Delica is continuing its three-year collaboration with Promotion-Tools. Following a successful pitch, Promotion-Tools secured the contract for a further year. The aim of the partnership is to convince customers of the quality of "CoffeeB" products and boost sales through tastings and training courses such as the Delica Sales Academy.

Every year, Promotion-Tools carries out around 1500 assignments, including in Migros stores, at Manor, Fust and MediaMarkt. The Sales Academy has established itself as a key instrument: Sales talents are promoted through training and a leaderboard system, which makes sales promotion particularly successful in electronics stores such as Fust and MediaMarkt.

In 2025, the Sales Academy is to be extended to all Delica categories and optimized through data-based reporting. The collaboration will continue to be characterized by a focus on innovation, quality and a trusting partnership.

Swiss International Air Lines (Swiss) is expanding its payment options: With immediate effect, flight tickets and additional services such as seat reservations or baggage bookings can be paid for using the Swiss payment app Twint. This new payment method is available both in the Swiss app and on swiss.com, provided the flight is departing from Switzerland.

"The integration of TWINT as a payment method is a further step towards offering our passengers even more choice at the booking stage and making travel easier and more personalized," explains Heike Birlenbach, Chief Commercial Officer at Swiss.

The cooperation underlines the close connection between Swiss and Swiss companies. "We have always been committed to Swissness and are delighted that our customers can now also buy their flight tickets with the leading Swiss payment app," continues Birlenbach.

Adrian Plattner, Chief Sales Officer of Twint, adds: "By linking Twint and Swiss, we are strengthening the user experience and bringing Switzerland's leading airline together with the most popular Swiss payment method."

Contcept Communication is delighted to have a new, well-known client: The Swiss Science Center Technorama is now relying on the expertise of the agency from Zurich, Lausanne and Berlin. The collaboration includes media relations, storytelling and influencer marketing. Contcept also manages Technorama's social media channels, including Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn.

With over 600 experimental stations on an exhibition area of 7,000 square meters and a 15,000 square meter park, Technorama is one of the most important institutions of its kind in Europe. In 2024, the Science Center set a new record with almost 370,000 visitors. With the ambitious "Technorama 2050" project, the non-profit foundation is planning extensive renovations, modernizations and expansions by 2030.

"We are very much looking forward to working together," says Ilona Schönle, Head of Marketing and Communication at Technorama. "With Contcept Communication, we have an agency at our side that has the best contacts in the media and has mastered the art of storytelling on all channels."

Barbara Ryter, Co-CEO of Contcept Communication, adds: "The Technorama is very well known and has many extraordinary, surprising stories to tell." She is managing the mandate together with junior consultant Claudia Jutz.

2025 marks the start of a profound transformation of enterprise software. It will go beyond the previous democratization of software development and engineering using generative AI and will change the previously stable software workflows. This is how Induprakas Keri, Senior Vice President and General Manager Hybrid Multicloud at Nutanix, sees the near future. "This year, a new type of software will come onto the market that learns from its application and improves the user experience and productivity of development teams independently, i.e. without active programming," says the expert.

Cooperation with the help of AI agents

In addition to self-optimization, the topic of cooperation will become increasingly important. This involves the collaboration of AI agents that can also conduct negotiations. "For companies to benefit from this, they need employees with the appropriate skills, processes and technologies," explains Debo Dutta, Chief AI Officer (CAIO) at Nutanix. New reasoning models, including open source models, would give AI models additional capabilities. Dutta assumes that AI inferencing will continue to gain in importance due to the increasing spread of reasoning models and agents.

In his opinion, new technologies and architectures will emerge to support the new generations of models and multi-agent systems. For example, in-memory computing will become popular in order to overcome the memory wall. In addition, entire memory controllers will run on intelligent network cards. His colleague Keri agrees and expects the power consumption of AI inferencing, especially at the edge, to become a serious challenge: "Contrary to popular belief, inferencing will be the real power guzzler, rather than training."

Also a consequence of AI in 2025: electricity consumption as a cost driver

As power consumption increases, so do the costs for companies. According to Dutta, this is mainly due to the scaling of the computing capacities required for inferencing. Companies therefore need to rethink their expenditure on infrastructure and energy.

To ensure that investments and operating costs do not jeopardize the success of AI projects, companies should use artificial intelligence in particular to "identify inefficiencies and automate labour-intensive processes", according to Tobi Knaup, General Manager Cloud Native at Nutanix. He recommends: "IT managers should pursue the strategy of financing AI with the help of AI." IT itself is under pressure to work with maximum efficiency and should therefore decommission products that do not use AI.

According to Rajiv Ramaswami, President and CEO of Nutanix, Nutanix itself is aiming for a 25 percent increase in development productivity: "We will use artificial intelligence to generate code for unit tests and a range of other functions." These and similar projects will become a reality in 2025 and will spread to more and more areas of the company with the emergence of new AI applications.

Source and further information: www.nutanix.com

This article originally appeared on m-q.ch - https://www.m-q.ch/de/ki-im-jahr-2025-zwischen-selbstoptimierung-kooperation-und-effizienz/

The aim of the mandate is to support companies, especially SMEs, in the coming years in the consistent implementation of the Energy Strategy 2050 and the achievement of the net-zero target by 2050 and to motivate them to plan energy efficiency and decarbonization measures.

Scholz & Friends impressed with an integrated marketing and communication concept that positions SwissEnergy as a "navigator" and competent supporter for the diverse sector-specific needs of the Swiss economy. With orchestrated measures from the areas of umbrella communication, community management, CRM and impact measurement, Swiss companies are accompanied along their customer journey on their individual path to net zero. The aim is to provide the necessary information, advice and funding opportunities from SwissEnergy and also to involve industry associations and partners.

"Providing new impetus for SwissEnergy's B2B communication with an innovative, orchestrated approach geared towards creative effectiveness is an extremely exciting challenge that we are very much looking forward to," says Mathias Rösch, CEO of Scholz & Friends Zurich.

The collaboration based on the "round table principle" will start immediately with an interdisciplinary team of communication experts from Scholz & Friends Family and the two subcontractors Campaigneers, responsible for community management, and Translingua, responsible for translation services. The first measures will be launched in the course of the year.

As the former Head of Production at Yoveo | Team Farner, Leonie Studer combines many years of experience in management with expertise and a passion for innovation and videos. "I am proud to build on the agency's success, especially after winning the Master of Swiss Web Award last year. With the team, the technologies of tomorrow and our clients, we will make a difference," says Leonie Studer about her new position.

Andreas Herren and Marco Demont are deliberately stepping back from operational management to give Leonie Studer and her team room for new ideas. At the same time, they will remain closely involved as consultants in order to use their experience and networks for the further development of the agency. In particular, their focus will be on networking Yoveo's expertise even more closely within Team Farner and thus with various communication disciplines.

Michel Grunder, CEO of Team Farner Switzerland, welcomes the change: "The move shows a trust in younger talent that was already in place long before the decision was made. This is just as much a compliment for Leonie as it is for Andreas and Marco for their entrepreneurial flair and vision. The entire leadership of Team Farner Switzerland and I look forward to continuing our close collaboration."

Companies such as Apple, Swatch and On owe their international breakthrough not only to technology, but also to design and storytelling. They are examples of how creativity is a key factor for success on the market.

But what does it take for companies to give creativity enough space? And make it a top priority? "Companies need travel companions to support them on this journey," says Thomas Aerni, Partner and Lead Strategy at Comm-unity. They need to understand the value chain on the one hand and be able to provide new impetus on the other - and translate it into practicable solutions. "This is precisely why we have developed our new Comm-unity creative collective AG agency model."

Comm-unity is the result of the merger of the agencies Basel West Unternehmenskommunikation, Sagbar, Visuelle Fabrik and Aerni Digital Solutions. The oldest of its roots goes back to 1969, when Albin Kirchhofer founded the predecessor of Basel West. He focused on content marketing early on, which is why Comm-unity describes itself as a Swiss pioneer in this field.

Community instead of hierarchies

"Our cooperation is not a quick fix, but has grown organically through joint projects," explains Aerni. "We are convinced that we gain strength as a collective - through creativity, collaboration, communication and critical thinking."

The four owners Thomas Aerni (Lead Strategy), Stephan Lehmann-Maldonado (Lead Content), Roman Albertini (Lead Design) and Michael Aerni (Lead Digital) make up the management team. Each of them can look back on a successful entrepreneurial career and is an expert in their discipline. "Each of us masters different tools. The art for us is not just to play sheet music, but to improvise as a collective. This is how we often come up with innovative solutions that lead to eureka moments for customers," says Stephan Lehmann-Maldonado. "For us, community means mastering challenges together - instead of creating hierarchies that divide."

The new creative collective works decentrally from several locations - Basel, Aarau, Bremgarten, Rotkreuz and Zurich. "Our model allows us to feel the pulse of the markets better and be geographically closer to our customers," says Roman Albertini.

In his career to date, Karim Weber has worked in various industries such as telecommunications, insurance, e-commerce, fashion and luxury. Most recently, he was Partner and Experience Director at Addvanto, where he helped shape the strategic direction as a member of the Board of Directors. Prior to that, he headed the "Future Marketing Lab" at Swisscom.

With the appointment of Weber, Elaboratum Suisse is focusing on expanding its consulting services. Meanwhile, as the new Managing Partner of the Elaboratum Group, Marco Schulz will drive forward the strategic development of the entire group while continuing to be responsible for the management of Elaboratum Suisse.

Evoq was founded 18 years ago on a mountain tour and has since reached countless peaks with its clients. The full-service agency has a broad portfolio that includes names such as SBB, Swissmem, Swiss Post and Sozialwerk Pfarrer Sieber.

With an interdisciplinary approach and a 20-strong team, Evoq realizes sustainable communication solutions. The comprehensive range of services extends from branding, advertising and digital media to orientation design.

"We are delighted to be included in the LSA," says Christian Sutter, Managing Partner and co-founder. "Evoq has not only grown in size in recent years, but has also become more diverse and creative. Joining the LSA is an important strategic step for us to further develop our agency and expand our network."

In a recent study, UZH computational linguist Eleanor Chodroff and Chloe Patman from Cambridge University investigated how well modern ASR systems cope with challenging listening conditions. The systems tested were "wav2vec 2.0" from Meta and "Whisper large-v3" from OpenAI. The benchmark: the performance of British native speakers.

The tests took place under extreme conditions - from speech-like noise to realistic pub noise, both with and without a cotton face mask. The result: humans performed best overall, but the OpenAI system "Whisper large-v3" outperformed them in almost all scenarios. Only in pub noise was it on a par with human hearing.

Particularly striking was the ability of "Whisper large-v3" to process speech correctly even without contextual support.

The decisive difference

The enormous performance of "Whisper" is based on gigantic amounts of training data. While Meta's "wav2vec 2.0" was trained with 960 hours of speech data, OpenAI drew on over 75 years of speech data for its standard system. The most powerful model even used more than 500 years of speech data. In comparison, humans develop similar skills in just a few years - a remarkable aspect, as study leader Eleanor Chodroff emphasizes. "In addition, automatic speech recognition in almost all other languages remains a major challenge."

Different sources of error

The study also showed that humans and machines fail in different ways. Humans almost always create grammatically correct sentences, but often write sentence fragments. In contrast, "wav2vec 2.0" often generated incomprehensible gibberish under difficult conditions. "Whisper" was able to produce grammatically correct sentences, but filled gaps in the content with completely incorrect information. (pd/swi)

The Study "Speech recognition in adverse conditions by humans and machines" by Chloe Patman and Eleanor Chodroff can be read in detail here.

The neutral portal can be used free of charge by both agencies and clients and combines the completeness of search engines with the efficiency of conventional industry portals. This is because traditional search engines such as Google are only of limited help in finding the right agency. Flinxio addresses this with a neutral overview of all relevant agencies and services, a filter-based search without hurdles and verified customer reviews. The foundation for this has been laid with the beta phase.

The start-up now relies on the active involvement of agencies and broad acceptance in the industry. By adding their own data to their pre-collected profiles, the search results will be continuously improved. They can also obtain customer reviews. It takes just a few minutes to check and complete the free profile, and review invitations can be sent to customers directly via the portal. Well-rated agencies benefit from optimal visibility. This means that every agency has a fair chance of being found by clients - regardless of how well known they are or their size.

Acceptance and participation are crucial

"We have put a lot of effort and passion into the new portal. Now we are inviting agencies to maintain their profile," says René Amstutz, Founder and CEO of Flinxio. In order for Flinxio to establish itself as a portal for agency searches, the cooperation of the agencies is now required. Clients would welcome such a solution. "The Swiss Advertising Client Association (SWA) supports the idea of a comprehensive and neutral search portal," says SWA Director Roland Ehrler. The agencies therefore have it in their own hands to create a new standard for agency searches together with the clients.

Larissa Mörgeli joined Nova Impact as its first employee in January 2020, shortly after it was founded. With a great deal of "expertise and her tireless commitment", she has made a significant contribution to the development and success of the agency over the past five years, according to a Nova Impact press release. Mörgeli has extensive professional experience and in-depth specialist knowledge with a focus on digital marketing.

The appointment of Mörgeli as a partner is a logical step in the agency's development, the statement continues. "Larissa has played a central role in our company from the very beginning and has contributed significantly to the growth and success of the agency with her strategic foresight and entrepreneurial thinking," explains founder Sandra Fehr.