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Viamedia Expands Currency Relationship with Comscore

Comscore will be the exclusive currency in 72 of 73 Viamedia markets

Viamedia, the leading local cross-media advertising company, announced that Comscore, a trusted currency for planning, transacting and evaluating media across platforms, will be the exclusive TV currency in 72 of its 73 Viamedia’s markets.

“We have a long history of partnering with Comscore and are consistently impressed with the stability and granularity of their TV currency,” said Mark Lieberman, president & CEO at Viamedia. “It is an easy decision to rely on the Comscore currency in the majority of our markets as its approach to measurement reflects the modern media landscape for TV and beyond. And as Viamedia has expanded its services into the digital space, we needed a currency that’s reliable and scalable in today’s complex cross-platform world.”

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With more than a decade of experience measuring television viewership from return path devices across tens of millions of households in all 210 local markets, Comscore is one of the industry’s most trusted sources for television viewing data. Comscore is also a leader in advanced audiences, which allow the industry to go beyond age and gender to transact on consumer behaviors, interests and lifestyles. This enables TV stations, networks, advertisers, agencies and media companies at the local and national levels to effectively find and reach their ideal audiences to maximize their success.

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“We are thrilled to grow our partnership with Viamedia and to act as the exclusive TV currency for nearly all of its markets and be the measurement source for their future cross-platform efforts,” said Carol Hinnant, executive vice president, national, at Comscore. “As the video landscape continues to evolve in complexity, it’s important that advertisers have a more accurate and holistic view of the audiences they are trying to reach so they can optimize their advertising efforts and make business decisions with confidence.”

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Miaozhen Systems, Tencent Beacon Jointly Issue White Paper On Anti-Ad-Fraud

Miaozhen Systems and Tencent Beacon on Jan. 21 issued the 2018 White Paper on Anti-Ad-Fraud, aiming to prevent advertisers from ad fraud and help build a healthy and transparent ecosystem for the digital marketing industry in China.

The 2018 White Paper on Anti-Ad-Fraud updates the status quo of digital ad fraud and its underground economy,presents an in-depth analysis of the technical composition of underground fraud economy and offers targeted anti-fraud solutions and preventive suggestions.

Issuing the white paper on anti-ad-fraud is a renewed cooperation between Tencent Beacon and Miaozhen Systems. Beacon is the intelligent mobile app data analysis platform managed by Tencent PCG (Platform and Content Group), and Miaozhen Systems is China’s leading data technology solution provider engaged in helping enterprises win the market.

The white paper says the expansion of underground fraud economy in 2018 was effectively curbed, remaining at 15% compared to last year thanks to the industry partners’ concerted efforts.

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However, the underground fraud economy saw a more collectivized structure and more sophisticated fraudulent technology, posing greater economic and technical challenges for combating ad fraud.

In the white paper, Tencent Beacon introduces an AI-based real-time anti-fraud solution called “Beacon Intelligent Anti-fraud Engine” to effectively fight against the “evolving” underground fraud economy. Supported by 1 billion end-user personas accumulated by Beacon, the anti-fraud engine is empowered by its exclusive terminal device identification and cloud cross-verification technology, thus maximizing the coverage, timeliness, and accuracy of its anti-fraud detection and identification.

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Combating ad fraud is a long-lasting war in the digital advertising industry, and winning the war requires the concerted efforts of all parties in the industry, said both leaders from Tencent Beacon and Miaozhen Systems.

Committed to building a healthy and sustainable ecosystem, Tencent Beacon has teamed up with Miaozhen Systems to issue white papers on combating ad fraud for two consecutive years. Moreover, last year, Tencent Beacon, Miaozhen Systems and AdMaster co-established China’s first anti-ad-fraud big data lab to upgrade the capability to identify and diagnose invalid traffic and fraudulent advertising.

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In the future, Tencent Beacon and Miaozhen Systems will ally with more industry partners to fight against ad fraud, invalid traffic, and other underground economies. The advertising and marketing ecosystem will definitely be healthier and more standardized under the concerted efforts of all industry parties.

Boostpoint Launches Open Beta Stage Digital Ad Solution for Small Business

Building a brand name isn’t just for big businesses with big budgets. Boostpoint has launched the open beta stage of its ad solution, which empowers local businesses to grow their brands through simple, consistent, and cost-effective digital advertisements.

“Boostpoint targets, creates, submits, and measures Facebook and Instagram campaigns from one dashboard, making it easy for local business pros to run digital ads that produce ROI,” says Co-Founder and CEO Sam Beiler.

Businesses, like contractors, cafes, and real estate professionals, create ads within Boostpoint. Then, using a proprietary algorithm, the ad solution hypertargets potential customers in neighborhoods where the company is already working or wants to do more business.

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“After creating and targeting ads to display in front of your most likely customers, hit submit and the campaign goes live on the ad platforms you’ve chosen,” says Beiler.

The platform’s features also include customizable digital ad templates and real-time reporting. Boostpoint currently integrates with Facebook and Instagram; the addition of other popular ad platforms is in the pipeline.

Working with Co-Founder Jared Neff, Beiler developed the Boostpoint concept while serving as Marketing Director for Equipter, a manufacturer of debris control equipment for the roofing and contracting industries.

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“Cost-effective digital advertising helped Equipter grow into a national brand. We recognized that if the contractors we worked with had access to a tool that built out and simplified that type of strategy, they could more easily create a strong brand local consumers would remember,” says Beiler.

“The result is a solution that helps small businesses of all types, from restaurants to real estate, leverage digital advertising while saving time and money on their marketing. We’re very excited about Boostpoint’s potential to help local businesses grow.”

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Badvertising: How Big Agencies Are Screwing Big Companies Out of Big Money, And How to Stop It

A New Book Reveals the Truth in the Digital Marketing World

The founders of marketing agency, Metric Digital, have released their new book, Badvertising.

Anybody who has been paying attention knows that the marketing agency world has been crumbling under the weight of its own bloated fraud, and Badvertising is an expose on how bad the problem is for a group of marketers who have worked from small startups to some of the largest companies in the world.

Kevin Simonson, John Pellinghelli, and Ryan Markman wrote this book to shine a light on what’s happening and why it’s not only impacting the brands that are being robbed, but also the end consumer. More importantly, they wanted to educate all parties involved: CEOs, CMOs, CFOs, brands of all sizes, marketing agencies, ad tech companies, private equity and venture capital firms, consultants, customers, and anyone else who is part of the digital marketing ecosystem.

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There are two completely different worlds of marketing right now: traditional advertising and digital performance marketing. Each thinks the other is wrong, but one is stealing business from the other one.

“You shine a light in a dark place to find out what’s going on. Brands are asking for transparency with their agencies and they are finding that they’re being lied to. It’s not just a Programmatic problem, it’s a contract incentive problem across Facebook, Instagram, Google… all channels.” Kevin Simonson, Author, CEO/Co-Founder.

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“This book reveals marketing insights for every level. From founders wearing all the hats, to new entrepreneurs, all the way up to CMO’s who want their teams to stay ahead of industry standards. Use this book as a guide for your marketing team to make sure they leave no digital stone unturned,” Taylor Sicard, Co-Founder, BV Growth.

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Dosh Declares War on Wasted Advertising Spend with $40 Million Series B Financing

Dosh, the fastest growing fintech app, today announced it has closed a $40 million Series B financing round, including $20 million in equity and $20 million in venture debt. The financing was led by Goodwater Capital and Western Technology Investment (WTI), with participation from investors PayPal, BAM Capital and Anthem Venture Partners.

In 2019, much of the $231 billion advertising spend will be wasted due to no attribution. Dosh brings a dramatic shift in how merchants spend advertising dollars by giving them a new way to reach and reward consumers.

“Consumers are tired of having their data used and sold to drive advertising revenues for companies. Dosh moves advertising spend directly into consumers’ wallets,” said Ryan Wuerch, founder and CEO at Dosh. “We are empowering consumers for the first time to benefit from their own data, while bringing merchants new customers and greater revenues.”

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Dosh has seen strong growth in the past year, including delivering over $50 million in cash back to millions of consumers and achieving the No. 1 position in the US App Store. This financing will be used to further accelerate product innovation, advance technical capabilities, create personalized experiences for consumers and hire the highest-caliber talent.

“Dosh’s mission is to put billions of dollars of wasted advertising spend directly into consumers’ pockets,” said Chi-Hua Chien, co-founder and managing partner at Goodwater Capital. “They are the clear leader in the rapidly growing card-linked offers market and we are confident this latest round of funding will accelerate their achievement of that mission.”

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The Dosh platform delivers results by linking marketing spend to consumer intent all the way through to the point of sale—online or in-store. Dosh’s platform:

  • Provides a deep, data-driven understanding of consumer purchase behavior in categories such as retail, dining, fuel and home improvement;
  • Delivers cash back to consumers by learning about their preferences and suggesting the best places to shop, including Dunkin’, Pier 1, Pizza Hut, Sam’s Club and Sephora;
  • Automates performance driven campaigns leading to new customers, winning back lapsed customers, increased frequency and higher average order value; and
  • Creates social engagement to increase brand visibility and new customer acquisition for merchants.

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“Working with Dosh has given Mama Fu’s one of the best ways to acquire new customers, increase visits and grow purchase value,” said Randy Murphy, CEO at Murphy Adams Restaurant Group. “Recently, we have seen a nearly 50% lift in transactions and a 66% increase in revenue directly attributable to Dosh providing us a direct connection to build deeper relationships with our customers.”

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Mobiquity Technologies and Advangelists Release AdCop to Fight Ad Fraud

Mobiquity Technologies, Inc., announces AdCopâ„¢, the advertising industry’s first transparent ad fraud reporting system to be made available free to brands and marketers as a beta testing program independent from Advangelists.

Originally designed as a proprietary Advangelists platform feature, AdCopâ„¢ monitors for programmatic fraud post bid impression. If AdCopâ„¢ suspects fraud, the Advangelists platform renders a blank page instead of an advertiser’s advertisement as a brand safety measure. In addition, the platform’s comprehensive reporting provides advertisers and publishers full transparency and details around the fraud detected.

Historically, advertisers seeking to protect themselves would need to blacklist app publishers and web sites with even minor levels of fraud. Removing these apps and web sites would inevitably hinder the size and scale of the advertiser’s audiences. With AdCopâ„¢, a brand can continue to achieve campaign scale, but is inherently protected from having their ad display on a fraudulent site, or adjacent to unknown or unwanted content.

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Premium publishers also benefit from AdCopâ„¢, knowing that fraud networks can not harm their reputation with brands seeking to protect themselves, or hinder their ability to capture ad revenue as brands build blacklists.

“Fraud hurts everyone in the industry. We believe programmatic media should be fully transparent, from cost transparency through to fully understanding the nature of fraudulent activity within your advertising partners,” said Deep Katyal, CEO of Advangelists. “Other platforms will report on fraud at a group level, but AdCopâ„¢ goes further, reporting impression by impression the app, placement, and inventory source responsible for fraud. More importantly it enables brands to actively protect themselves.”

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“The industry did a good job of cleaning up desktop programmatic fraud last year, but as mobile ad spend is growing at 20% in 2019, the fraudsters are staying ahead of the game by moving to mobile environments that are far more complicated to police,” said Brian Stoller, CMO of Mobiquity Technologies, and former media buyer. “We’ve observed some sectors of fraud growing at rates above 50%.”

“We believe so strongly in our product, that today, I’m excited to announce our free AdCopâ„¢ beta program,” continued Mr. Katyal. “Participating beta partners can monitor their ad campaign impression level fraud for free; they do not need to be a Client of Advangelists or purchase media through our platform.”

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Kustomer Raises $35 Million Series C Led by Battery Ventures, Further Challenging Salesforce and Zendesk as it Expands Into the Enterprise Market

Adds Neeraj Agrawal, General Partner at Battery Ventures, to Board of Directors

Kustomer, the next-generation customer management platform for the people-first enterprise, announced a $35 million Series C round led by Battery Ventures, bringing Kustomer’s total funding to $73.5 million. The investment comes just 6 months after its Series B round in June of 2018. Kustomer plans to use the capital to accelerate its go-to-market strategy, expand internationally, and invest in its platform, launching new products while cementing its position as the next-generation alternative to legacy solutions like Salesforce, Oracle and Zendesk.

Neeraj Agrawal, a general partner at Battery Ventures and a seasoned B2B software investor, joins Kustomer’s Board of Directors. Battery Ventures joins current investors Redpoint Ventures, Canaan Partners, Boldstart Ventures, Social Leverage and Cisco Investments who also participated in the round.

“From early on, leading brands in the B2C and DTC segments were attracted to Kustomer because we provide a next-generation alternative to outdated technologies and a solution to an endless queue of tickets that’s weighing companies down and frustrating their agents and customers,” said Brad Birnbaum, CEO of Kustomer. “Kustomer’s first-of-its-kind data model and one, single timeline view of customer interactions and events have differentiated us from legacy solutions and are the basis for our 500% year-over-year growth.”

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Kustomer’s explosive growth has been driven by its ability to attract large companies with thousands of service agents, rising frustration from existing outdated solutions that fail to deliver on their customer experience promise, the need for business process automation to drive efficiencies, and an overall shift in approach to customer management.

“We’ve been closely following Kustomer’s impressive growth and see a large opportunity for the company to become one of the top players in this market—owing mainly to its powerful platform, experienced team and ability to execute on its vision,” said Battery’s Agrawal. “We’re excited to leverage Battery’s global network and company-scaling expertise to partner with Brad and the rest of the Kustomer team to help the company expand further into the enterprise market.”

NYC-based Kustomer is one of the fastest-growing startups in its space. The company’s growth momentum is demonstrated by the expanding list of disruptive and innovative brands – like Ring, Rent the Runway, Glovo, Glossier, Away, Slice, Sweetgreen and UNTUCKit – using Kustomer to deliver on their people-first promise everyday.

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“Since switching to Kustomer from Desk.com, we’ve seen a 30-second decrease in handle time for voice interactions, a 25% overall improvement in efficiency and productivity from our team members, and a significant improvement in our FCR rate,” commented Mike Vroom, Customer Service Director at the click and brick retailer UNTUCKit. “I knew we were going to be more efficient with Kustomer, but I didn’t know HOW much more efficient. The ease of use has been really flawless, and everything our team members need is finally all in one place.”

“Kustomer has completely transformed our customer support operation here at Glovo.” Remarks Sergi Mendez, Global Head of Live Operations Support. “We are a three-sided marketplace, meaning our 2,000 agents provide support for our Glovers, merchants, and consumers. Through powerful workflows and simple integrations, our agents are able to handle over 1.8 million conversations per month across multiple channels without switching interfaces/platforms. Since switching to Kustomer, we have increased efficiency and are constantly improving live support to our users in over 20 countries across the globe.”

To keep up with growing demand, Kustomer has doubled the size of it’s workforce in 2018 and is planning on more than doubling it again in 2019. Today it is also announcing key senior leadership appointments, bolstering its leadership team capabilities as it takes on giant industry leaders and continues its growth momentum:  Amir Oren as VP of Finance (Formerly of Talkdesk, Zendesk and Dropbox), Nelly Rinot as VP of Marketing (Formerly of NICE, RRD and Radware), Alex Gadd as VP of Customer Experience (Formerly of SugarCRM and Oracle), and the promotion of Vikas Bhambri to SVP, Global Sales and Customer Experience (Formerly of Oracle, LivePerson and 8×8).

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“We are fortunate to have incredible depth and breadth of talent across Kustomer’s executive team,” said Birnbaum. “As we start executing on our strategy, I strongly believe the new appointments will help us tightly integrate all functions of the company and will help pave the way to our continued success in revolutionizing the customer management, service and support space in 2019 and beyond.”

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Customize Analytics Dashboards for Partner Engagement and Local Spend

Evaluating local marketing spend and engagement for a Brand’s partner network shouldn’t be complicated — especially when it’s crucial to Distributed Marketing strategy. Yet many Brand marketing teams struggle to gather disparate data across incompatible systems and complex partner networks.

SproutLoud, a leading Through-Channel Marketing Automation platform, has launched Customized Analytics Dashboards as an integral part of its comprehensive TCMA platform, making it simple for Brands to get relevant data on partner engagement and spend on their distributed marketing efforts. Customized Analytics Dashboards, a new feature of SproutLoud’s analytics solution, give Brands the flexibility they need to quickly determine which partners are participating in Co-Op Advertising campaigns and where they’re spending those dollars in the local markets. This gives Brands the advantage of making data-driven decisions in real time.

“You cannot manage what you don’t know,” said Anjan Upadhya, chief technology officer at SproutLoud. “SproutLoud Analytics, with customizable dashboards, gives Brands the flexibility and freedom they need to benchmark, explore and analyze data, so they can focus their local marketing spend on what works.”

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SproutLoud’s analytics solution simplifies the entire process of gathering data, so Brand marketers don’t need to be data scientists. SproutLoud Analytics features embedded guides within the platform, including videos and data dictionaries, that walk you through the meaning of each piece of data and what you can do with it. This means Brand marketers can quickly and efficiently pinpoint the information they need and share relevant results with regional managers and key decision makers. With Customized Analytics Dashboards, it’s easy to compare spend on multiple campaigns and tactics across your entire partner network or across a specific tier, region or class of partners.

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“At SproutLoud, we understand analytics is not a one-size-fits-all solution,” said SproutLoud Product Manager Sandra Gomez. “Our Customized Analytics Dashboards allow you to explore local marketing data in any way that best fits the strategy and goals of your Brand and the makeup of your partner network.”

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Nintex Announces Nintex Sign Powered by Adobe Sign

New partnership makes e-signatures natively available within the Nintex Process Cloud, the market-leading platform thousands of companies use daily to manage, automate and optimize business processes

Nintex, the global standard for process management and automation announced a strategic partnership with Adobe to bring new native electronic signature capabilities, called Nintex Sign powered by Adobe Sign, to Nintex partners and customers.

Nintex Sign powered by Adobe Sign, the leading e-signature solution used by over half the Fortune 100, meets the growing worldwide demand of Nintex customers and partners for affordably priced, trusted and fully integrated e-signatures within the Nintex Process Platform to securely complete transactions. Thousands of partners, public, private, and government organizations leverage the powerful, easy-to-use Nintex platform daily to quickly build process apps, automate their most sophisticated workflows, and generate all kinds of documents from disclosures, to orders, to closing contracts leveraging responsive Nintex digital forms and templates.

“The new offering produced by this partnership powerfully extends the native capabilities of our Nintex Platform, trusted as the global standard for process and document automation, to now include industry-leading Adobe-backed eSignatures,” said Nintex CEO Eric Johnson. “Nintex Sign, powered by our strategic partnership with Adobe, will bring tremendous value to our thriving Nintex process management and automation community.”

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Ashley Still, vice president and general manager, Adobe Document Cloud, added, “We believe great experiences for customers and employees start where the document does. With Nintex Sign powered by Adobe Sign, we’re excited to bring these two best-in-class solutions together, making it easier for Nintex’s global partner network and customers to transform digital document workflows.”

Aragon Research CEO Jim Lundy, the leading analyst covering the fast-growing, multi-billion dollar Digital Transaction Management and Workflow and Content Automation markets commented, “This strategic partnership brings together two of the leading providers in Documents, eSignatures, Process Management, Workflow and Content Automation.”

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EdgeVerve Systems Launches AssistEdge Discover to Unlock the True Value of Automation

Unique tool that eliminates human bias from automation implementation to be unveiled at OPEX Week: Business Transformation World Summit

EdgeVerve Systems, a subsidiary of Infosys announced the launch of AssistEdge Discover, a unique tool aimed at increasing the success rate of automation implementations at the enterprise level through process discovery. AssistEdge Discover automates processes sans human bias that often times lead to automation implementation failure.

Forrester reports that robotic process automation (RPA) will grow to a $2.9 billion market in 2021, bringing it to the forefront of enterprise digital transformation. However, over half of enterprise automation implementations still fail when business processes are not properly understood and manual knowledge is relied upon for process execution. At an enterprise level, this becomes increasingly challenging as the amount of data and number of steps in each process increase. By eliminating human bias and reducing manual process discovery, AssistEdge Discover can help an enterprise realize the full value of automation and enable collaboration, effective change management and continuous process improvement.

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AssistEdge Discover leverages user key strokes and sophisticated neural network algorithms to create an effective automation blueprint. It provides a clear recommendation based on the understanding of how business processes are executed through four pillars:

  • Automatic Data Capture: Input such as mouse and key strokes from identified users can be monitored and recorded without interfering with the employee’s work.
  • Remote Management of Data Capture: Administrators decide and control what data is being captured from which machines and users, and at which frequency, to ensure that no business and user sensitive data is captured.
  • Visual Data Analysis and Mapping: Data enrichment and analysis is carried out using advanced neural network and AI algorithms. This creates a visual, data-rich process map which not only shows common paths, but also different variations of the same path.
  • Recommendations: Recommendations identify the automation opportunities and collate them into a dashboard, allowing the enterprise to compare different processes and make an informed decision. Automation recommendations are based on real data, thus avoiding manual bias.

AssistEdge Discover simplifies the automation journey for enterprises that are growing at a rapid pace and require speed, agility and insights to drive success. The tool was uniquely built to be platform agnostic and work alongside other RPA tools, enabling an enterprise to better manage processes across multiple systems seamlessly.

Craig Le Clair, Vice President, Principal Analyst Serving Enterprise Architecture Professionals, Forrester, said, “Automation is no longer a back-office activity and now moving to the frontend where data driven insights and process mapping are becoming key to maximize automation success. RPA and AI will join forces to create digital workers for more than 40% of enterprises. Broader process assessment is developing quickly. There is a need to advance analytics to attack process improvement and combine process mining data with traditional RPA desktop analytics to create heat maps to guide bot design and bot behavior.”

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Atul Soneja, Global Head, Edge Products and Infosys Nia, EdgeVerve, said, “Today, with the rise of digital workforce in an enterprise, success is fast becoming outcome driven. The key to automation success is process discovery. The empirical approach to automation through process discovery makes the whole process transparent and amplifies the hidden values of automation impacting ROI. This is where AssistEdge Discover helps realize the true value of automation. It helps enterprises prioritize key processes for automation as well as key technologies to amplify business benefits.”

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