Community-Led 💬 What's on the Minds of Early Adopters #28
2025 Already = Whirlwind, Robots for All and Reinventing the IT Help Desk (Experience)!
Welcome to Community-Led. Each week we connect founders to dozens of early adopters and technology executives in fast growing startups and Fortune 500 companies. This newsletter surfaces the most interesting insights and conversations across the >2,000 members of the Decibel early adopter community every month. Let’s dive in!
It’s only January, and already, 2025 feels like a year that’s rewriting the rules of the game. AI is making bold moves, tech leaders are unveiling massive plans, and organizations are racing to turn ambition into action. The energy is palpable—but with it comes the challenge of cutting through the noise to identify what really matters and turn that focus into achieving high impact business objectives.
If you’re feeling the whirlwind, you’re not alone. Thankfully, my partner Jess’ The Week AI Broke My Feed provides a great recap of the five headline-making announcements just from last week alone!
And since it is the beginning of the year, I thought I would highlight innovative solutions that will help our CRO and CMO friends get off to a great start in 2025.
Check Aomni they are changing the game by enabling hyper-personalized key account understanding and insights. Recently highlighted Allie K. Miller, on her "Introduction to AI Agents" webinar…
“The thing that is brilliant about Aomni’s approach, and what sets it apart, is that it is going to combine with your content, your offerings. Aomni takes an agentic approach, reasoning through it and suggesting what to talk about as you reach out to your target sales accounts. I really like that! I like that it is not grabbing random research but giving you stuff that you can actually use in your business.”
And speaking of research, another emerging, must have, tool is Strella which provides game changing customer insights for product managers, designers and marketing managers in hours not weeks! Featuring AI-moderated interviews (try one for yourself here) and real-time synthesis, Strella delivers human insights at scale about everything from websites and prototypes to ad copy and ecommerce workflows.
The Watercooler: What we’re hearing in the Community
Decibel Community Events
Decibel’s Newest and Fastest Growing Community, #WinAI
#WinAI, a community for women pioneers in AI that are paving the way for the next generation of female technologists, is ✨! With events at our AI Pioneers Summit and the AWS re:Invent conference, we have power in numbers and want to celebrate more incredible women in the field.
2025 curated events are coming soon. Join the movement and help us by nominating women building in AI that have inspired you! Reach out to Lauren and Stacey…
An Inside Look at Innovation - Fixify
The message from IT teams everywhere is loud and clear: the traditional help desk is at its breaking point and it's time for something radically different. Enter Fixify, the game-changing platform that's reinventing the IT help desk experience by perfectly blending human empathy with cutting-edge AI technology!
While other solutions focus solely on efficiency, Fixify takes a unique and "texture-first" approach, recognizing that great IT support requires both speed and genuine human care. Their platform connects to existing IT ticketing systems like Jira and ServiceNow, using AI to automatically categorize tickets and identify problem "hotspots." The real magic happens when their sentiment analysis tool gauges the tone and urgency of incoming requests, ensuring every interaction hits the right note.
By empowering team members with AI-powered insights and tools, Fixify enables them to provide genuine care while moving at the speed of modern business.
Check out how Fixify can revolutionize your IT support here!
Decibel Friends and Family Update
🎉 Congratulations…
Petri Tuomola promoted to MD - Group Head of Enterprise Architecture and Data/AI Platform at DBS Bank
Liz Centoni, Chief Customer Experience Officer, Cisco, joins the Board of Directors at Workday
Stephen Augustus moves to CTO of Bloomberg
Anisha Vaswani joins IDG as CIO
Adam Arellano now Field CTO at Traceable
Kevin Arsenault joins Push Security as CRO
David Seidman now Head of Platform Security at Plaid
Merim Becirovic takes CIO role at BCG
Christos Kalantzis to CTO of HUMAN
Rajiv Taori welcomed as COO of Prowler
Ray Espinoza to VP of Information Security at Elite Technology
🔥Congratulations to Hilary Packer for being recognized with the American Express Inventor Award!!
Brightwave named one of the Best Inventions of 2024 by Time Magazine and a finalist for the 2024 Benzinga Fintech Award for Best Financial Research Company.
Artyom Keydunov, co-founder of Cube, writes for InfoWorld about Overcoming Data Inconsistency
Censys was selected as the Internet Intelligence Platform for Threat Hunting and Attack Surface Management for all US Intelligence Agencies.
Dropzone becomes the first and only startup in the SOC analyst space to receive Gartner’s Cool Vendor recognition.
RunZero named a Customers’ Choice in Gartner Peer Insights Voice of the Customer Report for Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (96% willingness to recommend!)
SpecterOps earned FedRAMP High Authorization making BloodHound Enterprise identity security platform available to U.S. government organizations
Platformatic.dev cements a $4.3M seed round to address Node.js challenges for enterprises
Credo.ai launches its new Integrations Hub, integrating responsible AI policies across platforms like Amazon SageMaker and Microsoft Dynamics 365
See you next time.
Thanks for reading. This is a community that you’re always welcome to contribute to. If you have any feedback or know a story that’s perfect for this newsletter, please reach out. Email me at Stacey@Decibel.vc.
Stacey