era of Hadoop-driven Big Data has come to an end... Read more

May

Could Alexa Become Your Next Executive Assistant?

Voice technology is not only helping companies engage with customers, it will increasingly be used inside the enterprise to complete administrative tasks... Read more

April 26

Startup Of The Week: Tact.ai

Tact.ai has built a conversational platform for sales teams that can be controlled using voice, chat, or text messages. By making personal assistants more broadly available and easier to use, the startup aims to let sales people use their voice to automate daily administrative chores so they can spend more time focused on their core job... Read more

April 8

The Future Of Enterprise Voice AI Is Genderless, In Your Car And (Hopefully) More Secure

Today’s voice-powered AI assistant has many names—Siri, Alexa, Cortana—but as this developing technology becomes ubiquitous in both consumer and enterprise environments, Chuck Ganapathi has a suggestion for his industry colleagues... Read more

March 20

Forbes Announces Fifth Annual CIO SUMMIT

Forbes today announced its fifth annual CIO Summit, an exclusive invitation-only summit convening the world’s leading Chief Information Officers from April 7 – 8, 2019 at The Ritz-Carlton, Half Moon Bay, in California. The theme of this year’s event is “The Digital CIO Takes Charge,” spotlighting the CIO’s opportunity to drive product, revenue and customer experience... Read more

February 25

2019 CRM Predictions and Expert Perspectives

As we close the second month of 2019, we can see that the customer relationship management (CRM) field is experiencing changes brought about by advances in technology and ever-increasing customer expectations. Customer engagement and customer experience are at top of mind for customer-facing organizations... Read more

February 25

teknowlogy unveils its "AI vendors of tomorrow - horizontals" mappings

teknowlogy has carried out a major study on the artificial intelligence players on a global scale. We first listed some 3500 start-ups and SMEs which are software vendors and claim to offer artificial intelligence solutions. We analysed them closely (skills, financing, technical details...), and finally selected about 800 of them that seem to have serious offers... Read more

February 13

Constellation ShortList™ Sales Productivity Tools

Sales Productivity solutions are software or applications that help optimize seller performance and productivity. These solutions can provide insights that facilitate meaningful buyer-seller conversations, automate administrative CRM tasks, and analyze email and calendar activity to recommend next-best actions. These solutions reduce the busywork associated with researching potential clients, communicating with them and administrative data entry... Read more

February 1

AI for Salespeople, 12 Apps you can use today!

AI is everywhere, and it will change the way all people work. If you’re not convinced, check this McKinsey Global Institute study “Artifical Intelligence, The Next Digital Frontier?”, you’ll learn many things! Including that sales, will be one of the areas that will be most impacted. And it has already started... Read more

Top 10 AI Solutions for Sales 2019

One of the biggest challenges sales managers face is keeping up with the avalanche of information their sales technology tools collect day after day. When sales managers drown in information, their ability to make decisions atrophies and sales slow to a crawl... Read more

50+ AI (artificial intelligence) Startups

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computer systems. These processes include learning (the acquisition of information and rules for using the information), reasoning (using rules to reach approximate or definite conclusions) and self-correction. Particular applications of AI include expert systems, speech recognition, and machine vision... Read more

25 Startups Transforming Sales with AI (artificial intelligence)

A curated list of 25 startups transforming sales and marketing with AI... Read more

December 31

CRM.org 2018 Year Roundup

It’s been an exciting journey this past year exploring what exactly CRM is all about. As a small crew of artists with an interest in tech and startups, we had no real preconceived notion of CRMs... Read more

December 18

Meet Paul Bernard, Director of Worldwide Corporate Development of the Alexa Fund at Amazon

Venture capital used to be a cottage industry, with very few investing in tomorrow's products and services. Oh, how times have changed! While there are more startups than ever, there's also more money chasing them. In this series, we look at the new (or relatively new) VCs in the early stages: seed and Series A.... Read more

December 7

Conversational Commerce 2019: From Ego to Production in Record Time

With thousands of brands evaluating their options for implementing chatbots and intelligent virtual assistants it is clear that “Conversational Commerce” is no longer about platitudes or vague concepts; it’s about money. As one of the speakers at Opus Research’s recent Conversational Commerce Conference observed, we’re way past proof of concept and into the critical paths of Marketing, Sales and Customer Support, observing “it’s gone from ego to production in record time.”... Read more

November 29

New Voice Of The Enterprise

Customers consistently tell me how frustrating the meeting experience can be. TVs don’t always turn on or they are set to the wrong input, and meeting PINs are long and cumbersome to enter. These familiar hassles are what first gave us the idea for Alexa for Business... Read more

October 10

Microsoft Introduces Voice Dictation in Latest Office Apps

You can now dictate your documents and emails with voice in the Windows 10 suite. Microsoft conveniently grouped its voice commands under Speech Recognition, which interprets voice commands and the spoken word across the operating system to handle a variety of tasks... Read more

October 9

Top 53 Startups developing AI for Enterprise

In the Enterprise AI can help to personalize customer experience, marketing, power fraud prevention, predict customer behavior, enable chat-bot support and sales, provide easy analytics, help find best job candidates... Read more

September 27

Amazon’s Alexa Fund invests in assistants for health care and education

Amazon’s $200 million Alexa Fund for the promotion of voice-powered products and conversational computing today announced investment in new early-stage startups Bamboo Learning, Endel, and Aiva... Read more

September 26

Dreamforce 2018 : Les assistants vocaux investissent le monde des CRM

Alors que Salesforce lance son propre assistant vocal grâce à sa brique IA Einstein, d'autres solutions similaires naissent dans le secteur des CRM. Salesforce y voit un passage vers une nouvelle ère pour les logiciels de gestion de la clientèle et pour les utilisateurs qui pourront gagner du temps dans le traitement et la saisie de données clients... Read more

September 26

Is Siri Up to Tact? Salesforce and Apple Announce Strategic Partnership on 'Dreamforce-Eve'

Siri, the voice assistant your dad uses when he wants to find the closest Chinese restaurant, and Salesforce, the world’s largest CRM company, will now enter into business together... Read more

September 19

With Einstein Voice, conversational CRM is about to go mainstream

I have to say right off the top here: Chuck Ganapathi was right! Or at least he's well on his way to being so. Chuck, the founder and CEO of Tact.AI, a startup focused on changing the way sales people interact with their CRM systems using their voice, told me a couple of months ago that every major CRM vendor will announce a voice offering by the end of the year... Read more

September 19

Einstein Voice gives Salesforce users gift of gab

Salespeople usually spend their days talking. They are on the phone and in meetings, but when it comes to updating Salesforce, they are back at the keyboard again typing notes and milestones, or searching for metrics about their performance. Today, Salesforce decided to change that by introducing Einstein Voice, a bit of AI magic that allows salespeople to talk to the program instead of typing... Read more

September 14

Touch, Text, Talk: Tact.ai Creates Voice-Induced FOMO for the CRM Industry

As it reaches new levels of sophistication, voice recognition software redefines the expectations that users have of their devices. CRM solutions developer Tact.ai believes that voice is going to take over the business world and become a major method for workers to interact with CRM software... Read more

august 14

Amazon now owns $1 billion worth of other companies

Amazon has become a more active corporate investor in recent years — and now its investment portfolio is worth $1 billion for the first time... Read more

july 31

Does Amazon need an Alexa smartphone to continue dominating the voice-first economy?

Jeff Bezos says he wants customers to "ask Alexa" for assistance wherever they are -- but can Amazon continue to dominate the next stages of the voice-first digital transformation as it has in the early days?... Read more

july 31

Tact juices faster sales cycles with AI and voice recognition

In 2012, a firm called Tactile was founded by Chuck Ganapathi, a former executive from the ranks of Salesforce and Siebel. Its aim was to tackle some of the barriers that Ganapathi felt were obstructing CRM technology... Read more

july 26

Amazon.com Announces Second Quarter Sales up 39% to $52.9 Billion

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced financial results for its second quarter ended June 30, 2018... Read more

july 26

Amazon Projects Net Sales Will Climb by at Least 23% in Q3

Amazon.com, Inc. today announced financial results for its second quarter ended June 30, 2018... Read more

july 10

This AI Startup Raised over $57 Million To Bring Voice Tech To Enterprise Sales Teams

There’s nothing quite like data entry to make you want to abandon your desk, get on a plane and never be seen again. It’s tedious, time consuming, and is practically impossible to get done on the go... Read more

july 6

Chuck Ganapathi of Tact.AI: Alexa Helps to Reimagine Relationship Between Sales Pros and Apps They Use

When Amazon launched its Alexa for Business (AFB) initiative last year, one of the launch partners invited early on was Tact.ai — a startup focused on changing the way sales people interact with their CRM systems using their voice. In fact, they launched the first conversational CRM skill for AFB. And just last week Amazon, along with Microsoft and Salesforce, were part of Tact’s series C funding round of $27 million... Read more

july 6

Inside Amazon's $100M Push to Put Alexa Everywhere

Zain Gulamali manages the $100 million Alexa Fund. We talked to him after a recent technology scouting workshop in LA about the future of Amazon's personal digital assistant... Read more

july 5

Why lazy customers could save you today but kill you tomorrow

In most businesses, customer apathyis not a good thing... Read more

july 4

A|I: The AI Times – Building Flawed AI

The AI Times is a weekly newsletter covering the biggest AI, machine learning, big data, and automation news from around the globe. If you want to read A|I before anyone else, make sure to subscribe using the form at the bottom of this page... Read more

july 3

Voice and the next generation of CRM adoption

CRM and voice are talked about but not often linked in a practical way. While more is being spent on CRM than ever before, more needs to be done for it to be as helpful as it should be... Read more

july 3

The AI startup looking to disrupt sales and its $57m investment backing: all you need to know

Salesforce, Amazon, Comcast and Microsoft have all backed and invested in Tact.ai, a startup building a human-friendly conversational AI sales platform... Read more

july 3

Fundings Provide a Peek into Emerging Tech

Venture and angel fundings highlight where new technologies and companies are on the cusp of growth... Read more

june 29

Bloomberg Markets

[Audio: Interview begins at 18:40] Chuck Ganapathi Chief Executive Officer Tact Discussing Corporate Venture Capital finding its voice over traditional VC With artificial intelligence... Read more

june 27

The Future of the Workplace: Tact.ai

We at Seller Accountant not only follow the E-Commerce market but look out for developments that may affect all of us. The following blog is to help understand how current market trends show where business is heading... Read more

june 26

Conversational AI company Tact.ai raises funding from Amazon, Microsoft, Comcast and Salesforce

While conversational AI has begun to revolutionize the way that consumer technologies are sold, that hasn't happened in the same way yet for salespeople in the enterprise space... Read more

june 26

On CRM: Why Did Microsoft, Amazon And Salesforce Just Invest In This CRM Company?

It's not every day that large competitors become investors in the same company. This week, however, one CRM company attracted funding in a Series C round from four of the biggest: Microsoft, Amazon, Salesforce and Comcast... Read more

june 26

AI startup Tact.ai gets $27 million funding from Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce

In order to improve the voice experience while driving, Tact has announced a product called 'Voice Intelligence" that will act as a car-based virtual assistant similar to Siri for iPhone... Read more

june 25

Fenwick Represents Tact.ai in its $27 Million Series C Financing

Fenwick & West represented Tact.ai Technologies, Inc., a leading enterprise intelligence startup on a mission to make enterprise software more human-friendly, in its $27 million Series C financing. Amazon’s Alexa Fund, Microsoft’s M12, Salesforce Ventures and Comcast Ventures led the round with participation from existing investors Accel Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Upfront Ventures... Read more

june 25

Microsoft’s M12 invests in Tact.ai, a conversational AI sales platform

Tact.ai is a conversational AI sales platform that is used by sales teams at Dell, Honeywell, GE, Cisco Systems, Kelly Services and other Fortune 500 companies to drive revenue growth. M12 (formerly Microsoft Ventures) was already an investor in this startup. Today, Tact.ai announced the completion of its $27M Series C fundraise with backing from M12 and new investors including Amazon Alexa Fund, Comcast Ventures and Salesforce Ventures. Tact.ai mentioned that it is going to use the new financing to expand its operations into new products and markets... Read more

june 25

Microsoft Monday: News App, Xbox Avatar Editor, Bonsai Acquisition, New Blockchain Initiative

“Microsoft Monday” is a weekly column that focuses on all things Microsoft. This week “Microsoft Monday” features news about the News app release, an ad highlighting Minecraft crossplay with the Nintendo Switch, the Bonsai acquisition, the Xbox Avatar Editor, new visual search technology for Bing, a blockchain partnership with Ernst & Young and much more... Read more

june 25

SD Times news digest

Tact.ai, developers of a conversational AI sales platform, announced its successful series C fundraiser of $27 million to be put towards development of human-friendly conversational AI for sales platforms. The new investments come courtesy of the Amazon Alexa Fund, Comcast Ventures and Salesforce Ventures... Read more

june 25

Amazon, Microsoft, And Comcast Back Tact.ai In $27 Million Funding Round To Expand Its Sales Platform

Tact.ai, a Redwood City, California-based enterprise intelligence startup, announced today that it has closed a $27 million funding round led by Amazon’s Alexa Fund, Microsoft’s M12, Salesforce Ventures, and Comcast Ventures. The infusion of capital comes shortly after the opening of the company’s new headquarters in the United Kingdom and development center in Bengaluru, India... Read more

june 25

Amazon, Microsoft, and Comcast back Tact.ai in $27 million funding round to expand its sales platform

Tact.ai, a Redwood Town, California-based undertaking intelligence startup, introduced nowadays that it has closed a $27 million investment spherical led via Amazon’s Alexa Fund, Microsoft’s M12, Salesforce Ventures, and Comcast Ventures. The infusion of capital comes in a while after the outlet of the corporate’s new headquarters in the UK and building middle in Bengaluru, India... Read more

june 25

Driving Efficiency in Enterprise Software

Cloud and SaaS migration is in the rear-view mirror – SaaS adoption is at 25% and growing steadily. Now that we have embraced both technologies, what’s the next frontier of innovation in enterprise software... Read more

june 25

Tact $27M Series C attracts Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce

It’s not often you can get three cloud giants like Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce to agree on much of anything, but today they were all part of a $27 million Series C investment in Tact.ai, a startup that has been trying to change the way sales people interact with information in CRM systems using voice... Read more

june 25

Amazon, Microsoft, and Comcast back Tact.ai in $27 million funding round to expand its sales platform

Tact.ai, a Redwood City, California-based enterprise intelligence startup, announced today that it has closed a $27 million funding round led by Amazon’s Alexa Fund, Microsoft’s M12, Salesforce Ventures, and Comcast Ventures. The infusion of capital comes shortly after the opening of the company’s new headquarters in the United Kingdom and development center in Bengaluru, India... Read more

june 25

Tact.ai Raises $27 Million From Corporate Venture Firms

New investors are Amazon Alexa Fund, Comcast Ventures and Salesforce Ventures... Read more

june 25

Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce back Tact.ai to take the friction out of sales

Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce all invest in Tact.ai, a conversational computing startup whose voice-driven intelligent workflow automation takes the friction out of sales... Read more

june 25

Amazon, Microsoft et Salesforce injectent 27 millions de dollars dans Tact.ai

La start-up américaine Tact.ai, qui développe une technologie d’intelligence artificielle conversationnelle pour les entreprises, a bouclé un tour de table de 27 millions de dollars. Ce dernier présente la particularité de réunir les trois géants du cloud que sont Amazon, Microsoft et Salesforce. Ainsi, Amazon Alexa Fund, Salesforce Ventures et M12 (ex-Microsoft Ventures) ont participé à l’opération aux côtés de Comcast Ventures, Accel Partners, Redpoint Ventures et Upfront Ventures... Read more

june 12

The often-overlooked value of moving to the cloud

Talk about the cloud’s benefits with most businesses and you'll quickly realize there's a chasm between their reality and today's hype. "Utilize this new service to scale faster!" "Leverage more microservices!" "Reduce your tech debt by migrating to the cloud!" These are true advantages, but for now, most are unattainable for these businesses. If I were to advocate for one goal with leveraging the cloud it would be the move to a modern, interoperable reference architecture... Read more

march 30

120+ Well Wishes & Favorite Apps on Appy’s 1st Birthday

Appy is the guide that everyone wishes they could have. Since she knows a lot about all things Salesforce, she leads the way to help you navigate the AppExchange ecosystem to solve your business challenge. Appy is also a connector... Read more

february 26

Alexa for Business: Everything Enterprises and IT Admins Need to Know

Alexa is an intelligent voice-based personal assistant developed by Amazon. It was first integrated into the company’s portable speakers, the Amazon Echo, and the Amazon Echo Dot. Apart from being integrated into company’s in-house products such as portable speakers, Amazon Fire TV Sticks, and more, Alexa is starting to find its way into several third-party appliances and applications such as lamps, TVs, air conditioners, mobile applications, and thermostats... Read more

february 20

Constellation ShortList™ Sales Productivity Tools

Sales Productivity solutions are software or applications that help optimize seller performance and productivity. These solutions can provide insights about buyers who facilitate meaningful buyer-seller conversations, automate administrative customer relationship management (CRM) tasks, analyze email and calendar activity to recommend next-best actions. These solutions reduce the busywork associated with researching potential clients, communicating with them, and administrative data entry... Read more

january 25

The Future of AI and Predictive Sales

New technology can digitally transform sales and boost your revenue potential... Read more

january 22

Cloud AI Startups Steel Themselves as Tech Giants Arrive

Founders in the sector are forced to differentiate in the face of a new level of competition... Read more

december 31

Voice interfaces beginning to find their way into business

Imagine attending a business meeting with an Amazon Echo (or any voice-driven device) sitting on the conference table. A question arises about the month’s sales numbers in the Southeast region. Instead of opening a laptop, opening a program like Excel and finding the numbers, you simply ask the device and get the answer instantly... Read more

december 4

Amazon Is Sending Alexa To The Workplace

Amazon Web Services has announced Alexa for Business to provide employees with an intelligent assistant. Alexa for Business can make various tasks around the workplace easier, such as managing calendars, keeping up with to-do lists, and making phone calls... Read more

december 1

Cheat sheet: Alexa for Business

Having conquered the home, Amazon takes on the office by using its voice platform to streamline corporate tasks... Read more

december 1

Amazon's Alexa for Business Takes on the Workplace

Technology gets in the way of your productivity on the job — and that's a problem, according to Amazon CTO Werner Vogels. During yesterday's keynote address at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services user conference taking place in Las Vegas, Vogels introduced attendees to a workplace where a digital assistant could handle tasks like starting conference calls, controlling conference room equipment, scheduling meetings, keeping track of tasks, reordering supplies and more, based on a voice command... Read more

december 1

GE: Digital Transformation of the Global Salesforce

How is one of the largest companies in the world evolving the way it sells? Cate Gutowski, Vice President, Commercial & digital THREAD at General Electric, speaks with CXOTalk about digital transformation of the global salesforce at General Electric, and the changing relationship between sales and IT... Read more

november 30

Amazon Unleashes Alexa for Business - Consequences Abound

Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced Alexa for Business, bringing Amazon's intelligent assist into the office. This shouldn't be a surprise to TMC readers, but the impact of this announcement cannot be overstated within the unified communications and voice processing sectors... Read more

november 30

Press Release: AWS Announces Alexa for Business

Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced Alexa for Business, a new AWS service that provides every employee with an intelligent assistant to simplify their interactions with the technology around them at work... Read more

november 30

Introducing Alexa for Business

Today, Amazon announced Alexa for Business from Amazon Web Services. Alexa for Business is a service that makes it easy for organizations to use Alexa in the workplace. This opens up new opportunities for Alexa skill developers to build skills that help organizations and employees use Alexa to get more done in less time... Read more

november 30

Announcing More Personalized Skill Responses When Alexa Recognizes a Customer’s Voice (Developer Preview)

Today we are excited to announce that developers will soon be able to use the Alexa Skills Kit to build personalized responses when Alexa recognizes a customer’s voice. Alexa voice profiles already enable personalized customer experiences with Alexa when playing music, making calls, sending messages, and more... Read more

november 27

Next-Gen Tools Will Drive Your Digital Transformation In Sales

Innovative Interfaces And Engagement Technologies Usher In A New Era In B2B Sales... Read more

november 14

Tact.ai Enhances Its Sales Assistant

Tact.ai, provider of a sales experience platform, has expanded the Tact Sales Assistant and furthered its integration with LinkedIn, becoming the first omnichannel artificial intelligence-powered assistant on the LinkedIn Sales Navigator Application Platform... Read more

november 12

Big Tech In AI: What Amazon, Apple, Google, GE, And Others Are Working On

Combined, the 10 largest tech companies have acquired 50 AI companies in the last 5 years, targeting facial recognition startups, chatbots, chip makers, and more... Read more

October 18

Conversational UI and the walled gardens of mobile and social

Conversational UI cuts across the walled gardens of mobile and social to restore an open Web, but risks new vendor lock-in to restrict customer choice... Read more

October 13

LinkedIn Debuts Sales Navigator Integrations and Other News

LinkedIn, the Mountain View, Calif.-based professional networking service, announced this week new Sales Navigator features including an integration between Sales Navigator and LinkedIn Campaign Manager... Read more

October 11

Two takes on conversational computing and the limits of AI

Two takes on conversational computing and the limits of AI... Read more

October 10

Work Better Together with Sales Navigator

For B2B sales professionals, closing deals has never been harder. With more buyers involved in the purchasing process, the proliferation of disconnected sales systems, and inefficiencies between the sales and marketing functions, the sales cycle has become incredibly complex. In this environment, sales teams need a strategic advantage: the ability to break down silos and get work done... Read more

October 10

LinkedIn announces a major update for Sales Navigator

Sales Navigator is an unique solution from LinkedIn that helps sellers to target the right buyers, understand key insights, and engage with personalized outreach. Sales Navigator has potential to become the top revenue generation service for LinkedIn. Today, LinkedIn announced a major update for Sales Navigator with several brand new features... Read more

September 29

DisrupTV Episode 81: Chuck Ganapathi, Will Hayes, Ron Miller

Tact.ai CEO and Founder Chuck Ganapathi appears on DisrupTV... Read more

September 28

Ventana Research Announces the Digital Innovation Award Winners for 2017

Ventana Research today announced the 10 winners of the 2017 Digital Innovation Awards. These awards, presented annually, identify the technologies that have the most striking impact in their respective markets... Read more

September 26

Win more business with Slack apps

Add these sales apps to Slack so you can spend more time with your customers... Read more

September 7

Tact—Bringing Useful Conversational AI Tools to Mobile Sales Folks

Artificial intelligence (AI) has permeated the business world, and found its sweet spot in sales. Companies can use AI-embedded tools to automate administrative and other non-sales–related tasks, for example—freeing up salespeople to focus on enhancing their revenue-generating activities... Read more

September 1

Artificial intelligence in sales: 10 companies to watch

Sales has changed a lot in the last several decades. We have gone from the door-to-door salesman, to the telemarketer, to the CRM, and now many sales technology companies are beginning to experiment with AI. In these successive developments, one theme has been consistent – empowering individual sales professionals to sell more... Read more

august 17

The Future of AI: What We’re Watching

The current renaissance in artificial intelligence is having a transformative effect in fields as diverse as transportation, healthcare, and advertising. Its underpinnings lie in advances in data-fueled machine learning’s ability to achieve state-of-the-art performance on all sorts of pattern-matching tasks. Innovations in deep learning, for instance, are helping tackle previously intractable problems, while everything from CRM platforms to the devices we use every day are becoming better at recognizing what we are trying to accomplish with them... Read more

AUGUST 16

Automation may take our jobs—but it’ll restore our humanity

For humans to survive the automation revolution, we need to double down on our humanity... Read more

july 26

B2B Sales Force Digital Transformation: Three Global Leaders Share Best Practices

B2B marketing and sales leaders must transform their sales forces to keep pace with digitally oriented buyers. By gleaning best practices from three global digital sales leaders at Cisco Systems, General Electric (GE), and IBM, we highlight key themes of their endeavors in this report. We also provide recommendations for how B2B firms of various shapes and sizes should move their sales forces forward... Read more

july 25

Four mobile sales startups to boost your team's performance

As the world of sales becomes more and more competitive, big brands and larger companies are continually on the lookout for new software and services that will enable them to get ahead of the crowd. We look at four of the most promising startups in the realm of mobile sales apps that are definitely worth keeping an eye on... Read more

july 17

Machine Learning and the Rise of the REEP: Role-Based Expert Enhancement Platforms

Based on Amalgam Insights’ discussions with over two dozen enterprise application solutions over the past six weeks, we believe that a new generation of applications is starting to emerge. Machine Learning has led to the evolution of a new generation of platforms that are transforming expert productivity by providing insights through self-guided logic that improves over time... Read more

july 26

Top 25 customer engagement and CRM startups 2017

It’s easy to see sales technology as ‘done’. Salesforce happened. There was an explosion of cloud-based companies offering CRM-like features. Now the market is populated with lots of software products, many of which do roughly the same thing... Read more

june 5

Tact CEO Chuck Ganapathi on the transition to conversational apps

An interview with Tact CEO Chuck Ganapathi on how the transition to AI-powered conversational apps will transform the enterprise apps landscape... Read more

may 19

Gartner Releases the CRM Sales 2017 Cool Vendors Report

Colleague Ilona Hansen and I are pleased to announce the newest Cool Vendors for the CRM Sales research practice... Read more

may 18

Cortana moves way beyond being a personal assistant

Combined with Microsoft Graph, Project Rome, and Bot Framework, the personal assistant technology looks to reinvent work across devices... Read more

may 16

Build17 – Azure rising as Microsoft preps Windows Fall

Announcements at Build17 around Windows 10 Fall Creators edition show that Windows now takes second place to Azure and AI in the Microsoft firmament... Read more

may 16

Outreach and Tact enhance the human side of sales through artificial intelligence

As anyone who works in sales knows, advanced tools that make selling easier can be just as important as quality leads. Unfortunately, many modern sellers are asked to deliver results with rudimentary tools amounting to little more than a database and some web entry forms. Although the past several years have seen a renaissance in the use of data and machine learning in digital marketing and marketing automation, solutions that use machine learning to enhance the human side of selling have been largely absent... Read more

may 11

The Wing Data-First 50: AI-Powered Business Applications

Welcome to our inaugural list of AI-powered Data-First business applications. It highlights 50 innovative, venture-backed startups in America that have set out to reinvent the $150BN-plus market for business applications using a powerful combination of data-centric strategies and artificial intelligence... Read more

may 11

Microsoft Debuts Smarter Cloud at Build

Microsoft executives, led by CEO Satya Nadella, introduced a series of enhancements to the company's critical data and cloud services at the kickoff of its annual Build conference on Wednesday, demonstrating new ways to expand adoption of artificial intelligence, personal digital assistants and other innovations... Read more

may 10

Microsoft Build 2017 – Windows 10 reaches 500 million

Microsoft chief exectuive Satya Nadella has told the opening session of the company's Build conference that Windows 10 had reached 500 million monthly active devices... Read more

may 11

Microsoft Unveils New Office 365 Developer Initiatives

During its opening day Build 2017 keynote today, Microsoft announced new features for the Microsoft Teams developer platform, new capabilities for Microsoft Graph, and improved connectivity with Office partner solutions... Read more

may 10

Tact Collaborates With Microsoft To Unlock Business And Customer Data Through Natural Conversation

Tact, the sales experience platform, today announced a collaboration with Microsoft to integrate its conversational AI-assistant with Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Cortana, Microsoft Graph and Sentiment Analysis. The collaboration was announced during a keynote led by Microsoft's Head of Artificial Intelligence Research, Harry Shum, on Wed., May 10 at Microsoft Build 2017 in Seattle, WA... Read more

may 10

Microsoft announces new tools and services to help developers modernize existing apps and build more intelligent ones, on every platform, for every platform

Satya Nadella, Scott Guthrie and Harry Shum welcomed thousands of developers to Seattle for Build 2017 — Microsoft’s annual developer conference. During his opening keynote Nadella announced that Windows had reached 500 million Windows 10 monthly active devices and noted how — together — Windows, Microsoft Office and Microsoft Azure offer developers more than a billion opportunities to connect their innovations with Microsoft customers... Read more

may 10

Live: Watch Microsoft’s Build 2017 keynote with GeekWire’s commentary

Microsoft’s Build developer conference kicks off in downtown Seattle this morning, with a heavy focus on cloud technologies, and GeekWire is here to cover the latest news about Microsoft Azure, Windows, databases, artificial intelligence, developer tools and more... Read more

may 10

Microsoft Doubles Down On AI

At its Build developer conference, Microsoft launched multiple AI-powered tools that will help developers enhance their own products and services. "AI is everywhere," proclaimed Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella from the stage as he elaborated on a changing landscape... Read more

may 10

Cortana Skills Kit launches alongside 20+ new voice apps

The Cortana Skills Kit became publicly available today. That means developers can make voice apps for the intelligent assistant used by 145 million monthly active users, and an initial group of voice apps is also now available... Read more

may 10

Microsoft Build 2017: Microsoft AI – Amplify human ingenuity

A few years ago, it was hard to think of a commonly used technology tool that used AI. In a few years, it will be hard to imagine any technology that doesn’t tap into the power of AI... Read more

may 8

Tact Named a "Cool Vendor" in 2017 CRM Sales by Gartner

New report profiles one of the first commercially available virtual digital sales assistants... Read more

april 23

113 enterprise AI companies you should know

Enterprise companies comprise a $3.4 trillion market worldwide of which an increasingly larger share is being allocated to artificial intelligence technologies... Read more

march 8

Constellation ShortList™ Sales Productivity Tools

These are the best-of-breed shortlist vendors who provide their application and services without bundling into another platform... Read more

march 8

10 Companies Using Artificial Intelligence To Create Smarter Sales Tech Products

These early- to mid-stage companies have raised rounds from investors such as First Round Capital, Starbucks, Salesforce Ventures, and Redpoint Ventures... Read more

march 2

Cold Call: 65+ Companies Transforming The Sales Tech Landscape

Investors have poured over $6B into these startups offering sales tech solutions across CRM, sales enablement, communication, analytics, and more... Read more

february 17

Identifying Best-in-Breed USER Applications - User Solution Enterprise Ready

Over the past decade, a new set of user-oriented enterprise applications has arrived to support a variety of business use cases across both horizontal use cases such as analytics and collaboration as well as departmental use cases such as finance and sales... Read more

february 15

8 Artificial Intelligence Startups Improving CRM

Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Sounds like a self-help group for frustrated call center employees. Not quite. Rather, it’s a catch-all term for how companies manage customer interactions and data. It covers strategies involving everything from customer service to sales. Each incoming phone call or email may contain an overwhelming amount of data that a mere human in today’s hyper-competitive, tech-intensive environment can’t handle alone. Time to bring in some help with artificial intelligence... Read more

february 9

Artificial Intelligence Tools That Will Transform Your B2B Marketing Operations

When you think of artificial intelligence (AI), do you imagine Will Smith battling humanoid robots? Well, think again…did you know that AI is already being applied in the Internet, helping you go about your daily life without drawing attention to itself... Read more

january 31

Slack Plans To Kill Microsoft With Enterprise Grid, But May Face Threat From Microsoft Teams

Slack, the $3.8 billion cloud-based team collaboration tool, has launched Slack Enterprise Grid, aimed at helping companies administer and connect multiple chat instances. Slack made the big announcement this week in San Francisco... Read more

january 31

Tact brings intelligent sales assistant to new Slack enterprise edition

Tact, the AI-driven sales tool that uses software smarts to simplify sales tasks, today announced integration with the newly announced Slack enterprise product, Slack Enterprise Grid... Read more

december 30

Tact Aims to Advance Conversational Application Interfaces

The combination of bots and voice-enabled natural language interfaces is about to transform the way end users interact with a broad spectrum of applications in 2017... Read more

december 21

Tact Raises $15 Million to Support AI-Enhanced Sales Assistant

On December 12, 2016, Tact announced a $15 million Series B funding round to support its AI-based sales assistant platform. In this report, Blue Hill explains how Tact’s embedded AI and user experience provide... Read more

december 17

Artificial intelligence finds its way into business through sales

Artificial intelligence (AI) had a coming out party of sorts in 2016. Even though it has been in development for decades, this year, with the perfect combination of cheap computing power and access to increasing amounts of data, it seems AI’s time has come... Read more

december 13

CRM sucks, but voice, messaging, AI, and $15 million could make it better

Every company loves CRM. Every sales rep hates it. Former Salesforce executive and current Tact CEO Chuck Ganapathi thinks the solution is a virtual personal assistant, driven by modern artificial intelligence... Read more

december 12

Tact grabs $15 million Series B to make CRM easier to use

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software was born with the best of intentions — to create a record of customer interactions. The problem, salespeople will tell you, is that it becomes a chore. Tact has been designed to add an intelligent layer to CRM — and today it got $15 million to make CRM easier to use... Read more

december 12

Tact Raises $15 Million for AI Assistant for Salespeople (PDF)

Salespeople today work from their mobile devices more than ever before, but most customer relationship management applications were built during the web era... Read more

december 12

Microsoft Is Backing This Voice-Driven Sales Assistant

Companies spend an enormous sum of money on sales automation and relationship management software, a category that could reach $51.5 billion in revenue by 2020, according to a forecast by Cowen and Co... Read more

december 12

Tact raises $15M to put conversational interface on Salesforce.com

Chatbots are automating cybersecurity operations and speeding up recruiting, and now companies are starting to employ them as part of their sales efforts... Read more

december 12

Tact Closes $15 Million to Readily Connect Sales Tools to Mobile Devices

Today, Tact, a Redwood City, CA based company, announced the successful close of a $15 million series B round led by Upfront Ventures. The round also had participation from Microsoft Ventures, and existing investors Kevin Efrusy of Accel Partners and Satish Dharmaraj of Redpoint Ventures... Read more

december 12

25 5-Star Apps You Haven’t Heard Of (But Need To)

I love that AppExchange is constantly growing with new apps. Although new apps may be flying under your radar, some are starting to generate significant momentum and buzz (not to mention terrific reviews) from our community. Spanning a wide range of categories, these 25 apps possess common attributes: they’re value packed and have a high customer rating... Read more

november 22

The Top 9 communications tools for Salesforce

Our team attended last month’s Salesforce Dreamforce event in San Francisco. We visited each stand at the exhibition and collated the top tools, add-ons and Apps for Salesforce users... Read more

march 28

Tactile Mobile CRM Platform Wows Stevie Award Judges

Since 2002, The Stevie Awards have recognized excellence both on an individual and organizational level. In the always competitive Sales & Customer Service group, past Stevies for Best Relationship Management Solution have gone to respected names like LexisNexis... Read more

october 26

After mobile boom, companies move to offline-first strategy for growth

At a time when most startups in India are switching to a mobile-first model, a clutch of firms in Silicon Valley and India have moved on to the next stage — an offline-first strategy... Read more

september 18

The Biggest Business News at Dreamforce

Salesforce, Microsoft, and a slew of other business software vendors announce cloud, customer relationship management, management, marketing, and sales solutions for enterprises... Read more

september 16

Tactile Releases Three Mobile Sales Apps

Tactile, provider of a mobile-first command center designed specifically for field salespeople, today unveiled three new products that empower salespeople while on the road... Read more

august 30

Why App Developers Should Think Offline-First

Think back to how and where you worked five years ago. Smart phones were already everywhere, yet business applications were still heavily relegated to the desktop. Today, mobile technology has not only become omnipresent in our personal lives, but it is also transforming the way we work, and developers are scrambling to meet this growing demand... Read more

july 6

How to Build an Offline-ready Mobile App (and Why You Should)

There is an expectation for constant connectivity today. We’ve all experienced the frustration of not being able to access email on the subway or needing an urgent file on the road but being in a dead spot... Read more

may 7

A Microsoft-Salesforce tie-up might be all about the growing purse of the CMO

Persistent rumors of an acquisition have been floating around Salesforce for weeks now. The market has twice halted trading of Salesforce's stock in the last two weeks — once on April 29 and again on Tuesday. This was necessary because the price spiked up dangerously fast on news that the cloud company was hearing buyout offers... Read more

may 6

Why Microsoft Might Buy CRM Giant Salesforce

Rumors around a Salesforce takeover are heating up. After a swirl of chatter last week about Oracle being a likely suitor for the company, the talk has now turned to Microsoft Relevant Products/Services as a possible buyer for the customer relationship management giant... Read more

march 19

How to Get Your Family on Board With Your Startup Lifestyle

You’re ready. You have a great idea, and you have reached a place in your career or life where starting your own company is the next step. Great! But before you start pitching your idea to potential investors, partners or employees there is vital step you can’t skip: How do you get your spouse and family to accept the risk, uncertainty and lifestyle that lies ahead as an entrepreneur... Read more

march 6

At Startups, People Are 'New Infrastructure'

This is a very popular meme today in the Valley: If you talk to aspiring entrepreneurs in accelerators or earlier, it’s 'We want to be the Uber for something or the AirBnB for blank,' " says Chuck Ganapathi, the founder of Tactile, which makes software that helps salespeople do their jobs better... Read more

march 6

Why Salesforce.com should be watching its back for Microsoft

Last week, Salesforce.com reported some pretty stellar fourth quarter and fiscal year results along with a strong outlook for the coming year. The company continues to expand into new areas, bringing the “power of the cloud” to what will become new business units that will drive growth for the company... Read more

march 4

Offline is not just another mobile feature

Every discussion on mobile-first development misses out on one of its most important and least understood characteristics: Mobile apps need to work offline... Read more

january 30

Mobile CRM for the Modern-Day Road Warrior

When you think of today's work environments, images of cubicles, copy rooms and water coolers may come to mind. Or, if you're in parts of the Silicon Valley, maybe they're more like ping-pong tables, well-stocked kitchens and fitness centers... Read more

december 26

Enterprise Mobility Will (Finally) Flourish in 2015

Yes, this is another predictions post. But unlike years past, I’m going on record saying 2015 will actually be different: 2015 will be the year that enterprise mobility not only arrives, but flourishes... Read more

november 25

Tactile 2015 Predictions: The Year of Enterprise Mobility

2015 will be the year of enterprise mobility. Sure, maybe you've heard this before, but 2014 paved the way with a huge shift towards user-led mobile enterprise apps which is finally moving the needle on enterprise mobile adoption... Read more

november 12

Is There a 'Masterpiece' Among Modern Applications?

Forrester Research analysts have been talking about "modern applications," a term they more or less coined, for a couple of years now. One of the clearest definitions of a modern app comes from application development and delivery specialist Jeffrey S Hammond, who listed the qualities of a modern app in a 2013 blog post... Read more

october 27

Tact Premium Goes With the Flow

With Tact Premium, "basically it is boom, boom, boom -- here is what you need to get on with your day," said Tactile founder and CEO Chuck Ganapathi. The reason the app is catching on is that the company deliberately designed it to mimic a sales rep's communication workflow. "We inverted the typical model and brought CRM into the communication workflow -- not vice versa," he said... Read more

october 16

Want Great B2B Reviews? Provide a Great Customer Experience

Before the days of social media and sites like Yelp and Amazon, customers had to rely on vendor advertisements and personal recommendations from family and friends to get information about products. Today, a quick Google search will populate reviews, ratings and comments from consumers and media outlets from around the Web, offering you a wealth of data about not only the product itself but how well it works and any issues that others have run into when using it... Read more

october 12

A Force in Tech Fests Pushes Forward

Startup Tactile Inc., founded by former Salesforce executive Chuck Ganapathi, plans to use Dreamforce to introduce a paid premium version of Tact, an app that is designed to help salespeople handle many routine chores on smartphones. Though they work alongside Salesforce services, Mr. Ganapathi said companies like Tactile and Veeva also compete with parts of that company’s offerings in a “frenemy” relationship that’s becoming increasingly common in the market... Read more

september 1

Could Mobile CRM Solve Field Sales' Biggest Problems?

For many field sales representatives, CRM is a burden. After a long day of selling, they have to enter information from the day's calls and appointments, culled from hastily scribbled notes, into their company's CRM system... Read more

august 29

What these 6 CEOs learned from working at Salesforce

Salesforce launched 15 years ago. With annual revenues expected at more than $5 billion this year, it is hard to remember those days when Salesforce was a scrappy start up, trying to sell enterprise customers on the benefits of the multi-tenant software-as-a-service model... Read more

june 27

Tactile touches up sales software

Imagine spending more than a decade making products that you believed nobody liked using... Read more

june 10

The Ultimate Hackers: Salespeople Go “Rogue”

Outside of tech circles, the word “hacker” conjures up an image of a nerdy kid scheming in his parents’ basement, or someone causing a national security crisis in the latest episode of “Scandal.”... Read more

june 2

Tactile CEO: Why now's the time for 'bring your own' business app

The momentum behind targeting business apps at employees rather than their employers is building, according to startup Tactile's founder and CEO, Chuck Ganapathi... Read more

march 25

Tactile Raises $11M To Help Workers Sync Their Personal And Professional Data

Tactile, a new enterprise company that wants to help workers bring together all their customer information into one app, has raised $11.2 million in Series A funding from Accel Partners and Redpoint Ventures... Read more

march 25

The Daily Startup

Tactile emerged from stealth mode with $11.2 million in funding and software that synchronizes business data, starting with customer relationship management data aimed at salespeople. The company’s Series A round comes from Accel Partners and Redpoint Ventures... Read more

march 25

Former Salesforce exec raises $11.2 mln for software startup

Chuck Ganapathi, the executive behind Salesforce's popular Chatter software, is starting a company that takes aim at that company's core focus of managing business relationships... Read more

march 25

Salesforce vet launches new app that tackles the enterprise’s dirty little secret

Tactile CEO Chuck Ganapathi, a former Salesforce executive, aims to simplify enterprise software the same way Dropbox and iCloud did for consumer storage... Read more

march 25

Tactile Raises $11.2M to Consolidate Data for Salespeople

Tactile Inc. emerged from stealth mode with $11.2 million in funding and software that synchronizes business data, starting with customer relationship management data aimed at salespeople... Read more