Econsultancy research reveals one third of organizations fear going out of business within next 36 months without reinvention of business model

In partnership with Sitecore, the global leader in digital experience management software, Econsultancy today released a report entitled Reinventing Commerce, providing a snapshot of the global commerce market. The research highlights that 60 percent of organizations report their business model is under critical or significant pressure to adapt to changing market conditions, with one-third concerned that the pressure could threaten the survival of their business within 36 months. A majority of companies surveyed identified a new model for growth by using commerce expertise combined with the right personalized experience for the customer. Two-thirds of respondents recognize that creating the right personalized content for their customers is how they can take on the big brands. While excited about the possible favorable business outcomes of creating the right personalized customer journey, respondents globally are conflicted about working with and competing among macro-players such as Amazon and Alibaba. Nearly the same percentage of respondents consider the top-tier e-commerce marketplaces to be a significant opportunity for growth 47 percent, even as they are concerned about working with them 46 percent.

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AI Tech

CGI and Google expand partnership to drive industry-specific innovation in the responsible use of generative AI

PR Newswire | November 03, 2023

CGI (NYSE: GIB) (TSX: GIB.A) today announced the expansion of the company's partnership with Google to drive innovation in the responsible use of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. This partnership will help clients accelerate their time-to-value from new generative AI use cases specific to their industries. As part of the agreement, CGI will leverage Google Cloud Platform (Google Cloud) to enhance the capabilities of its CGI PulseAI solution, a hyper-automation and decision engine platform that uses AI and machine learning models to deliver high-performance intelligent process automation. "AI continues to be at the top of discussion agendas with clients around the world seeking trusted advice from CGI for how to responsibly move from AI experimentation to implementation—while accelerating their return on investment," said CGI President and Chief Executive Office George D. Schindler. "Our expanded partnership with Google is one of the key global alliances that will help us develop and deliver new AI-based services and solutions for clients, as well as expanded skills development opportunities for our consultants." Generative AI is fundamentally changing how many businesses operate, fueling a new era of cloud that can benefit virtually every area of an organization, said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. By utilizing Google Cloud's leading GenAI capabilities, CGI can help clients unlock new insights that help them improve operations and productivity. Google's Vertex AI will enable CGI PulseAI to build trusted industry-specific large language models that will enable the development and implementation of unique generative AI use cases for clients. For example, in the financial sector, Google Cloud's trusted data will enable CGI PulseAI to refine a tailored model, called "FinPulseAI," for financial services clients. Likewise, unique models can be developed for other industries, increasing CGI PulseAI's rapid adaptability in meeting the industry-specific needs of clients. For example, CGI plans to explore the use of Google's MedPaLM2 model for transforming medical claims processing and validation. The initiative will merge CGI's deep health sector expertise with Google's advanced AI model to provide enhanced medical claim validation and fraud detection for health clients. Clients will be able to process medical claims faster and with greater accuracy, ensuring that each claim is legitimate and compliant. By harnessing the power of models like MedPaLM2, health providers, researchers, and administrators will have expanded tools that enable better delivery of care while expanding the boundaries of medical science for the benefit of patients and society. Google Cloud's robust, scalable infrastructure also will accelerate clients' implementation of CGI PulseAI services by managing all computing and memory requirements, increasing the solution's customization capabilities and enabling a broader range of solution offerings. With the integration of Google Cloud and CGI PulseAI, clients can better meet today's business demands, as well as predict and address industry challenges before they emerge, helping them stay at the forefront of their industries. CGI will launch Google AI training globally as an addition to the AI curriculum in its "CGI Academia" online university. The two companies also will develop AI sandboxes using Google Cloud technologies to support ongoing AI development in support of the delivery of innovative solutions. CGI's end-to-end capabilities in data science and machine learning, combined with its deep domain knowledge and technology engineering skills, help clients generate new insights, experiences, and business models powered by AI. CGI PulseAI is a trademark of CGI Inc. and its related companies. For more information on the company's AI expertise and offerings, visit cgi.com.

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AI Applications

Nvidia and VMware Forge New Alliance to Craft Custom Generative AI

NVIDIA | September 08, 2023

• Nvidia and VMware announce an extensive collaboration to empower enterprises with customized generative AI technology, focusing on security and privacy. • The VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA platform, set for an early release, provides access to Nvidia's accelerated computing and generative AI software for enterprise customization. • The platform ensures secure data access, supports up to 16 GPUs for scalability, and utilizes Nvidia's NeMo framework for building generative AI models with efficient resource sharing. In a joint announcement at VMware Explore 2023, Nvidia and VMware unveiled their extensive collaboration expansion, unveiling a groundbreaking platform designed to empower enterprises, especially the vast user base of VMware cloud services, to tailor generative AI technology to suit their unique business needs. Customization has emerged as a pivotal focus for Nvidia, given the rapid proliferation of generative AI technology over the past ten months. This approach aims to empower enterprises to harness the full potential of this technology while mitigating security and privacy concerns. Scheduled for release early next year, the new platform, VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA, will facilitate enterprise access to Nvidia's accelerated computing capabilities and generative AI software. This will enable the customization of models and the execution of generative AI applications, encompassing intelligent chatbots, virtual assistants, search engines, and summarization tools. Recognizing that enterprise data required for training and customizing generative AI models is dispersed across various cloud environments and data center infrastructures, Nvidia and VMware intend to provide secure and cost-effective access to this data. Paul Turner, Vice President of Product Management, vSphere at VMware, emphasized the importance of safeguarding data assets, suggesting that companies may opt to bring more generative AI workloads closer to their data centers rather than migrating data to public cloud services. According to Turner, enterprises may initially deploy the platform in relatively small-scale environments, such as clusters comprising two to four GPU-based servers. However, as enterprises seek enhanced performance for their generative AI projects, the platform can leverage Nvidia's storage capabilities, NVLink, and NVSwitch, integrated with VMware vSphere, to support configurations of up to 16 GPUs. This enables an accelerated data feed into the AI models. These pooled resources can be efficiently shared across different departments, ensuring cost-effectiveness while preserving privacy and security. Customers will have the flexibility to run AI services in proximity to their data sources. The platform will feature Nvidia NeMo, a cloud-native framework that is part of Nvidia AI Enterprise, the operating system of the Nvidia AI platform. NeMo encompasses customization tools, guardrail toolkits, data curation tools, and pre-trained models, enabling enterprises to build, adapt, and deploy generative AI models across diverse environments. Justin Boitano, Vice President of Enterprise AI at Nvidia, highlighted the timeliness of enterprise customization of generative AI as this transformative technology continues to influence every sector. Boitano referenced research from consulting firm McKinsey, which estimates that generative AI has the potential to generate an additional $4.4 trillion in annual business value. This technology is poised to revolutionize industries by expediting ideation, automating complex tasks, enhancing creativity, and facilitating communication across various modalities. Boitano concluded that generative AI would serve as indispensable assistants, seamlessly integrated into all facets of businesses across every industry, unlocking substantial untapped potential.

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Software

OpenText AI Enables Smarter Organizations

PR Newswire | October 16, 2023

OpenText™ (NASDAQ: OTEX), (TSX: OTEX), the information company, today announced the latest release of its Cloud Editions (CE) 23.4, which includes OpenText Aviator artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities that carry through the company's innovation roadmap. For over a decade, OpenText has been helping organizations manage and secure large complex data sets from IoT and robotics, to natural language processing, to complex systems and generative AI. OpenText Aviator empowers organizations to swiftly act on their data, make sharp decisions and evolve with intelligent tools that learn over time. OpenText Aviator uplevels information automation so organizations can easily make the AI pivot and conquer today's and tomorrow's business challenges. The AI revolution is creating an unprecedented platform shift – one that will transform all industries, all functions, and all roles, said Mark Barrenechea, CEO & CTO of OpenText. OpenText has been developing AI capabilities for over a decade, and OpenText Aviators is an AI breakthrough for customers. OpenText Aviator will help customers massively increase productivity through new conversation interfaces leveraging Information Management data sets and language models. The demand for and adoption of AI technologies continues to grow at record speed. According to IDC, global AI IT spending will surpass $308 billion by 2026. In response to this rapidly growing demand and market potential, OpenText introduced its opentext.ai vision and strategy for AI focused on helping organizations power and protect traditional operational and experience data while anticipating a new layer of learning data from generative AI and large language models (LLMS). Grounded in layering LLMs on top of private, secured data, opentext.ai allows for a full stack or modular approach to practical AI. Organizations can take advantage of LLM-based capabilities within applications, or they can utilize OpenText Cloud API Services to create the right sandbox to experiment with. "From upstream and renewables to trading and transport to marketing and manufacturing, we keep goods and people moving. We span 160 markets, serve about 32 million people a day at 46,000 branded retail sites and work with more than 1 million business customers. We have been the No.1 global lubricants supplier for 16 consecutive years and offer our customers a strong portfolio of energy solutions they need today and tomorrow. AI is key to maintaining our performance in these areas whilst we play a key role in the energy transition and help our customers decarbonize their businesses in the journey to net zero," said Jonathan Cullender, Head of Integration at Shell. "We are excited to take the stage with OpenText in Las Vegas to explore the game-changing capabilities of AI within the energy sector and how OpenText solutions have been instrumental in improving our operational efficiency and security, ultimately leading to substantial cost savings." "As generative AI moves on from the initial hype, the work to ensure a measurable return on investment begins," said Darryl Gray, Global Vice President of Software Partner Solutions at SAP. "SAP is committed to creating an enterprise AI ecosystem for the future that complements our world-class business applications suite and helps our customers unlock their full potential. We support the vision behind OpenText's opentext.ai strategy and are confident that OpenText's latest innovations will enable businesses of all sizes and industries to elevate their operations to unimaginable heights." OpenText Aviator enables AI orchestration and the creation of information flows across multiple clouds and knowledge bases allowing organizations to address multiple AI use cases for their enterprise without having to move their data. The latest Cloud Editions release includes: OpenText Aviator for Business OpenText IT Operations Aviator™ is a cutting-edge generative AI virtual agent for OpenText Service Management Automation X (SMAX). The latest integration combines LLMs with OpenText's data security expertise to enhance the user experience, facilitate intuitive self-service, provide faster issue resolution and gain efficiency, ultimately reducing service management costs and improve end-user customer experience. OpenText DevOps Aviator™ revolutionizes software delivery with generative AI capabilities enabling organizations to deliver software at unparalleled velocity. This tool leverages AI to optimize software delivery with feature prediction, enhances test coverage with automatic test creation and authoring, and reduces points of risk that impact quality. OpenText Content Aviator™ optimizes information retrieval in the workplace, making it more efficient and productive. The interactive chat interface and natural language queries enhances user productivity and streamlines content discovery. OpenText Experience Aviator™ integrates Customer Communications Management (CCM) software with generative AI capabilities enabling marketing, communications and customer service support teams to produce well-formed and relevant material faster than ever, boosting development productivity. OpenText Cybersecurity Aviator™ offers AI-enhanced rapid deployment capabilities and cloud-based efficiency to help organizations implement new threat detection models designed to protect users from diverse, sophisticated and evolving threats. OpenText Business Network Aviator™ brings generative AI and large language models (LLMs) into the OpenText Business Network, placing the entire supply chain information flow into a single platform. By utilizing a comprehensive 360-degree perspective of end-to-end supply chain operations and an AI-powered conversational interface, businesses will gain access to information to respond quickly to dynamic and unpredictable market fluctuations and conditions. OpenText Aviator for Technologists OpenText Aviator Platform offers a suite of tools and connectors to administer enterprise-grade data warehouses, data lakes, analytics of structure and unstructured data, and visualization for intelligent decision-making. OpenText Aviator Search introduces a new advanced capability to go from clicks to conversations with search that spans all data types across multiple repositories to build any custom solution, portal, or experience for an enterprise. OpenText Aviator IOT brings forward a collection of tools to better connect and protect millions of IoT endpoints to get real-time insights and visibility into assets location, condition, utilization, performance and health. OpenText Aviator Thrust & Thrust Studio is a set of robust cloud API services and developer tools built over the last three years that can power secure information flows, fuel custom AI solutions, and fast-track new AI-embedded applications. OpenText Aviator Lab is a partnership for experimentation with professional AI experts to help customers accelerate AI development through rapid prototyping, AI reference architectures in a secure sandbox environment.

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