Channels

Falkon SMS, has officially launched its HubSpot SMS integration, allowing sales, marketing, and support teams to send and receive text messages directly from within their HubSpot CRM accounts. The new integration offers seamless contact sync, message automation, and more—designed to accelerate customer engagement and streamline operations. This integration empowers teams to communicate faster, stay organized, and manage conversations in real time without switching tabs or juggling external SMS tools. Key Features of Falkon SMS for HubSpot: Instant Contact Sync HubSpot contacts automatically sync to Falkon SMS—no manual imports, ever; Send & Receive Texts in HubSpot; Chat with leads and customers directly within your CRM timeline; Scheduled Texting Plan texts ahead of time—ideal for appointment reminders, campaign launches, or follow-ups; Group Messaging & Broadcasts: Start group chats for collaboration or send mass updates with ease; Automated Replies & Keyword Triggers; Set up smart auto-responses to handle common queries efficiently; Analytics & Performance Insights: Track message delivery, engagement, and campaign success in one place.

Read Article

First Insight study reveals that 71% of consumers surveyed believed they could recognize a private label when making a purchase, yet 72% were unable to do so when shown side-by-side images of store brand and national brand products. 84% of consumers now trust in the quality of store-brand products more or the same as national brands, while 52% say they’ve been influenced to try a store-brand product by in-store promotions, packaging, displays or marketing materials. Among the findings: The stigma once associated with private labels have largely disappeared. Seventy-seven (77%) of consumers aren’t concerned with how they’re perceived for purchasing private label products. Today’s shoppers love finding “the dupe.” Smart imitation has become a badge of savvy shopping, with 47% of consumers saying they’ve tried a private label product specifically because it was a dupe of a name-brand item. 44% of consumers—and 70% of those earning more than $150k per year—saying they’re more likely to try a private label if it’s marketed as a dupe of a high-end product. Consumers are willing to break from their normal brands to try new products. While 48% of consumers still identify as brand loyal, more than half say they’re either brand curious (32%) or motivated by price and savings (20%). Brand loyalty is no longer a guarantee. Consumers today no longer worship national brands; they chase value, quality and availability. 71% consumers say they would be willing to try a private label if their preferred national brand was out of stock. And once a consumer makes the switch and feels satisfied, they rarely go back, with 45% saying they’ve permanently switched from a national brand to a private label when the product met or exceeded expectations. The perception of store brands varies by income level. While the stigma around private label is fading overall, more affluent shoppers still feel image-conscious. 44% of consumers making $150k+ per year say they’re concerned about how they’re perceived when buying private label products. This is a significant increase compared to 27% of those earning $51K–$149K and 17% of those earning $50K or less. Essentials are the entry points for private label trial. Grocery (56%), household cleaning supplies (38%), clothing and apparel (34%), and personal care and beauty (33%) are the most commonly purchased private label categories. Private label is driving brand advocacy—and store traffic: 66% of consumers say they recommend private label products to friends and family, and 34% say they’re more likely to shop at a retailer specifically because of its private label offerings.

Read Article

Sephora U.S. has announced its first-ever “Delivered to Beauty” activation, in partnership with Lyft Media. From July 7-10, the beauty retailer is offering Lyft ride credits (up to $20 off) to shoppers in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and Seattle, enabling the shoppers to be “delivered” to a participating Sephora location. Once they arrival in the store, shoppers can receive guidance from Sephora’s beauty advisors, along with a personalized “skin scan,” exclusive product sampling and $10 off any order (over $50) at checkout.  The activation is part of Sephora’s new “Get Beauty from People Who Get Beauty” campaign, which aims to showcase the value of “trusted and personalized expertise provided by Sephora.”  As part of the activation, which was developed in partnership with Lyft Media, select vehicles will be custom wrapped with Sephora branding, transforming the journey into an extension of the beauty experience itself, the company said.  “At Lyft, we want to connect people with the places they love, and our partnership with Sephora really leans into that,” said Suzie Reider, executive VP of Lyft Media and Business. “It’s a natural collaboration: a rider steps out of their Lyft, transported by a driver who knows their way around their communities, and enters Sephora’s best-in-class shopping experience that offers expert guidance, too.”

Read Article

Wegmans Food Markets is testing Instacart Caper Cart smart carts at a store in Syracuse, N.Y. This marks the first deployment of Caper Carts at Wegmans, as part of an initial in-store program offering customers a smarter, more seamless way to shop in-store. Part of the Instacart Connected Stores platform, Caper Carts are equipped with cameras, a built-in scale, and location sensors connected to Nvidia Jetson hardware which work together with an edge AI system to automatically recognize items as they are placed in the cart. Once products are added, customers can watch their running cost total, similar to an online shopping cart. Caper Carts also feature an interactive screen that tracks spending, provides access to deals, and offers product recommendations based on the customer’s location in the store and the carts’ contents. Wegmans customers can log in to their Shoppers Club loyalty account on the cart’s screen to shop with a Caper Cart. When finished, customers can check out directly from the cart. “Caper Carts are transforming everyday grocery shopping into a faster, more personalized experience,” said David McIntosh, chief connected stores officer at Instacart.

Read Article

Startup CharmKey, a smart AI keyboard app, is redefining how people communicate—by helping them say exactly the right thing at exactly the right time. CharmKey isn’t just another keyboard—it’s a social communication assistant. In the age of digital relationships and remote work, messaging is your first impression. Misreading tone or replying too late can cost opportunities or lead to misunderstandings. CharmKey bridges that gap, making sure users feel confident, understood, and in control—without overthinking every word. Key Features: Instant Tone Switching: Users can select from built-in tone presets—like Polite, Professional, Chill, or Flirty,—to instantly rewrite any message for the right context. One text can now fit multiple situations with one tap. AI Reply Generator: Stuck on how to respond? CharmKey drafts natural, thoughtful replies instantly. Whether it’s romantic, friendly, or business, users can skip the stress of writing and sound confident every time. Emotion Analysis from Screenshots: CharmKey lets users upload screenshots of conversations to decode hidden emotions, red flags, or signals of romantic interest—helping them decide what to say next and avoid awkward missteps. Plug-and-Play Chat Templates: From breaking the ice to confessing feelings, CharmKey offers expertly crafted chat templates for high-pressure moments—rooted in psychology and social dynamics. Create Your Own Tone: Advanced users can customize or build their own tone presets, giving full control over how they sound in different conversations—whether it’s charming, assertive, or playfully mysterious.

Read Article

Whatsapp is introducing the ability for large businesses to reach customers through voice calls, which will allow the app to explore the use of AI-powered voice agents. The company is also looking into using AI to recommend products to users. While the company doesn’t charge for its AI features at the moment, there is a possibility that it could put a price tag on that after it achieves scale. Today, small business accounts can already chat with customers over voice on WhatsApp, but larger business accounts haven’t yet had the ability. In the next few weeks, larger businesses will be able to access this feature via the API. This will allow customers to place voice calls to businesses and allow businesses to call back customers.  WhatsApp said it will soon add a way for customers to send and receive voice messages from businesses, too. By enabling voice pipelines, companies could set up an AI-enabled voice agent through a startup like Vapi, ElevenLabs, Coval, or Phonic to run their customer service over WhatsApp. In addition, an AI-powered chat-based customer support and outreach feature that began testing last year is now being expanded to more merchants in Mexico. In addition, WhatsApp is looking to AI to power product recommendations on a merchant’s site.

Read Article

Chuck E. Cheese has launched Chuck’s Arcade, which combines a rotating mix of retro classics with the hottest new titles, including state-of-the-art racing simulators and immersive virtual reality hits. Included in the curated collection of retro legends are such offerings as Ms. Pac-Man, Galaga, Mortal Kombat, Donkey Kong and Centipede.  Select arcade locations also feature retro-themed merchandise. The assortment includes classic logo apparel, collectible toys, novelty candy and prize redemption items. Each Chuck’s Arcade is overseen by an animatronic character such as Chuck E. Cheese or one of the other familiar figures from the brand’s past. The characters, however, do not perform as they do at Chuck R. Cheese locations. Instead, they stand watch in what is described as “a nostalgic nod” to the company’s history. No two Chuck’s Arcade locations are exactly alike, the company said. Instead, each offers a unique environment. The arcade was created for adults and lifelong fans who grew up “surrounded by the electric glow of arcade screens, the symphony of digital soundtracks and the thrill of chasing high scores with friends long into the night.”

Read Article

Tailor, a headless ERP platform for modern retail businesses, announced an additional close of its Series A round, bringing the total raised to $22 million. The new investors include JIC Venture Growth Investments (JIC VGI), a Japanese government-backed investment fund, and New Enterprise Associates (NEA). Y Combinator, which participated in Tailor’s seed round, also increased its investment. This second close reflects growing global demand for flexible, API-first business systems that help enterprises move beyond the limitations of monolithic ERPs. “Tailor’s platform serves an increasingly complex supply chain landscape and we believe Tailor has the potential to rethink the ERP systems that power global commerce and operational agility,” said Andrew Schoen, Partner Technology Investing Team, at NEA. Tailor enables mid-market and enterprise companies to build and evolve their own ERP stack with speed and flexibility. Its composable, headless architecture decouples the data and logic layer from the user interface, allowing for highly customizable workflows and easy integration with best-of-breed SaaS tools. With Tailor, companies can: Orchestrate cross-system workflows with customizable modules for inventory, purchasing, fulfillment, finance, and more; Replace or integrate with legacy systems without re-architecting core infrastructure; Give developers and AI agents programmatic access to business logic and operational data; Deliver internal tools or customer-facing experiences with custom UIs

Read Article

Once seen as a back-end utility, payments are now central to customer experience and brand differentiation, with innovations like BNPL and embedded finance reshaping how consumers interact with retailers. Video game commerce firm Xsolla is partnering with Affirm to bring BNPL to video game storefronts. The move shows that retailers large and small, digital and brick-and-mortar, are embracing embedded finance and the potential of payments as a lever for growth. Payments are moving from a stealth driver of customer loyalty to a front-and-center strategy for customer retention and lifetime value extraction. This shift is driving greater investment in payment orchestration platforms, tokenization and customer vaulting systems, allowing merchants to deliver a seamless experience while unlocking deeper insights into purchase behavior. Outside of owning the customer relationship end-to-end, another reason retailers are turning to payments as a growth lever is due to data. By consolidating payment rails and unifying back-end systems, retailers can achieve a 360-degree view of the customer. This deep insight allows retailers to understand customer segments, such as whether they should be classified as a “luxury buyer” or a “budget buyer,” and to identify patterns including cart abandonment or cross-category spending. With the convergence of data, customer experience, FinTech innovation and loyalty programs, retailer-driven payments optionality and financial services are emerging not just as a function of commerce, but as a fundamental enabler of brand differentiation and revenue expansion.

Read Article

Hallucinations will persist whenever LLMs operate in ambiguous or unfamiliar territory, unless there is a fundamental architectural shift away from black box statistical models. There are essentially two options for high-risk use cases given the current state of LLM evolution: Adopt a hybrid solution: hallucination-free, explainable symbolic AI for high-risk use cases, LLMs for everything else. Leave out high-risk use cases, as suggested in #2 above, but that leaves the benefits of the AI unrealized for those use cases. However, the benefits of AI can still be applied to the rest of the organization. The following rank-ordered list is the steps you could take to limit hallucination. 1) Apply hallucination-free, explainable, symbolic AI to high-risk use cases. This is the only foolproof way to eliminate the risk of hallucination in your high-risk use cases. 2) Limit LLM usage to low-risk arenas. Not exposing your high-risk use cases to LLMs is also foolproof but does not bring the benefits of AI to those use cases. Use-case gating is non-negotiable. 3) Mandatory ‘Human-in-the-Loop’ for critical decisions. Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a start, but enterprise deployments need qualified professionals embedded in both model training and real-time decision checkpoints. 4) Governance. Integrate AI safety into corporate governance at the outset. Set clear accountability and thresholds. ‘Red team’ the system. Make hallucination rates part of your board-level risk profile. Follow frameworks like NIST’s AI RMF or the FDA’s new AI guidance 5) Curated, Domain-Specific Data Pipelines. Don’t train models on the internet. Train them on expertly vetted, up-to-date, domain-specific corpora 6) Retrieval-Augmented Architectures (not a comprehensive solution). Combine them with knowledge graphs and retrieval engines. Hybrid models are the only way to make hallucinations structurally impossible, not just unlikely.

Read Article