Following the web redesign and other changes, Google is introducing a new prompt bar for the Gemini app on Android and iOS. Gemini is going from a pill-shaped text field to a rounded rectangle (even before you enter text). Underneath the “Ask Gemini” field, you get a row of actions, starting with the ‘plus’ menu that’s now much shorter. You just get Camera, Gallery, Files, and Drive in this bottom sheet. Next up are pill-shaped buttons for “Research” and “Canvas.” Tap the three-dot icon in a circle to see those items in list form with brief descriptions, as well as “Video” (Veo 2 generation). Chips will stay highlighted upon tap. Deep Research: Get in-depth reports; Canvas: Create docs and code; Video: Generate with Veo. If you open the model picker, Google has removed Deep Research and Veo 2 (for Advanced subscribers). They are better thought of as Gemini capabilities than general-purpose models, with the new chips having the benefit of being always visible. As such, the menu is now down to four models: 2.0 Flash: Fast all-around help; 2.5 Flash (preview): Our next reasoning model built for speed; 2.5 Pro (preview): Reasoning, math & code; Personalization (preview): Based on your Search history. The voice input microphone and Gemini Live button round out this prompt bar redesign. Overall, it’s not as minimalist as before, but allows Google to introduce more features and matches the web UI. It’s also rolling out to the Gemini app for iPhone and iPad. Google is using this redesign to switch to standard iOS menus.
Onboarding metrics- Time To First Value, Onboarding CSAT, Customer Outcome Achievement, and Onboarding Risks, should regularly be reported in leadership meetings and board decks
Onboarding is a critical metric in software companies, often overlooked in discussions about annual recurring revenue (ARR), churn, customer acquisition cost (CAC), and customer lifetime value (LTV). It is the first step in the customer journey and defines every subsequent experience. A great onboarding experience can reinforce customers’ decisions, while a confusing one can erode trust. Great onboarding creates upstream value, as it leads to expansion, retention, and referrals. Positive customer metrics are often downstream of onboarding, such as expansion, retention, and referrals. Companies should regularly report onboarding performance in leadership meetings and board decks, as it is an important leading indicator of customer health, revenue growth, and operational efficiency. Some onboarding metrics suggested by the author include Time To First Value, Onboarding Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Customer Outcome Achievement, and Onboarding Risks. These metrics are not vanity metrics but early warning systems for potential issues. Onboarding should be a cross-functional effort that spans product, sales, marketing, and leadership. Product needs to ensure an intuitive experience, sales set realistic expectations, marketing supports post-sale engagement, and leadership invests in tools, processes, and people to make it work at scale. Ignoring onboarding can lead to wasted CAC, delayed launches, and dissatisfied customers. Companies that nail onboarding often see faster time to revenue recognition, higher net retention, new champions, and use cases. Treating onboarding like a mirror can help companies identify misalignment, friction, and missed opportunities. By investing in onboarding, companies can become growth engines and revenue levers, leading to better financial outcomes.
Siro’s AI-driven coaching for in-person sales teams offers real-time transcription, performance analytics, and industry-specific training models
Startup Siro has secured $50 million in a Series B round led by SignalFire with participation from Dick Costolo and Adam Bain’s VC firm 01 Advisors. Siro transcribes sales meetings via an app. Features include a company-wide dashboard where sales folks can submit successful calls and sort them by engagement from peers, allowing other reps to listen to top calls and get insights about improving on-ground sales visits. Siro trains models for specific industry verticals — for example, for HVAC sales coaching. The company also uses a general-purpose model to gauge how a salesperson is building rapport and handling rejections. Wayne Hu, a partner at SignalFire, said that the VC firm always wants to invest in companies that have a strong business advantage in data for particular segments. “Siro’s solution is helping digitize the ‘dark matter’ of offline conversations comprising field sales engagements, which has broad extensibility across verticals and depth in downstream actions that can be instrumented from this data, such as customer and product insights,” he told.
Qualified unveils Spotlight: The industry’s first observation layer for agentic B2B marketing- understanding each lead—who they are, which role they hold, and where they are in the buying journey
Qualified, the agentic marketing platform with the world’s leading AI SDR agent, will unveil Spotlight, the industry’s first observation layer for agentic marketing. Spotlight offers customers a new contextual view of Piper the AI SDR Agent. B2B marketers can now see AI transparency in action, including how Piper thinks, reasons, and strategizes for every unique buyer, as she autonomously generates pipeline at scale. This innovation ensures trust and confidence as marketers integrate AI agents into their teams and workflows. No two user Spotlights are the same—Piper formulates a unique game plan for every buyer, executing hundreds of thousands of strategies simultaneously to maximize conversion. Qualified’s first-of-its-kind Agentic Marketing Platform helps marketers leverage agents to drive scalable pipeline generation. At its center sits Piper the AI SDR Agent, who engages with and converts all qualified leads, autonomously and at scale. With Spotlight, marketers can observe: Lead Context: Piper the AI SDR Agent understands each lead—who they are, which role they hold, and where they are in the buying journey—informing tailored selling experiences. Account Context: Piper understands key account data—their segment, buying committee, and level of intent—delivering an account-based sales motion; Piper rolls lead and account data into one unified view, helping her sell to the whole buyer versus separate leads and accounts. Behavior Monitoring: Piper tracks how buyers are engaging across the website, email inbox, and online, and adjusts her strategy accordingly. Goals and Guardrails: Piper operates toward specific goals for each unique buyer and within the guardrails outlined by marketing, working towards targets of meetings booked and pipeline generated.
Vercel’s AI model enables creating independent, scalable web-based checkout systems on developers’ own domains by offering customisable template with frontend components through API
The team behind Vercel’s V0, an AI-powered platform for web creation, has developed an AI model it claims excels at certain website development tasks. Available through an API, the model, called “v0-1.0-md,” can be prompted with text or images, and was “optimized for front-end and full-stack web development,” the Vercel team says. Currently in beta, it requires a V0 Premium plan ($20 per month) or Team plan ($30 per user per month) with usage-based billing enabled. Vercel’s model can “auto-fix” common coding issues, the Vercel team says, and it’s compatible with tools and SDKs that support OpenAI’s API format. Evaluated on web development frameworks like Next.js, the model can ingest up to 128,000 tokens in one go. The launch of V0’s model comes as more developers and companies look to adopt AI-powered tools for programming.
Korl’s AI agent for sales teams creates customized presentations for customers by understanding the strengths and outcomes of each product, and then matching this understanding with the needs of each customer
Customer success software startup Korl is on a mission to help businesses of all sizes unlock more revenue growth opportunities after raising $5 million in seed funding to coincide with the general availability of its platform. The startup is leveraging AI to help companies better communicate the value of their products and services to customers, so they can use whatever insights it pulls up to increase sales. To do this, it has built a novel “presentation agent” that creates customized presentations for customers at critical milestones, such as executive business reviews and renewal conversations. The agent works by crafting a presentation that addresses each customer’s top concerns, highlighting how the company’s products and services can make a difference. In some ways, it can be thought of as a bridge between a company’s internal tools and its communication strategy, guiding the way it talks to customers. It attempts to understand the strengths of each product and the outcomes it can generate, and then matches this understanding with the needs of each customer. For instance, it will assess the customer’s business priorities, usage history and lifecycle stage, so companies can better understand how they’re able to help them.
Google Pay’s redesign of the pay sheet to now display rich card art and names to make cards more easily identifiable and speed up selection
Google I/O recently announced several updates to its Google Pay payment service, including a redesign of the pay sheet, which appears when transactions are made with stored cards in third-party apps. The pay sheet now displays rich card art and names, enhancing card identification and speeding up selection. The UI has also been optimized for dark mode. Additionally, Pay will now work on Android WebViews, allowing purchases to be made in in-app browsers starting with Chrome version 136. Google Wallet also introduced a new Nearby Passes notification feature, notifying users about tickets or passes when they’re close to a relevant location.
Google enables launching AI Mode with one-tap search on Android and iOS that does away with the homepage; adds slick animation with color glows to encompass entire screen for iOS
Besides the widget shortcut, Google is making AI Mode faster to access with one-tap search on Android and iOS. Previously, launching AI Mode from the shortcut beneath the Search bar in the Google app or widget would bring you to an introductory homepage. You’d then have to touch the “Ask AI Mode” field before you could start typing. Opening AI Mode now immediately takes you to the input box with the keyboard open. The header just shows the ‘G’ logo (and close button), while the suggested queries carousel disappears after you enter text for a minimalist look. With the previous homepage no longer available, you cannot quickly access conversation history. Google tells us to soon expect direct access from the text field. One-tap AI Mode access is live on both Google for Android and iOS. On the latter platform, Google has introduced a very slick animation. Tapping the AI Mode button will expand the usual Search field to encompass your entire screen as the keyboard pops up. As this occurs, there’s a four-color glow around the expanding perimeter that looks very nice. It fades out just as everything settles, while closing AI Mode also results in a visual effect. There’s no equivalent animation on Android right now, but there are other colorful touches.
Eppo, a feature flagging and experimentation platform offers “confidence intervals” to make it easier to understand and interpret the results of a randomized app experiments and different versions of apps and models
Datadog has acquired Eppo, a feature-flagging and experimentation platform. Despite the demand for tools that let developers experiment with different versions of apps, the infrastructure required for product analytics remains relatively complex to build. Beyond data pipelines and statistical methods, experimentation infrastructure relies on analytics workflows often sourced from difficult-to-configure cloud environments. Eppo will continue supporting existing customers and bringing on new ones under the brand “Eppo by Datadog.” Eppo offers “confidence intervals” to make it easier to understand and interpret the results of a randomized app experiment. The platform supports experimentation with AI and machine learning models, leveraging techniques to perform live experiments that show whether one model is outperforming another. Eppo co-founder and CEO Che Sharma said “With Datadog, we are uniting product analytics, feature management, AI, and experimentation capabilities for businesses to reduce risk, learn quickly, and ship high-quality products.” For Datadog, the Eppo buy could bolster the company’s current product analytics solutions. “The use of multiple AI models increases the complexity of deploying applications in production,” Michael Whetten, VP of Product at Datadog, said. “Experimentation solves this correlation and measurement problem, enabling teams to compare multiple models side-by-side, determine user engagement against cost tradeoffs, and ultimately build AI products that deliver measurable value.”
Google redesigning the Search bar widget on Android taking after Circle to Search revamp earlier this year with an overarching pill-shaped container
Google is rolling out a redesign of the Search bar homescreen widget on Android that better emphasizes the optional shortcut. The previous design was a pill with the Google ‘G’ logo at the left. Next up is a custom shortcut, voice input microphone, and Google Lens shortcut. This new design takes after Circle to Search revamp earlier this year with an overarching pill-shaped container. It’s slightly taller than before, which aligns with Material 3’s preference for thicker search fields. At the left is a large Search bar that’s unchanged. What’s new is how Google moved the optional shortcut to a standalone circle at the right. This results in the custom button standing out much more, and is easier to tap. The available options are: None, AI Mode, Translate (text), Song Search, Weather, Translate (camera), Sports, Dictionary, Homework, Finance, Saved, and News. The minimum width to have everything appear is 4×1, instead of 3×1, which might disrupt some layouts. When you adjust the transparency slider, the outer container is what changes the most. We’re seeing this Search bar redesign with Google app 16.17 (latest beta). If you don’t have this change yet, highlight the widget on your homescreen and tap the pencil icon.