As Q4 nears its end, companies are reflecting on their achievements and preparing strategies for the coming year. This reflection is critical, as Forrester’s CX Index 2024 shows: CX Index scores have dipped across the board. In this context, I urge you to remind everyone in your organization: “CX isn’t a project.” Projects end, but placing customers at the center of your business’ strategy, operations, and leadership requires continuous commitment. This sustained commitment is exactly what Forrester’s Customer Obsession Awards recognizes. Nedbank Won Forrester’s Customer-Obsessed Enterprise Award EMEA 2024 At Forrester’s CX Summit EMEA, Anton de Wet, Nedbank’s chief customer officer, and Derek Tedder, executive CX strategy & culture, shared details on the bank’s sustained efforts over the years. BNP Paribas And Bank Millennium Were Award Finalists Those two firms stood out among the submissions for their programmatic CX efforts. We recognized BNP Paribas for its comprehensive work in managing and improving customer journeys at scale. The bank’s efforts to harmonize CX efforts across multiple countries, while catering to diverse customer needs, demonstrate the power of a well-coordinated, scalable CX strategy. We recognized Bank Millennium for its structured and customer-centered approach to elevating the quality of its CX. Its strategy, grounded in understanding and addressing customer needs, highlights the value of data-driven decisions and personalized improvements that resonate deeply with their customers. Magdalena Suchanek, CX leader at Bank Millennium, said: “The scope checked in the application for the Award is comprehensive and multidimensional. It covers practical aspects of CX management, but also those related to leadership, strategy, culture, and results. The preparation of the application itself, and then conversations with analysts on this topic, are a good opportunity to review the organization’s efforts in being customer obsessed.” Congratulations again to Nedbank, BNP Paribas, and Bank Millennium! As you reflect and plan… Consider these sources: As always: Don’t hesitate to be in touch. And keep an eye out for our call for submissions for the Customer Obsession Awards 2025. source

No matter how many years of experience you have in your current role or wider industry, it’s never a bad idea to stay on top of emerging trends and any new skills that go along with them. For discovering additional capabilities or enhancing your current proficiencies, online courses are a convenient option. Even better? A “class pass” to unlimited courses, such as this StackSkills lifetime deal, that lets you learn on your terms. Thanks to a limited-time Cyber Week price drop, enrolling in StackSkills as a lifetime student will cost you only $19.97, which is a heck of a lot less than many single-course offerings out there. With over 1,000 programs to choose from (and growing), you can focus on expanding skills in a subject matter you’re already familiar with or launch into something new that will help you keep your resume updated. Current availability includes professional development classes on topics such as growth hacking, game design, blockchain, AI, digital marketing, cybersecurity, copywriting, big data, running a web development business, and candlestick trading (to name a few). Looking for something for your off-the-clock hours? Try photography, Portuguese lessons, memory training, mindfulness meditation, or the intriguing 27 Life-Changing Lessons from the Smartest People in History. All of these courses and more — new content is added monthly — are available with just a few clicks once you’re a StackSkills member. Individual classes and bundles are self-paced, so you can hop in and hop out as needed or start over any lessons you want to review again. StackSkills (rated 4.6 stars on Trustpilot) works with hundreds of top-rated instructors to provide hands-on training in addition to video and e-book lessons for beginners, advanced learners, and everyone in between. Secure a lifetime membership to StackSkills today for $19.97 (reg. $600) and access online courses whenever suits your schedule. Cyber Week sale ends at 11:59 pm on December 15. Prices and availability are subject to change. source

Keeping gen AI in check Despite internal excitement around the platform, Muthukrishnan says AI governance remained top-of-mind. The company adapted its Ally Technology Operating Model (ATOM) for gen AI. The model has five core pillars that guide the introduction of all new technology and provide a roadmap for assessments, evaluations, and approvals: Discover, Ideate, Elaborate, Execute, and Measure. The company also established an AI Working Group to work in conjunction with its existing Governance Group. Together, they formed an internal team of professionals in financial service fields including regulatory compliance, risk management, and audit, among others. The team reviews and advises on gen AI use cases. To help guide the team on implementation of both classic AI and gen AI, the AI Working Group also developed the Ally AI Playbook to empower Ally’s business lines to explore AI use cases, plan for pilot programs, and move them into production in a responsible, considered way. Muthukrishnan says the playbook creates a common language of understanding across the company. source

By Christopher Cole ( December 4, 2024, 5:42 PM EST) — Lawyers who gathered for the telecom bar’s marquee yearly dinner Tuesday were treated to the traditional night of sardonic wit as the outgoing head of the Federal Communications Commission took aim at the new power structure looming in Washington, D.C…. Law360 is on it, so you are, too. A Law360 subscription puts you at the center of fast-moving legal issues, trends and developments so you can act with speed and confidence. Over 200 articles are published daily across more than 60 topics, industries, practice areas and jurisdictions. A Law360 subscription includes features such as Daily newsletters Expert analysis Mobile app Advanced search Judge information Real-time alerts 450K+ searchable archived articles And more! Experience Law360 today with a free 7-day trial. source

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Meta’s VP of generative AI, Ahmad Al-Dahle took to rival social network X today to announce the release of Llama 3.3, the latest open-source multilingual large language model (LLM) from the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Quest VR. As he wrote: “Llama 3.3 improves core performance at a significantly lower cost, making it even more accessible to the entire open-source community.” With 70 billion parameters — or settings governing the model’s behavior — Llama 3.3 delivers results on par with Meta’s 405B parameter model from the Llama 3.1 from the summer, but at a fraction of the cost and computational overhead — e.g., the GPU capacity needed to run the model in an inference. It’s designed to offer top-tier performance and accessibility yet in a smaller package than prior foundation models. Meta’s Llama 3.3 is offered under the Llama 3.3 Community License Agreement, which grants a non-exclusive, royalty-free license for use, reproduction, distribution, and modification of the model and its outputs. Developers integrating Llama 3.3 into products or services must include appropriate attribution, such as “Built with Llama,” and adhere to an Acceptable Use Policy that prohibits activities like generating harmful content, violating laws, or enabling cyberattacks. While the license is generally free, organizations with over 700 million monthly active users must obtain a commercial license directly from Meta. A statement from the AI at Meta team underscores this vision: “Llama 3.3 delivers leading performance and quality across text-based use cases at a fraction of the inference cost.” How much savings are we talkin’ about, really? Some back-of-the-envelope math: Llama 3.1-405B requires between 243 GB and 1944 GB of GPU memory, according to the Substratus blog (for the open source cross cloud substrate). Meanwhile, the older Llama 2-70B requires between 42-168 GB of GPU memory, according to the same blog, though same have claimed as low as 4 GB, or as Exo Labs has shown, a few Mac computers with M4 chips and no discrete GPUs. Therefore, if the GPU savings for lower-parameter models holds up in this case, those looking to deploy Meta’s most powerful open source Llama models can expect to save up to nearly 1940 GB worth of GPU memory, or potentially, 24 times reduced GPU load for a standard 80 GB Nvidia H100 GPU. At an estimated $25,000 per H100 GPU, that’s up to $600,000 in up-front GPU cost savings, potentially — not to mention the continuous power costs. A highly performant model in a small form factor According to Meta AI on X, the Llama 3.3 model handedly outperforms the identically sized Llama 3.1-70B as well as Amazon’s new Nova Pro model in several benchmarks such as multilingual dialogue, reasoning, and other advanced natural language processing (NLP) tasks (Nova outperforms it in HumanEval coding tasks). Llama 3.3 has been pretrained on 15 trillion tokens from “publicly available” data and fine-tuned on over 25 million synthetically generated examples, according to the information Meta provided in the “model card” posted on its website. Leveraging 39.3 million GPU hours on H100-80GB hardware, the model’s development underscores Meta’s commitment to energy efficiency and sustainability. Llama 3.3 leads in multilingual reasoning tasks with a 91.1% accuracy rate on MGSM, demonstrating its effectiveness in supporting languages such as German, French, Italian, Hindi, Portuguese, Spanish, and Thai, in addition to English. Cost-effective and environmentally conscious Llama 3.3 is specifically optimized for cost-effective inference, with token generation costs as low as $0.01 per million tokens. This makes the model highly competitive against industry counterparts like GPT-4 and Claude 3.5, with greater affordability for developers seeking to deploy sophisticated AI solutions. Meta has also emphasized the environmental responsibility of this release. Despite its intensive training process, the company leveraged renewable energy to offset greenhouse gas emissions, resulting in net-zero emissions for the training phase. Location-based emissions totaled 11,390 tons of CO2-equivalent, but Meta’s renewable energy initiatives ensured sustainability. Advanced features and deployment options The model introduces several enhancements, including a longer context window of 128k tokens (comparable to GPT-4o, about 400 pages of book text), making it suitable for long-form content generation and other advanced use cases. Its architecture incorporates Grouped Query Attention (GQA), improving scalability and performance during inference. Designed to align with user preferences for safety and helpfulness, Llama 3.3 uses reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) and supervised fine-tuning (SFT). This alignment ensures robust refusals to inappropriate prompts and an assistant-like behavior optimized for real-world applications. Llama 3.3 is already available for download through Meta, Hugging Face, GitHub, and other platforms, with integration options for researchers and developers. Meta is also offering resources like Llama Guard 3 and Prompt Guard to help users deploy the model safely and responsibly. source

Even with access to new, more advanced self-service tools (hello, generative AI), business buying remains a long and complex process. Tight budgets, complex buying committees, and drawn-out purchase cycles are still very much the norm. Buyers are frustrated — and as our latest global buyer research shows, companies are falling short in helping them. Forrester surveyed more than 16,000 global business buyers to better understand how they experience the purchase journey. The results, highlighted in our new report, The State Of Business Buying, 2024 (client access only), show that: Buyers are increasingly dissatisfied. Eighty-seven percent of buyers express dissatisfaction with the provider they choose at the end of a “successful” purchasing process. Price is the reason cited most often — but there are others that are perhaps more instructive. Buyers are not satisfied with the technology, domain, and industry expertise that providers demonstrate, nor their ease and flexibility during the process. The disconnect is worse with Gen Z and Millennial buyers, who express dissatisfaction 91% of the time. Internal processes add time and complexity. Nearly all (91%) of purchases stall at some point in the process, our survey data shows. While budget and price are the leading reasons, “my organization’s purchasing process” was the third-most selected response. Buyers contend with challenges such as managing competing organizational priorities, overlapping technologies and contracts, and financial negotiation. Adding to internal complexity is the growing size of buying groups: On average, 13 people within the organization are involved in the buying decision, and most purchases in our survey involved two or more departments. Buyers crave autonomy. Buyers want to be able to find quick answers to their questions — and they want to be able to interact with experts for deeper conversations once they feel ready. Buyers prefer a near-even split between personal and self-guided interactions during the buying process, which has held consistent over the past few years. GenAI — a new response option this year — immediately rose to the top of self-guided interactions, followed closely by internet searches and vendor websites. Yet it’s not only the early stages of the buying process that buyers lean on self-service for — our research shows that the purchase transaction itself is also moving in that direction. “One size fits all” approaches don’t work. Industry, technology, and domain expertise are among the top technical reasons that buyers cited for selecting a provider. Buyers want providers to understand their specific needs and context and to connect their offering’s capabilities accordingly. They also prize collaboration and partnership, citing drivers such as “ease of doing business” and the vendor’s “investment to co-create or co-innovate with us.” Providers can differentiate themselves by demonstrating a deep understanding of buyer needs and working processes. Our new report, The State Of Business Buying, 2024 (client-only access), explores these and other findings in greater depth and offers new interactive capabilities for clients to get more detail about their specific target audiences. The report also includes actionable steps for companies to take to provide the seamless interactions and assistance with decision-making that buyers crave. The report is part of our Buyer Insights series, which will publish between now and the end of January. Other reports in the series focus on buyer motivations and preferences by industry, region, company size, persona, and other variables. These reports are also interactive and allow providers to drill down to more specific details about their target audiences to make data-informed decisions about campaigns, programs, content assets, and messaging. Contact your customer success manager to schedule an inquiry or submit a request here. source

By Madeline Buday, Milly Dick and Anusha Sunkara ( December 4, 2024, 5:41 PM EST) — On Oct. 24, the U.S. Department of Justice again intervened in a private action in an effort to guide the developing law shaping the legality of algorithmic pricing by filing an amicus curiae brief in the first algorithmic price-fixing case to reach an appeals court…. Law360 is on it, so you are, too. A Law360 subscription puts you at the center of fast-moving legal issues, trends and developments so you can act with speed and confidence. Over 200 articles are published daily across more than 60 topics, industries, practice areas and jurisdictions. A Law360 subscription includes features such as Daily newsletters Expert analysis Mobile app Advanced search Judge information Real-time alerts 450K+ searchable archived articles And more! Experience Law360 today with a free 7-day trial. source

Introducing a new product or service to the market requires meticulous preparation. A go to market strategy template helps streamline the planning process and reduce risk while helping you develop a clear plan of action. After launching dozens of services, products, and businesses over the years, these are my top recommendations for anyone who needs help getting started. monday.com: A versatile template for any go to market strategy monday.com is one of the most flexible project management tools I’ve used. It works for personal use, small teams, and even big brands working on cross-departmental initiatives or managing an entire business. The free plan includes two seats, unlimited documents, and over 200+ other templates. It’s not the best free plan out there, but it works to try it out. Alternatively, try any premium plan for free with a 14-day trial to see if it’s right for your team. More on monday.com: monday.com review | monday.com vs Wrike | monday.com vs Airtable. monday.com makes it easy to prioritize your most important tasks while tracking costs and completion status along the way. Image: monday.com This is actually just a generic marketing strategy template from monday.com. But it can easily be adapted for go-to-market planning and execution. It works best for long-term planning that requires team collaboration. If just you and one other person are launching a new product in two weeks, then this template is probably overkill. But if you’re working with a complete team and rolling out a new product or service over the next three to six months, it’s the right level of detail. I like how it takes you through the process of turning a big-picture goal — like a new product or business idea — into smaller, more attainable tasks. At that point, you can assign work to your team and keep an eye of the overall progress at a high level in real time. Users can easily switch between Gantt chart views, tables, and other custom visualizations based on what you’re working on. A product owner, for example, may just want to review the Gantt chart to ensure their launch is on track. Someone on the marketing team, however, may prefer to see a weekly view of all upcoming tasks assigned to them. One drawback of this template is that it doesn’t come pre-loaded with specific tasks for go-to-market planning. You’ll have to add those in yourself, which can take some time depending on the complexity of your strategy. But it’s a great place to start if you have a general idea of what you want to do. ClickUp: Go to market strategy templates ClickUp is also a complete project management solution for teams of all sizes. While the free forever plan is designed for individual use, you can use it to unlock hundreds of templates, including two excellent go to market templates. The first template provides everything you need to develop your concept and bring your new product or service to life. The second is better for team alignment in the early planning stages. You could potentially use both, starting with the second template and adding in the first whenever you’re ready to start assigning work. More on ClickUp: ClickUp Review | ClickUp vs monday.com | ClickUp vs Notion. Template 1: An advanced option for complex product launches This template works best if you want to plan and execute your go-to-market strategy from the same platform. ClickUp makes it really easy to start with an idea and validate it before defining all the steps required to launch it. It works just as well for B2C and B2B, including physical products, services, moving into new markets, or coming up with business ideas. ClickUp helps you define months of planning into a roadmap that your entire team can follow. Image: Clickup.com To start, the template helps you fine-tune product positioning in a way that resonates with your customers and stands out from your competition. From there, you can break down a six or 12-month plan into simpler, more attainable steps. Complex launches don’t feel quite as intimidating when you segment everything into stages and clearly defined steps like this. ClickUp has a built-in goal-setting feature that’s included for free with this template. You can set clear objectives and timelines for every stage, and ClickUp will automatically track your team’s progress along the way. You’ll benefit from advanced features like dependency warnings and the ability to adjust assignments on the fly. ClickUp also lets you identify KPIs to measure success, like customer acquisition costs and CLV, so you can track key data even after your product hits the market. Template 2: A simpler choice to ensure high-level team alignment This ClickUp template is designed to take an idea and put it on paper. It’s a simple way for business leaders and project managers to clearly communicate goals while assigning ownership to different team members. You can use it for new product launches, new service offerings, and even overhauls of your existing products. This is a straightforward strategy template that can be completed by one person in less than two hours. Image: Clickup.com While you have the option to take this template and turn it into a full project within ClickUp, it’s not necessary. It’s more of a one or two-page resource that anyone on your team can reference any time they feel lost or like they’re missing necessary context. This template can also work well for quick pitches and proposals. For example, a department head or product manager could use it to present an idea to company executives and other decision-makers. It’s worth noting that this lacks a competitive analysis section that you’ll find with similar templates. You won’t be able to define major tasks and break everything up into distinct project phases, either. But you don’t necessarily need both of those things for simpler product rollouts. Plus, you can start with this template to get your ideas out and ensure everyone involved understands what you’re trying to accomplish

By Bryan Koenig ( December 4, 2024, 1:09 PM EST) — President-elect Donald Trump signaled a full steam ahead approach to reining in major technology platforms with the announced nomination Wednesday of former Federal Trade Commission staffer and Trump administration economic adviser Gail Slater to run the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division…. Law360 is on it, so you are, too. A Law360 subscription puts you at the center of fast-moving legal issues, trends and developments so you can act with speed and confidence. Over 200 articles are published daily across more than 60 topics, industries, practice areas and jurisdictions. A Law360 subscription includes features such as Daily newsletters Expert analysis Mobile app Advanced search Judge information Real-time alerts 450K+ searchable archived articles And more! Experience Law360 today with a free 7-day trial. source

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Microsoft Copilot is getting smarter by the day. The Satya Nadella-led company has just announced that its AI assistant now has ‘vision’ capabilities that enable it to browse the internet with users. While the feature was first announced in October this year, the company is now previewing it with a select set of Pro subscribers. According to Microsoft, these users will be able to trigger Copilot Vision on webpages opened on their Edge browser and interact with it regarding the contents visible on the screen. The feature is still in the early stages of development and pretty restricted, but once fully evolved, it could prove to be a game-changer for Microsoft’s enterprise customers — helping them with analysis and decision-making as they interact with products the company has in its ecosystem (OneDrive, Excel, SharePoint, etc.)  In the long run, it will also be interesting to see how Copilot Vision fares against more open and capable agentic offerings, such as those from Anthropic and Emergence AI, that allow developers to integrate agents to see, reason and take actions across applications from different vendors. What to expect with Copilot Vision? When a user opens a website, they may or may not have an intended goal. But, when they do, like researching for an academic paper, the process of executing the desired task revolves around going through the website, reading all its content and then taking a call on it (like whether the website’s content should be used as a reference for the paper or not). The same applies to other day-to-day web tasks like shopping. With the new Copilot Vision experience, Microsoft aims to make this entire process simpler. Essentially, the user now has an assistant that sits at the bottom of their browser and can be called upon whenever needed to read the contents of the website, covering all the texts and images, and help with decision-making.  It can immediately scan, analyze and provide all the required information, considering the intended goal of the user — just like a second set of eyes. The capability has far-reaching benefits — it can accelerate your workflows in not time — as well as major implications, given the agent is reading and assessing whatever you’re browsing. However, Microsoft has assured that all the context and information shared by the users is deleted as soon as the Vision session is closed. It also noted that websites’ data is not captured/stored for training the underlying models. “In short, we’re prioritizing copyright, creators, and our user’s privacy and safety – and are putting them all first,” the Copilot team wrote in a blog post announcing the preview of the capability. Expansion based on feedback Currently, a select set of Copilot Pro subscribers in the US, who have signed up for the early-access Copilot Labs program, will be able to use vision capabilities in their Edge browser. The capability will be opt-in, which means they don’t have to worry about AI reading their screens all the time.  Further, at this stage, it will only work with select websites. Microsoft says it will take feedback from the early users and gradually improve the capability while expanding support to more Pro users and other websites.  In the long run, the company may even expand these capabilities to other products in its ecosystem, such as OneDrive and Excel, allowing enterprise users to work and make decisions more easily. However, there’s no official confirmation yet. Not to mention, given the cautious approach signaled here, it may take some time to become a reality.  Microsoft’s move to launch Copilot Vision’s preview comes at a time when competitors are pushing the bar in the agentic AI space. Salesforce has already rolled out AgentForce across its Customer 360 offerings to automate workflows across domains like sales, marketing and service.  Meanwhile, Anthropic has launched ‘Computer Use,’ which allows developers to integrate Claude to interact with a computer desktop environment, performing tasks that were previously handled only by human workers, such as opening applications, interacting with interfaces and filling out forms. source