Articles by Jack M. Germain

As urgent care clinics grapple with burnout and staffing shortages, new AI tools aim to reduce administrative workload and give clinicians more time to focus on patient care In the high-pressure world of urgent care, the waiting room has long been a symbol of the health care system’s greatest frustrations. Overstretched staff, anxious patients, a...

Organizations are spending heavily on AI-driven sales enablement — yet execution on the ground continues to lag. Industry reports show 2025 was a tough year for sales teams, with slipping quotas, longer deal cycles, and reps struggling with core skills Despite record investment, 84% of sales reps missed their quotas, with win rates dipping into t...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as a visual CRM asset that goes beyond static data files. It is a dynamic asset that manages the relationship between the seller's inventory and the customer's intent Matthieu Rouif, CEO of Photoroom, sees visual AI moving from a creative tool to critical infrastructure for small businesses. The shift from i...

Artificial intelligence chatbots drove 28% more shopper referrals to retail apps during the Black Friday weekend in 2025, accelerating the rise of AI storefronts Analysis by mobile app insights provider Apptopia argues that shoppers are moving beyond browsing web pages or comparison lists. Instead, many are letting AI tools do it for them....

Traditional loyalty programs are underperforming as brands shift toward advocacy-driven growth. To reduce customer defections, marketers must move beyond purely transactional models and adopt participation engines that reward reviews, referrals, user-generated content, and community engagement alongside purchases E-commerce cloud platform Brevo's 2...

Artificial intelligence (AI) adoption in the workplace is accelerating faster than most organizations can secure it, leaving employee use increasingly unmonitored and risky According to new research from AI-powered data security firm Cyberhaven, nearly 40% of all employee interactions with AI tools now involve sensitive corporate data. As workers b...

Most customer support organizations are built to serve the loudest 10% of users — the ones who open tickets. The greater risk lies with the silent majority who encounter friction, say nothing, and quietly churn As artificial intelligence moves from experimentation to deployment, a new class of agentic AI is emerging to address this hidden revenue...

Two newly uncovered malware campaigns are exploiting open-source software across Windows and Linux environments to target enterprise executives and cloud systems, signaling a sharp escalation in both social engineering and kernel-level attack sophistication The first is an open-source Python script targeting business executives. This phishing campa...

As AI shopping agents remove friction from online commerce, they are also erasing the behavioral signals retailers rely on to detect fraud — creating a visibility gap that could trigger the largest friendly-fraud wave since e-commerce began According to Kevin King, VP of credit risk at LexisNexis Risk Solutions, friendly fraud is the fastest-grow...

More than just a high-speed task automation tool, artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming a controlled environment for brands to test customer experiences that would be too risky, expensive, or complex to conduct in the real world Companies can run predictive experience simulations to uncover hidden opportunities by creating hyper-realistic digita...

The one-size-fits-all approach of legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems continues to frustrate mid-market retailers, where thin margins leave little room for slow or rigid software Most traditional ERP platforms were designed for large enterprises, pushing small and medium-sized businesses into systems that are overly complex, costly, a...

The AI permission gap is becoming a significant blind spot for CISOs, especially as enterprises move from simple chatbots to autonomous agents capable of executing code Security teams are starting to realize that they are deploying artificial intelligence (AI) agents with the same mistakes organizations made during the cloud and SaaS land rush: exc...

Despite predictions that AI would be standard in CRM by 2025, new research from Workbooks suggests AI adoption is still lagging inside many CRM systems — especially in the mid-market. The company believes the AI adoption gap inside CRM systems is set to close rapidly in 2026.” However, the prediction wasn’t wrong — adoption has simply taken...

Two new product updates aim to help retailers use agentic AI more effectively by improving shopper trust and making product detail pages (PDPs) easier for machines to understand A new agentic commerce platform from Cimulate connects traditional site search with newer discovery channels, including answer engines and conversational commerce....

Misconceptions about how artificial intelligence (AI) will solve customer experience (CX) problems are plaguing the CRM industry — and too many companies are slapping AI onto broken systems instead of fixing customer relationships first A lack of proper integration between CRM and phone systems still forces customers to repeat account information...

Walking into today’s B2B buying process feels less like a marathon and more like a sprint. According to new LinkedIn data, nearly half of B2B deals now close within just 14 days That acceleration is recent. The share of B2B buying decisions closing inside a two-week window has jumped to 45%, up from 38% last quarter....

Shoppers’ acceptance of mobile wallets is firmly established. What began as a convenient way to pay has expanded into a broader trust relationship, as consumers increasingly rely on digital wallets for loyalty programs, offers, and store credentials — and now, their most sensitive credential: their ID With a majority of U.S. adults already usin...

Open-source database software support firm Percona is refocusing its business on structured, services-led engagements aimed at solving performance and AI-readiness challenges for enterprise database teams Last month, the company announced the launch of Percona Packages, a suite of structured consulting and support offerings for enterprise IT and DB...

Digital vendors and e-commerce businesses enter 2026 facing a radically changed retail landscape, shaped by rising customer expectations, tighter margins, and rapid advances in AI-driven commerce technology The most significant and persistent challenge for e-commerce retailers in 2025 was ever-increasing customer expectations for hyper-personalizat...

CRM users in 2025 could easily describe their experiences as a struggle to extract real, tangible value from sophisticated systems, often hampered by fundamental human and operational issues. Whether 2026 can successfully fix these broken aspects may be too much of a reach to make CRM a more reliable business tool in the new year Those challenges f...