Tootfinder

Source: Sierra, which builds AI customer service agents, nears a $350M raise at a $10B valuation, up from $4.5B in October 2024, and is set to top $100M in ARR (Ina Fried/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/09/03/sierra-ai-agents-funding-350-million

Scoop: Agent startup Sierra closes in on $350 million deal
The company's specialty, AI agents for customer support, is in growing demand.

Nearly 3,000 North Face website customer accounts breached as retail incidents continue https://therecord.media/north-face-customer-accounts-data-breach-notification

Customer Service Representative's Perception of the AI Assistant in an Organization's Call Center
Kai Qin, Kexin Du, Yimeng Chen, Yueyan Liu, Jie Cai, Zhiqiang Nie, Nan Gao, Guohui Wei, Shengzhu Wang, Chun Yu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.00513

Customer Service Representative's Perception of the AI Assistant in an Organization's Call Center
The integration of various AI tools creates a complex socio-technical environment where employee-customer interactions form the core of work practices. This study investigates how customer service representatives (CSRs) at the power grid service customer service call center perceive AI assistance in their interactions with customers. Through a field visit and semi-structured interviews with 13 CSRs, we found that AI can alleviate some traditional burdens during the call (e.g., typing and memori…

»Blogs werden immer mehr zu einer wichtigen Wegstation auf der Customer Journey« titelte der eco im August 2015 ein Interview mit Tim Cole, dem womöglich ersten Blogger des Internets. Anlass war, dass sein Blog cole.de damals 20 Jahre alt wurde.
https://www.eco.d…

Tel Aviv-based Wonderful, which develops customer support AI agents for businesses in non-English speaking countries, raised a $34M seed led by Index Ventures (Yuliya Chernova/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/articles/wonderfu…

Just found out that an old intranet we initially created for a customer back in 2008-9 (on Drupal 4.7 or maybe 5, subsequently upgraded through to Drupal 6) is still running (not on the open internet). Their MS Sharepoint replacement for it has been... less than stunningly successful in its designated role.
I suspect that original Intranet, even inflation adjusted, would've cost the orders of magnitude less in up-front development and per-year maintenance.

Learn to be horrified and offended by customer support that goes nowhere, by inaccessible remedy for problems. Learn to be horrified by the denial of humanity at scale.

AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning
https://www.seuros.com/blog/aws-deleted-my-10-year-account-without-warning/
- The Architecture That Should Have Protected Me -
Small reminder that there is no 100% protection in the…

🤦‍♂️😝

SaaS giant Workiva discloses data breach after Salesforce attack
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/saas-giant-workiva-discloses-data-breach-after-salesforce-attack/?mid=1#cid=3061643

SaaS giant Workiva discloses data breach after Salesforce attack
Workiva, a leading cloud-based SaaS (Software as a Service) provider, notified its customers that attackers who gained access to a third-party customer relationship management (CRM) system stole some of their data.

Scoop: Social Security starts customer wait time audit (Stephen Neukam/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/09/03/social-security-wait-time-audit-senate-democrats-elizabeth-warren-bisignano
http://www.memeorandum.com/250903/p28#a250903p28

Did you know that the tickets for the world's most important awards ceremony run through Flownative's servers? 😎
I conducted another interview, this time with long-time customer @… from Passcreator. David talks a bit about what's going on and it's really exciting to see what he and his team have built over the years based on a flow applicati…

Imagine if a candidate for US President had a workable program to ban sludge, that bureaucratic hell companies and the government put us through on support lines, in endless phone menus, and online to make us give up. They'd win 50 states!
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/

That Dropped Call With Customer Service? It Was on Purpose.
Endless wait times and excessive procedural fuss—it’s all part of a tactic called “sludge.”

Quantifying the Social Costs of Power Outages and Restoration Disparities Across Four U.S. Hurricanes
Xiangpeng Li, Junwei Ma, Bo Li, Ali Mostafavi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02653

Quantifying the Social Costs of Power Outages and Restoration Disparities Across Four U.S. Hurricanes
The multifaceted nature of disaster impact shows that densely populated areas contribute more to aggregate burden, while sparsely populated but heavily affected regions suffer disproportionately at the individual level. This study introduces a framework for quantifying the societal impacts of power outages by translating customer weighted outage exposure into deprivation measures, integrating welfare metrics with three recovery indicators, average outage days per customer, restoration duration,…

Channel Choice and Customer Value
Shirsho Biswas, Hema Yoganarasimhan, Haonan Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00208 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00208

Channel Choice and Customer Value
The rapid growth of digital shopping channels has prompted many traditional retailers to invest in e-commerce websites and mobile apps. While prior literature shows that multichannel customers tend to be more valuable, it overlooks how the reason for adopting a new channel may shape post-adoption behavior. Using transaction-level data from a major Brazilian pet supplies retailer, we examine how adoption of online shopping - by previously offline-only customers - affects post-adoption spend, pro…

A Benchmark Dataset and Evaluation Framework for Vietnamese Large Language Models in Customer Support
Long S. T. Nguyen, Truong P. Hua, Thanh M. Nguyen, Toan Q. Pham, Nam K. Ngo, An X. Nguyen, Nghi D. M. Pham, Nghia H. Nguyen, Tho T. Quan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22542

A Benchmark Dataset and Evaluation Framework for Vietnamese Large Language Models in Customer Support
With the rapid growth of Artificial Intelligence, Large Language Models (LLMs) have become essential for Question Answering (QA) systems, improving efficiency and reducing human workload in customer service. The emergence of Vietnamese LLMs (ViLLMs) highlights lightweight open-source models as a practical choice for their accuracy, efficiency, and privacy benefits. However, domain-specific evaluations remain limited, and the absence of benchmark datasets reflecting real customer interactions ma…

Potential Customer Lifetime Value in Financial Institutions: The Usage Of Open Banking Data to Improve CLV Estimation
Jo\~ao B. G. de Brito, Rodrigo Heldt, Cleo S. Silveira, Matthias Bogaert, Guilherme B. Bucco, Fernando B. Luce, Jo\~ao L. Becker, Filipe J. Zabala, Michel J. Anzanello
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22711

Potential Customer Lifetime Value in Financial Institutions: The Usage Of Open Banking Data to Improve CLV Estimation
Financial institutions increasingly adopt customer-centric strategies to enhance profitability and build long-term relationships. While Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a core metric, its calculations often rely solely on single-entity data, missing insights from customer activities across multiple firms. This study introduces the Potential Customer Lifetime Value (PCLV) framework, leveraging Open Banking (OB) data to estimate customer value comprehensively. We predict retention probability and…

EGC: HaaS Lite WP1 D15 Customer Research - EGC Work Package 1: Deliverable 15: Customer Research, Public Report. - https://www.earth.org.uk/EGC-WP1-D15-Customer-Research.html

EGC: HaaS Lite WP1 D15 Customer Research
EGC Work Package 1: Deliverable 15: Customer Research, Public Report.

Cloudflare reports Q2 revenue up 28% YoY to $512.3M, vs. $501.21M est., and forecasts Q3 revenue of $543.5M to $544.5M, vs. $538.6M est. (Duncan Riley/SiliconANGLE)
https://siliconangle.com/2025/07/31/cloudflare-beats-second-quart…

Cloudflare beats earnings estimates with strong revenue and customer growth - SiliconANGLE
Cloudflare beats earnings estimates with strong revenue and customer growth - SiliconANGLE

Chatbot Deployment Considerations for Application-Agnostic Human-Machine Dialogues
Pablo Rivas, Chelsi Chelsi, Nishit Nishit, Laharika Ravula
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02611 ht…

Chatbot Deployment Considerations for Application-Agnostic Human-Machine Dialogues
Automatic conversation systems based on natural language responses are becoming ubiquitous, in part, due to major advances in computational linguistics and machine learning. The easy access to robust and affordable platforms are causing companies to have an unprecedented rush to adopt chatbot technologies for customer service and support. However, this rush has caused judgment lapses when releasing chatbot technologies into production systems. This paper aims to shed light on basic, elemental, …

‘Big Charging’ is concerned about the ‘Durchleitungsmodell’ [‘pass-through’ model], a requirement in the Autobahn truck charging tender. Free choice of supplier for the customer (logistics fleet) means charging at more favourable conditions, new flex models etc.

Have to say, I'm impressed with Wahoo customer service.
Battery cover to my heart rate monitor broke a couple of years ago; I thought they might be able to send me a replacement cover, but after contacting them they sent me a completely new device.
This week the battery in my 4 year old Bolt 2 cycling computer failed and the device will no longer charge. After contacting them, they are now sending me a new Bolt 3 computer as a goodwill gesture.

After loosing millions of USD in potential revenues for years due to understaffed sales teams, Salesforce now hopes for an #AI miracle.
There, fixed it for you.
https://slashdot.org/…

American biotech company Regeneron Pharmaceuticals announced today that it's buying 23andMe,
the bankrupt consumer-genomics company that sold take-home DNA kits.
Regeneron is to pay $256 million in cash to acquire "substantially all" of 23andMe's assets,
including its massive biobank of around 15 million customer genetic samples and data.
Put simply, the genetic information of millions is now in the hands of a drugmaker seeking to mine it to make n…

Bankrupt 23andMe Just Sold Off All Your DNA Data
The consumer-genomics company 23andMe just sold its biobank of customer genetic data to drugmaker Regeneron for $256 million.

🍐 Indian crypto exchange CoinDCX says $44 million stolen from reserves
#crypto

Indian crypto exchange CoinDCX says $44 million stolen from reserves
The founders of Indian cryptocurrency exchange CoinDCX said no customer funds were affected in a more than $40 million theft from reserves.

This was really interesting. It's about Topaz AI, which was a denoising/upscaling solution I looked at about nine months ago, and rejected because I wasn't really prepared to make the investment at that stage ($300/yr) https://mstdn.social/@Onmyom/114779996030982643…

Cloudflare says attackers gained access to a Salesforce instance it uses for internal customer case management, as part of the Salesloft Drift breach (Sergiu Gatlan/BleepingComputer)
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/secu

> The reason Copeland created this default admin user "ONEDAY" with a predictable, daily password was due to customer demand
[Generate "Mocking SpongeBob" meme with the text: Business Logic]
https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/02/fros…

Frostbyte10 bugs put thousands of refrigerators at major grocery chains at risk
: Major flaws uncovered in Copeland controllers: Patch now

Stable formulations for the Capacitated Facility Location Problem with Customer Preferences
Concepci\'on Dom\'inguez, Juan de Dios Jaime-Alc\'antara
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21944

Stable formulations for the Capacitated Facility Location Problem with Customer Preferences
In the Simple Plant Location Problem with Order (SPLPO), the aim is to open a subset of plants to assign every customer taking into account their preferences. Customers rank the plants in strict order and are assigned to their favorite open plant, and the objective is to minimize the location plus allocation costs. Here, we study a generalization of the SPLPO named the Capacitated Facility Location Problem with Customer Preferences (CFLCP) where a limited number of customers can be allocated to…

Some of these big retailer breaches have tended to surface in the Korean press first, now it's Papa John's.
https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/2025-06-26/na…

Papa John's Korea confirms customer data breech exposing names, contact info, addresses
Pizza franchise Papa John's Korea has confirmed a customer data breach caused by a security vulnerability, prompting an official investigation by the Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC).

Are You Listening to Me? Fine-Tuning Chatbots for Empathetic Dialogue
Paulo Ricardo Knob, Leonardo Scholler, Juliano Rigatti, Soraia Raupp Musse
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02537

Are You Listening to Me? Fine-Tuning Chatbots for Empathetic Dialogue
Conversational agents have made significant progress since ELIZA, expanding their role across various domains, including healthcare, education, and customer service. As these agents become increasingly integrated into daily human interactions, the need for emotional intelligence, particularly empathetic listening, becomes increasingly essential. In this study, we explore how Large Language Models (LLMs) respond when tasked with generating emotionally rich interactions. Starting from a small dat…

Cinven acquires a majority stake in Smart Communications from Accel-KKR; sources: the deal values the customer conversations platform at ~$1.8B including debt (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-01/cinven…

‘Significant’ amount of customer data accessed during cyberattack on Qantas airline https://therecord.media/qantas-airline-data-breach

1/2: Eeek!
https://blog.google/products/chrome/store-reviews/
Just me, or is this a horrifying prospect? The SEO wars and the Amazon homepage have taught us that businesses will do anything - ANYTHING, ethics be damned, to game their online reputations. This …

Chrome is helping you shop smarter and safer with store reviews.
We’re introducing store reviews to Google Chrome in the U.S. to make your online shopping experience safer and more efficient. This feature uses data from Google Shopping and other popular review websites to provide people with helpful insights when shopping on e-commerce sites.Just click the icon to the left of the web address and you can access an AI-generated summary of reviews. The description will cover topics like customer service, product quality, shipping, pricing and returns, helping…

SERP Interference Network and Its Applications in Search Advertising
Purak Jain, Sandeep Appala
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21598 https://

SERP Interference Network and Its Applications in Search Advertising
Search Engine marketing teams in the e-commerce industry manage global search engine traffic to their websites with the aim to optimize long-term profitability by delivering the best possible customer experience on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). In order to do so, they need to run continuous and rapid Search Marketing A/B tests to continuously evolve and improve their products. However, unlike typical e-commerce A/B tests that can randomize based on customer identification, their tests fa…

Court filing: Deel alleges Rippling's "competitive intelligence manager" Brett Alexander Johnson posed as a customer to access Deel's product and business info (George Hammond/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/abd988f6-e524-48d9-8433-27c…

New spying claims emerge in Silicon Valley corporate espionage scandal
HR start-ups Rippling and Deel trade allegations their leaders directed efforts to steal company secrets from one another

The Integration of Agile Methodologies in DevOps Practices within the Information Technology Industry
Ashley Hourigan, Ridewaan Hanslo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21811 https://

The Integration of Agile Methodologies in DevOps Practices within the Information Technology Industry
The demand for rapid software delivery in the Information Technology (IT) industry has significantly intensified, emphasising the need for faster software products and service releases with enhanced features to meet customer expectations. Agile methodologies are replacing traditional approaches such as Waterfall, where flexibility, iterative development and adaptation to change are favoured over rigid planning and execution. DevOps, a subsequent evolution from Agile, emphasises collaborative ef…

Data breach reveals Catwatchful ‘stalkerware’ is spying on thousands of phones
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/02/data-breach-reveals-catwatchful-stalkerware-spying-on-thousands-android-phones/

Exclusive: Data breach reveals Catwatchful 'stalkerware' is spying on thousands of phones
The spyware operation's exposed customer email addresses and passwords were shared with data breach notification service Have I Been Pwned.

A potential customer may have ghosted me but I just keep working on the project as I get spare time between other projects because it's a fun and challenging one and if they ever reply to me again then yay(?) but if not I'll just drop a new product for others if they want it.

Weak Supervision Techniques towards Enhanced ASR Models in Industry-level CRM Systems
Zhongsheng Wang, Sijie Wang, Jia Wang, Yung-I Liang, Yuxi Zhang, Jiamou Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.16843

Weak Supervision Techniques towards Enhanced ASR Models in Industry-level CRM Systems
In the design of customer relationship management (CRM) systems, accurately identifying customer types and offering personalized services are key to enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty. However, this process faces the challenge of discerning customer voices and intentions, and general pre-trained automatic speech recognition (ASR) models make it difficult to effectively address industry-specific speech recognition tasks. To address this issue, we innovatively proposed a solution for fin…

Customer guidance for SharePoint vulnerability CVE-2025-53770 | MSRC Blog | Microsoft Security Response Center
#sharepoint #cybersecurity #vulnerability
🔗

Had a good call with a TelemetryDeck customer about our UI, then a bad call from the vet— the parasites are still there.
I am so tired.

Chrome will debut AI-generated store reviews to US shoppers, where clicking an icon just to the left of the URL will show a popup with store reputation info (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/28/google-chrome-adds-ai-…

Google Chrome adds AI-powered store summaries to help US shoppers | TechCrunch
The feature will display a pop-up that informs consumers about the store's reputation for things like product quality, shopping, pricing, customer service, and returns.

Have you had an "AI error in your favor" yet?
I just got done slogging through Amazon customer support chat, where while talking to the bot it promised an item was returnable within 90 days, even though it actually was only eligible for the normal 30 days policy. When I finally got through to a human, they were able to let me know why the return actually wasn't eligible, but when I quoted them what the bot had promised, they made an exception and let me do the return. I didn't even really try to push the bot to make any promises, though that should be easy.
#AI

Cloudflare, Zscaler among companies impacted by Salesloft Drift incident https://therecord.media/salesloft-drift-breach-cloudflare-zscaler-palo-alto-networks

angry sales guy: hey, what gives. I was reading the minutes yesterday and you recorded `and was written for sales (if they can read..?)`.. that's not professional.
me: well, I write all the customer facing stuff.
asg: ... so?
me: and I write all of the training material for all teams downstream of engineering
asg: .. and?
me: so what I write is arguably the most important, most exciting content that engineering produces.
asg: Look, I don't see-

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/australias-qantas-confirms-cyber-incident-one-its-contact-centres-2025-07-01/
Australia's Qantas says 6 million customer accounts accessed in cyber hack

This person deserves a short story award.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1C7I6NOWE02FM?ASIN=B0CQ8S545V

Tesla says a Model Y drove itself from Gigafactory Texas to a buyer's home 30 minutes away, marking its first fully autonomous vehicle delivery (Andrew J. Hawkins/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/694801/tesla-autonomous-delivery…

Tesla says it delivered its first car autonomously from factory to customer
Tesla delivered its first vehicle autonomously from factory to customer. But

The Custom #Tenant Code Nightmare (And How to Wake Up) 🏗️
🔥 Managing dozens of customer branches wastes 40% of development time on merges instead of features
🎨 Custom Views: Use fallback patterns
or customer-specific directories for branding without logic changes
⚙️ Custom Services: Swap implementations via dependency injection - same interface, different providers
…

Human resources software giant Workday has disclosed a data breach following a social engineering attack that compromised a third-party customer relationship management (CRM) platform.
https://www.computing.co.uk/news/2025/secu

Workday confirms data breach amid wave of Salesforce-linked cyberattacks
Human resources software giant Workday has disclosed a data breach following a social engineering attack that compromised a third-party customer relationship management (CRM) platform.

"So, I think in like five years, people are not going to be doing entry-level support tasks. They'll be doing other stuff, because why would you do that when the AI can just do it very well? "
So if I understand correctly, the AI will handle the easy stuff, and when there's a real problem they'll escalate to a human who learned how to work with customers (esp upset customers) how?

SF founder touts AI customer support
Decagon CEO says service will replace humans

"So, I think in like five years, people are not going to be doing entry-level support tasks. They'll be doing other stuff, because why would you do that when the AI can just do it very well? "
So if I understand correctly, the AI will handle the easy stuff, and when there's a real problem they'll escalate to a human who learned how to work with customers (esp upset customers) how?

SF founder touts AI customer support
Decagon CEO says service will replace humans

If there's one thing I've learned about myself over the last 3-4 years is that I am not cut out for any form of customer support.
My urge to yell "Then just don't do it that way!" is far too strong.

"Amazon Q: Now with Helpful AI-Powered Self-Destruct Capabilities"
by Corey Quinn
Big oof. This is a great breakdown of what happened and why it's concerning — and especially so because we're not hearing the details from Amazon.
https://www.la…

Trump says JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America rejected him as a customer
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/05/trump-jpmorgan-chase-bank-of-america-rejected-bank-customer.html

Ich habe via Amazon bei einem deutschen Händler 6 Flaschen Sirup bestellt.
Händler schickte das falsche Produkt.
Zurückgeschickt in der selben Verpackung.
Nun schreibt mir GLS einen Brief, dass sie es nicht zustellen konnten, weil eine Flasche kaputtgegangen ist. Und wollen eine Verfügung.
WTH? Wie soll ich eine Verfügung erteilen? Bedeutet das in D was anderes als in CH?

Another bullet dodged accidentally…
In this case, the real reason I didn’t recommend 1P for my employer was that I had experienced their enshittification process as an individual user and wasn’t sure how far they might go with a corporate customer.
(I also saw no need for an “enterprise” solution for us at that point and that turned out right.)

now i really want to try Cheddar Bay biscuits https://mas.to/@carnage4life/114830335171951140

“Carefully managing electric vehicle demand could cut all U.S. electric bills by 10% annually, regardless of whether a customer owns an EV, according to new research from Brattle and ev. energy.”
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/managed-e

Managed EV charging could generate $30B in annual savings by 2035: report
Carefully managing electric vehicle demand could cut all U.S. electric bills by 10% annually, regardless of whether a customer owns an EV, according to new research from ev.energy and The Brattle Group.

from my link log —
EBCDIC is incompatible with GDPR.
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/10/ebcdic-is-incompatible-with-gdpr/
saved 2024-10-28

EBCDIC is incompatible with GDPR
Welcome to acronym city! The Court of Appeal of Brussels has made an interesting ruling. A customer complained that their bank was spelling the customer's name incorrectly. The bank didn't have support for diacritical marks. Things like á, è, ô, ü, ç etc. Those accents are common in many languages. So it was a little surprising that the bank didn't support them. The bank refused to spell their c…

EMMM, Explain Me My Model! Explainable Machine Generated Text Detection in Dialogues
Angela Yifei Yuan, Haoyi Li, Soyeon Caren Han, Christopher Leckie
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18715

EMMM, Explain Me My Model! Explainable Machine Generated Text Detection in Dialogues
The rapid adoption of large language models (LLMs) in customer service introduces new risks, as malicious actors can exploit them to conduct large-scale user impersonation through machine-generated text (MGT). Current MGT detection methods often struggle in online conversational settings, reducing the reliability and interpretability essential for trustworthy AI deployment. In customer service scenarios where operators are typically non-expert users, explanation become crucial for trustworthy M…

KiseKloset: Comprehensive System For Outfit Retrieval, Recommendation, And Try-On
Thanh-Tung Phan-Nguyen, Khoi-Nguyen Nguyen-Ngoc, Tam V. Nguyen, Minh-Triet Tran, Trung-Nghia Le
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.23471

KiseKloset: Comprehensive System For Outfit Retrieval, Recommendation, And Try-On
The global fashion e-commerce industry has become integral to people's daily lives, leveraging technological advancements to offer personalized shopping experiences, primarily through recommendation systems that enhance customer engagement through personalized suggestions. To improve customers' experience in online shopping, we propose a novel comprehensive KiseKloset system for outfit retrieval, recommendation, and try-on. We explore two approaches for outfit retrieval: similar item retrieval …

“If someone is stealing our company data or customer data, that’s not a big deal for us. We have a functioning backup copy of all that data, and therefore we can replace stolen data very fast.” #justthinkin

Israeli customer service automation company Nice acquires Cognigy, which develops a conversational and agentic AI platform, for $955M, set to close in Q4 2025 (Shiri Habib-Valdhorn/Globes)
https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-nice-acquires-ai-co-cognigy-…

Nice acquires AI co Cognigy for $955m
The acquisition combines Nice's purpose built customer service AI platform with Cognigy's conversational and agentic platform, which will enable organizations to accelerate AI adoption in customer experience.

Wenn ich mir einen potentiellen Dienstleister genauer angucke, schaue ich auf jeden Fall auf die "über uns"-Seite. Denn ich möchte wissen, wie sich die Firma selbst sieht, wie sie so ticken.
Für Flownative habe ich mal etwas ausprobiert. Mit einigen unserer Kunden habe ich Interviews geführt. Auf dieser Basis habe ich dann Artikel geschrieben. Was haltet ihr von dem Format? Kann man sich so lange Texte heute noch leisten?

Examining the sentiment and emotional differences in product and service reviews: The moderating role of culture
Vinh Truong (RMIT University)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21057 h…

Examining the sentiment and emotional differences in product and service reviews: The moderating role of culture
This study explores how emotions and sentiments differ in customer reviews of products and services on e-commerce platforms. Unlike earlier research that treats all reviews uniformly, this study distinguishes between reviews of products, typically fulfilling basic, functional needs, and services, which often cater to experiential and emotional desires. The findings reveal clear differences in emotional expression and sentiment between the two. Product reviews frequently focus on practicality, s…

Your Spending Needs Attention: Modeling Financial Habits with Transformers
D. T. Braithwaite, Misael Cavalcanti, R. Austin McEver, Hiroto Udagawa, Daniel Silva, Rohan Ramanath, Felipe Meneses, Arissa Yoshida, Evan Wingert, Matheus Ramos, Brian Zanfelice, Aman Gupta
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.23267 …

Your Spending Needs Attention: Modeling Financial Habits with Transformers
Predictive models play a crucial role in the financial industry, enabling risk prediction, fraud detection, and personalized recommendations, where slight changes in core model performance can result in billions of dollars in revenue or losses. While financial institutions have access to enormous amounts of user data (e.g., bank transactions, in-app events, and customer support logs), leveraging this data effectively remains challenging due to its complexity and scale. Thus, in many financial i…

Sources: Salesforce and ServiceNow are in talks to invest ~$750M each in Genesys, which uses AI to automate customer service functions, valuing Genesys at ~$15B (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-31/salesforc…

LOL this is me at gigs when a drunk person comes up and asks if we can play a particular song where there has been weeks of back-and-forth with the client/planner locking down the set list.
I say we definitely do, fucking awesome song man, enthusiastically and with absolute certainty, then go back to playing and never think about it again

womp womp
https://www.reuters.com/business/google-scale-ais-largest-customer-plans-split-after-meta-deal-sources-say-2025-06-13/

The tech lead next to me has been on the phone the past 3 (work) days fielding calls from the service team installing a prototype system.
Every single problem they've encountered so far is one I - a year ago - suggested a quality-of-life/design-for-serviceability/ux improvement to mitigate, minimize or deal with should it occur.
Our product managers know our customer's industry inside and out but not one has commercial software experience. I have 30 yrs of it.
T…

Spatial Optimization of Autonomous Vehicle Assignment Based on Distance-Driven Demand and Customer Patience
Niloufar Mirzavand Boroujeni, Nasim Mirzavand Boroujeni, Nima Moradi, Saeed Jamalzadeh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12671

Spatial Optimization of Autonomous Vehicle Assignment Based on Distance-Driven Demand and Customer Patience
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) can improve efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance road safety. They optimize traffic flow, minimize congestion, and support sustainability through shared mobility and reduced fuel consumption. A key challenge in AV deployment is allocating vehicles to parking lots across regions to meet fluctuating demand. Proper allocation reduces delays, lowers costs, and boosts user satisfaction by ensuring timely vehicle availability. This paper explores the impact of customer wait…

Figma's stock closes up 250% at $115.50, after Figma sold shares at $33 in its IPO, hitting a ~$68B valuation; Adobe's $20B Figma acquisition fell apart in 2023 (Jordan Novet/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/31/figma-fig-starts-trading-on-nyse-after-…

Figma more than triples in NYSE debut after selling shares at $33
Fast-growing Figma's internet software has over 13 million users, and the customer list includes Google, Microsoft and Netflix.

A security researcher said
flaws in a carmaker’s online dealership portal
exposed the private information
and vehicle data of its customers,
and could have allowed hackers to remotely break into any of its customers’ vehicles.
Eaton Zveare, who works as a security researcher at software delivery company Harness,
told TechCrunch the flaw he discovered
allowed the creation of an admin account
that granted “unfettered access” to the unnamed carma…

Security flaws in a carmaker's web portal let one hacker remotely unlock cars from anywhere | TechCrunch
Security researcher Eaton Zveare told TechCrunch that the flaws he discovered in the carmaker's centralized dealer portal exposed vast access to customer and vehicle data. With this access, Zveare said he could remotely take over a customer's account and unlock their cars, and more.

Figma opens at $85 on the NYSE, after selling shares at $33 in its IPO, hitting a ~$50B valuation, more than a year after Adobe's $20B failed acquisition (Jordan Novet/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/31/figma-fig-starts-trading-on-nyse-after-ipo.html

Figma more than triples in NYSE debut after selling shares at $33
Fast-growing Figma's internet software has over 13 million users, and the customer list includes Google, Microsoft and Netflix.

SLM4Offer: Personalized Marketing Offer Generation Using Contrastive Learning Based Fine-Tuning
Vedasamhitha Challapalli, Konduru Venkat Sai, Piyush Pratap Singh, Rupesh Prasad, Arvind Maurya, Atul Singh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15471

SLM4Offer: Personalized Marketing Offer Generation Using Contrastive Learning Based Fine-Tuning
Personalized marketing has emerged as a pivotal strategy for enhancing customer engagement and driving business growth. Academic and industry efforts have predominantly focused on recommendation systems and personalized advertisements. Nonetheless, this facet of personalization holds significant potential for increasing conversion rates and improving customer satisfaction. Prior studies suggest that well-executed personalization strategies can boost revenue by up to 40 percent, underscoring the…

Evaluating an Immersive Analytics Application at an Enterprise Business Intelligence Customer Conference
Matthew Brehmer, Ginger Gloystein, Bailiang Zhou, Abby Gray, Sruthi Pillai, Ben Medina, Vidya Setlur
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15152

Evaluating an Immersive Analytics Application at an Enterprise Business Intelligence Customer Conference
We reflect on an evaluation of an immersive analytics application (Tableau for visionOS) conducted at a large enterprise business intelligence (BI) conference. Conducting a study in such a context offered an opportunistic setting to gather diverse feedback. However, this setting also highlighted the challenge of evaluating usability while also assessing potential utility, as feedback straddled between the novelty of the experience and the practicality of the application in participants' analyti…

Scale AI emphasizes that it remains an independent company and says Meta will not have access to Scale's internal systems or customers' confidential information (Scale AI)
https://scale.com/blog/customer-trust-scale-meta-deal

Scale Remains Independent After Meta Investment | Scale
Customer trust and data security remain Scale’s top priorities.

French payments group Worldline's stock drops 20% after European journalism network EIC reports alleging that the company covered up customer fraud (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

ReviewGraph: A Knowledge Graph Embedding Based Framework for Review Rating Prediction with Sentiment Features
A. J. W. de Vink, Natalia Amat-Lefort, Lifeng Han
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13953

ReviewGraph: A Knowledge Graph Embedding Based Framework for Review Rating Prediction with Sentiment Features
In the hospitality industry, understanding the factors that drive customer review ratings is critical for improving guest satisfaction and business performance. This work proposes ReviewGraph for Review Rating Prediction (RRP), a novel framework that transforms textual customer reviews into knowledge graphs by extracting (subject, predicate, object) triples and associating sentiment scores. Using graph embeddings (Node2Vec) and sentiment features, the framework predicts review rating scores thr…

Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Electric Power Industry Customer Support
Hei Yu Chan, Kuok Tou Ho, Chenglong Ma, Yujing Si, Hok Lai Lin, Sa Lei Lam
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05664

Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Electric Power Industry Customer Support
Many AI customer service systems use standard NLP pipelines or finetuned language models, which often fall short on ambiguous, multi-intent, or detail-specific queries. This case study evaluates recent techniques: query rewriting, RAG Fusion, keyword augmentation, intent recognition, and context reranking, for building a robust customer support system in the electric power domain. We compare vector-store and graph-based RAG frameworks, ultimately selecting the graph-based RAG for its superior p…

Vocalize: Lead Acquisition and User Engagement through Gamified Voice Competitions
Edvin Teskeredzic, Muamer Paric, Adna Sestic, Petra Fribert, Anamarija Lukac, Hadzem Hadzic, Kemal Altwlkany, Emanuel Lacic
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.20730

Vocalize: Lead Acquisition and User Engagement through Gamified Voice Competitions
This paper explores the prospect of creating engaging user experiences and collecting leads through an interactive and gamified platform. We introduce Vocalize, an end-to-end system for increasing user engagement and lead acquisition through gamified voice competitions. Using audio processing techniques and LLMs, we create engaging and interactive experiences that have the potential to reach a wide audience, foster brand recognition, and increase customer loyalty. We describe the system from a …

Decagon, which offers AI-powered customer service agents for enterprises, raised a $131M Series C co-led by Accel and a16z at a $1.5B valuation (Anna Tong/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/technology/customer-service-ai-startup-…

Check out today's Metacurity for the critical infosec developments you should know, including
--UK's NCA arrested four people for M&S, Co-Op cyberattacks
--Russian hoops player Kasatkin busted in France in connection with ransomware,
--McDonald's employee chatbot was riddled with absurd flaws,
--Hackers stole $40m from GMX protocol,
--Customer data exposed in Bitcoin Depot breach,
--Hackers run scam messages in old Mt. Gox wallets,
--Ni…

UK's NCA arrested four people for M&S, Co-Op cyberattacks
Russian hoops player Kasatkin busted in France in connection with ransomware, McDonald's employee chatbot was riddled with absurd flaws, Hackers stole $40m from GMX protocol, Customer data exposed in Bitcoin Depot breach, Hackers run scam messages in old Mt. Gox wallets, much more

Chrome will debut AI-generated store reviews to US shoppers, where clicking an icon just to the left of the URL will show a popup with store reputation info (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/28/google-chrome-adds-ai-…

Google Chrome adds AI-powered store summaries to help US shoppers | TechCrunch
The feature will display a pop-up that informs consumers about the store's reputation for things like product quality, shopping, pricing, customer service, and returns.

Source: Pylon, which uses AI to automate B2B customer service, raised $31M led by a16z and Bain Capital at a valuation in the hundreds of millions of dollars (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/andreessen-…

Why Andreessen and Bain Backed a Self-Described ‘Zendesk Killer’
Automating customer service has been among the most popular applications of artificial intelligence models, and investors have pumped about $1 billion into six key startups developing them. Now, a seventh is throwing its hat into the ring.San Francisco-based startup Pylon has raised $31 million ...

Sources: mass production of Microsoft's next AI chip is delayed to 2026 and is expected to underperform Nvidia's Blackwell chip, released in late 2024 (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/microsofts-ai-chip-effort-falls-b…

Microsoft’s AI Chip Effort Falls Behind
Microsoft has spent years designing its own artificial intelligence chips, in part to reduce its dependence on Nvidia. It isn’t going so well. The software giant, which Nvidia employees say was its largest customer by revenue last year, is taking much longer than expected to design its ...

Marc Benioff says "AI is doing 30% to 50% of the work at Salesforce now", including software engineering and customer service (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-26/salesforce-ceo-s…

Berlin-based Buena, which is building AI-powered software to automate property management tasks, raised $58M, including a Series A led by GV (Cate Lawrence/Tech.eu)
https://tech.eu/2025/07/23/gv-and-20vc

GV and 20VC back Buena’s vision to reinvent property management through AI-powered rollups
Berlin proptech Buena has raised a total of $58 million in funding, including a Series A funding round led by GV, with participation from 20VC, Stride, and Capnamic.  Property management is incredibly fragmented, with over 30,000 firms in Germany employing an average of just five people each… Meanwhile, the industry is notorious for talent shortage and record-low customer NPS scores, with 96.3 per cent of German property managers.  Buena is changing the industry in two ways: first, by bui…

Berlin-based Synthflow, a no-code service letting enterprises build and deploy customized voice AI customer service agents, raised a $20M Series A led by Accel (Rebecca Szkutak/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/24/how-

How Synthflow AI is cutting through the noise in a loud AI voice category | TechCrunch
Synthflow AI was founded in 2023 and has amassed more than 1,000 customers and handled more than 45 million calls.

Thoma Bravo buys customer service automation software provider Verint for $1.23B in cash, days after its $12.3B purchase of HR software provider Dayforce (Ryan Gould/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-25/tho…

Sources: Google, Scale AI's largest customer, plans to cut ties with the company after the Meta deal; Microsoft, OpenAI, and xAI also plan to step back (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/google-scal…

Intel says it may exit cutting-edge manufacturing if it can't secure customers for its 14A process, a major shift for the long-time steward of Moore's Law (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific

Elon Musk says Tesla's robotaxi service will "tentatively" begin on June 22 in Austin, with first autonomous deliveries of a car to a customer's home on June 28 (Ari Levy/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/10/elon-musk-

Elon Musk says Tesla robotaxi rides in Austin 'tentatively' set to begin June 22
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in a post on X on Tuesday that the first self-driving Tesla will reach a customer's house on June 28.

A hacker claims to have compromised Amazon's Q coding assistant for VS Code via a GitHub pull request; Amazon says "no customer resources were impacted" (Joseph Cox/404 Media)
https://www.404media.co/hacker-plants-computer-wiping-comma…

Hacker Plants Computer 'Wiping' Commands in Amazon's AI Coding Agent
The wiping commands probably wouldn't have worked, but a hacker who says they wanted to expose Amazon’s AI “security theater” was able to add code to Amazon’s popular ‘Q’ AI assistant for VS Code, which Amazon then pushed out to users.

Sources: Visa shut down its open-banking business in the US amid regulatory uncertainty; the unit provided tools to help fintechs access customer-account data (Paige Smith/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-…

Seoul-based chip designer FuriosaAI signs a deal with LG to use its AI chip RNGD, its first major contract, after rejecting Meta's $800M buyout offer in March (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Boston-based Maven, which builds autonomous AI agents for enterprises' customer support, raised a $50M Series B led by Dell, taking its total funding to $78M (Chris Metinko/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/pro/enterprise-softw…

Exclusive: Maven AGI raises $50M Series B
The Series B was led by Dell Technologies Capital.

A federal appeals court rejects T-Mobile's bid to overturn a $92M fine for illegally sharing customer location data without consent, per a 2024 FCC ruling (Jon Brodkin/Ars Technica)
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20

T-Mobile claimed selling location data without consent is legal—judges disagree
T-Mobile can’t overturn $92 million fine; AT&T and Verizon verdicts still to come.