Embedded AI Expert

Cresta launches next generation of Cresta Insights to unlock deeper, more actionable intelligence from customer conversations. Upgraded AI Analyst, Topic Discovery, and new Real-Time Trends capabilities make Cresta Insights more authoritative, more real-time, and more agentic than ever before. July 29, 2026 Cresta, the leading customer experience AI platform, today announced a major expansion of Cresta Insights' agentic capabilities. The enhancements to Cresta Insights enable enterprises to uncover critical customer experience information hidden in conversations faster, more confidently, and in greater depth than any other system available today. "Historically, insights tools only gave you answers to the questions you knew to ask. But many of the most critical issues are the ones nobody would think to look for: the unknown unknowns," said Ping Wu, CEO of Cresta. "Cresta Insights is the first truly agentic customer experience insights system. It doesn't wait for the question. It finds the trends that matter most, surfaces them to you proactively, and uses agentic reasoning to help you deeply investigate and identify the right actions to take next." The upgraded Cresta Insights is composed of three key elements. The new and improved AI Analyst: A CX research agent that works autonomously and recommends what to do next. AI Analyst has already automated more than 4 million hours of research to date, and with these enhancements it is even more efficient. New capabilities include: * Auto-execution: The user asks a question in plain English, and AI Analyst plans and executes research autonomously. It intelligently selects the right type of analysis to run and the right conversations to run it on, without the user needing to specify filters or intervene. * Extensible output types: AI Analyst builds multi-modal outputs including comparisons, charts, queries, behavior discovery reports, coaching recommendations, and fully drafted briefs and emails directly in Cresta Insights. * Cresta context grounding: AI Analyst reasons over Insights categories, workflows, predicted attributes, and business context, not just transcripts. Upgraded Topic Discovery: A single source of truth for why customers are calling that that stays aligned with the business over time. The upgrades include: * LLM-generated initial taxonomy: Topic Discovery generates an exhaustive taxonomy of conversation categories, with up to three layers of sub-categories. * Human-in-the-loop refinement: Admins explore groups with descriptions and examples, then merge, split, rename, or move clusters to fit what matters most to the business. * Locked-in golden taxonomy: Topic Discovery automatically tags every closed conversation against the taxonomy, with no need for manual keywording or maintenance. * Trustable everywhere: The classification is usable as a metric and filter in dashboards, as a filter in AI Analyst queries, and as a trigger condition in automated workflows and real-time guidance. Real-Time Trends: A new system designed to catch the unknown unknowns, down to the minute. Real-Time Trends gives contact center operations leaders and CX executives rapid visibility into what's changing in their business, including the events that no taxonomy was ever built to catch. It provides the detail users need to brief leadership and get talking points to agents within the hour. Included in Real-Time Trends: * Minute-level spike detection: Real-Time Trends flags trending topics and emerging spikes in customer conversations as they happen. * Unknown-unknown coverage: The system catches emerging keyword phrases and events that aren't tracked anywhere in a company's taxonomy yet, such as outages, regional disruptions, new product issues, or black swan events. * Auto-generated headlines and root causes: Every trend comes with an auto-generated headline and root-cause explanation, powered by AI Analyst. * Proactive email alerts: Subscribers receive email notifications when new topics start to spike. Together, the improvements close the loop between discovery and decision-making, turning Cresta Insights into a single system that finds out what customers are calling about, what's causing it right now, and what to do next. Wu added, "The onus in building a customer experience that improves with every conversation should not be on the user knowing what to look for. Today's enhancements are a major step forward in our vision of the proactive, agentic conversation intelligence system of the future."

Ahold Delhaize announces new investments through W23 Global to drive innovation in retail technologies. Through W23 Global, Ahold Delhaize invested in five new start-ups developing solutions for AI-enabled operations and sustainability in the grocery retail sector. July 21, 2026 - Ahold Delhaize is pleased to provide an update from W23 Global, the venture capital fund supported by five leading grocery retailers, including Ahold Delhaize, Tesco and Woolworths Group. Last year, Ahold announced four new investments in August and December, and this year the fund has completed five additional investments in the start-ups Moment Energy, Verse, Skyfire, Haast, and Cresta. This growing portfolio contributes to the broader ambition of helping retailers operate more sustainably and efficiently while delivering improved experiences for customers. Sustainability. Advancing circular energy solutions with Moment Energy. Included in this new round of investments is Moment Energy, a pioneer in repurposed battery energy storage systems (BESS) and the first company in North America to manufacture certified, commercial-scale systems using second-life electric vehicle batteries. Built on the principle that every battery deserves a second life, Moment Energy's platform extends EV battery lifespan, preventing premature recycling and landfill waste while enabling more sustainable energy use. Its cost-effective BESS solutions deliver reliable and flexible energy storage at scale across grocery retail infrastructure as well as in settings including data centers, hospitals, factories and microgrids. As Ingrid Maes, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Chief Investment Officer (CIO) of W23 Global, noted, "Moment Energy is meaningfully advancing what's possible in sustainable retail infrastructure and supply chain circularity. As grocery operations face rising energy costs and increasing demand pressures, Moment Energy's second-life storage systems give retailers a faster, cleaner path to reliable backup power, while significantly reducing peak-demand utility costs." Optimizing energy portfolios with Verse. W23 Global is also investing in Verse, an energy intelligence platform that helps large-scale energy consumers manage increasingly complex energy portfolios. Its core product, Aria(TM), centralizes utility bills, contracts, and power purchase agreements across thousands of sites, providing a unified view of energy data. This enables retailers to compare forecasts to actual performance across stores, distribution centers and other physical assets, make smarter procurement decisions, and optimize costs and risk. With the addition of Dispatch Intelligence, Verse also orchestrates on-site energy resources in real time, helping AI infrastructure come online faster in a constrained grid environment. AI-enabled operations. Enabling secure agent-driven commerce with Skyfire. Expanding its focus to the emerging landscape of AI-driven commerce, W23 Global is investing in Skyfire, which is building a cross-ecosystem trust and permission layer for the agentic economy. The platform provides a secure identity and financial stack that enables retailers to distinguish trusted AI shopping agents from malicious automation. Through verified "Know Your Agent" (KYA) credentials and integrated payment capabilities, Skyfire allows businesses to safely open their digital channels to autonomous shoppers. "Skyfire is providing the critical infrastructure required to turn the rise of autonomous AI into a new frontier of growth for retailers," said Ingrid Maes, CEO and CIO of W23 Global. "By upgrading traditional commerce stacks with a dedicated agent identity and payment layer, Skyfire provides the key to unlock high-intent agent demand while shielding systems from the surge of bot-driven cyber risk. Skyfire provides the infrastructure retailers need to capture and process automated transactions securely and instantly." Scaling compliant marketing with Haast. Among its latest investments, W23 Global is investing in Haast, an AI-native platform designed to automate marketing compliance and brand protection for consumer industries. Founded in 2023, Haast supports retailers in managing compliance across the full content lifecycle, from pre-publication review to continuous monitoring of live channels. Operating across text, image, video, and audio, the platform helps ensure consistent, compliant messaging while accelerating approval processes. It helps marketing, legal, and compliance teams save time, reduce risk, and speed up content approvals in a complex regulatory environment. Elevating customer experience with Cresta. W23 Global also announces its investment in Cresta, a unified platform in human-centric generative AI for contact centers. Cresta's platform combines autonomous AI agents with real-time coaching and conversation intelligence for human teams. Originating from the Stanford AI Lab and led by the co-founder of Google's AI Contact Center, the company helps teams work more effectively by turning conversational data into live agent assistance. Their scalable technology has already delivered measurable operational results for global enterprises, with over 80 businesses as customers. As Ingrid Maes, CEO and Chief Investment Officer of W23 Global, noted, "Customer service has become a critical point of differentiation for retailers. The opportunity is no longer simply to automate interactions, but to deliver faster, more personalized and more consistent customer experiences while fundamentally improving the economics of service. We believe Cresta is one of the companies best positioned to help retailers achieve both." About W23 Global. W23 Global is a global grocery retail venture capital fund backed by five leading grocery retailers: Tesco (UK, ROI, Europe), Ahold Delhaize (U.S., Europe, Indonesia), Woolworths Group (Australia, New Zealand), Shoprite Group (Africa), and Empire Company Limited (Canada). W23 Global invests in innovative start-ups and scale-ups developing technology to transform grocery retail. Its work focuses on supporting companies that build solutions with practical application across markets, helping advance the way retailers operate and serve customers while addressing sustainability challenges. As technology continues to shape the future of grocery retail, W23 Global remains focused on solutions that make a tangible difference for both customers and retailers.

Cresta has launched Training Simulator, an AI-powered training product for customer service agents. The platform uses AI agents to simulate realistic customer interactions based on actual conversation data, replacing traditional scripted role-play exercises. The simulator creates dynamic customer scenarios that respond in real time, showing emotion and pushing back on inadequate answers. Training scenarios can be built using prompts or auto-generated from real conversations. The system evaluates agent performance using the same quality criteria applied to live customer interactions. Training Simulator integrates with coaching plans, allowing managers to assign targeted simulations based on individual agent weaknesses. Cresta CEO Ping Wu said the platform enables agents to practice challenging conversations repeatedly in a safe environment before engaging with real customers. The company aims to reduce agent onboarding time, improve retention, and enhance overall performance.