Digiday’s 2026 Technology Awards put a spotlight on a clear shift: AI and automation are no longer side experiments for marketing and media teams. This year’s winners show the technology being used for operational work—handling customer calls, personalizing web experiences, improving analytics and keeping audiences on publisher sites.
AI agents move into high-volume operations
PolyAI won Best AI Tool for its deployment with SafeRide Health. SafeRide built an AI agent named Steven on PolyAI’s agentic dialog platform to handle member authentication, ride bookings, cancellations and modifications. Digiday reports that Steven now manages more than 80% of inbound calls, reduced the speak-to-human rate from 55% to 2% and saved 47,000 agent hours.
The takeaway for marketers is that AI agents deliver the strongest early results when they are mapped to a specific, repetitive task. SafeRide’s outcome was not a generic chatbot; it was a workflow change with a clear metric: fewer human touches, faster service and measurable hours saved.
A conversational layer for publisher revenue
Adam Singolda, founder and CEO of Taboola, was named Technology Founder of the Year. Taboola launched DeeperDive in 2025 to give publishers a conversational AI experience built on their own journalism. The platform uses reader behavior to deliver relevant answers while keeping audiences and revenue on publisher sites.
Partnerships with Gannett and The Independent helped drive adoption, and USA Today integrated reader questions into newsroom workflows. DeeperDive users generate nearly three times more revenue per user, with minimal cannibalization of existing revenue, according to Digiday.
For content and media teams, this is a useful benchmark: generative AI can be an on-site engagement layer instead of a traffic leak. The pattern is to use first-party content, answer reader questions and keep the session on your own domain.
Personalization without developer bottlenecks
Contentful and Docusign won Best Personalization & A/B Testing Platform. Docusign replaced its legacy CMS with Contentful and used Contentful Personalization to launch tailored homepages for 20 audience segments without developer support. The team incorporated firmographic and intent data, expanded audience insights and accelerated localization.
By March 2026, Docusign reached 6.19 million monthly active profiles and tested more than 20 audiences across 7,000 pages in 14 languages. The case shows that no-code personalization can raise experimentation velocity when the underlying CMS removes the need for developer tickets.
Other winners worth noting
- Best Buy-Side Programmatic Platform: Viant’s Ad Platform Redefines CTV as a Growth Engine
- Best Customer Data Platform: swsh x Rolling Stone
- Best Data Management Platform: Optable & Unity – Unlocking Brand Demand for 256M Gamers
- Best Marketing Analytics Platform: Realtor.com achieves 300% ROI with Knotch
- Best E-Commerce Technology: The First Agentic Storefront by Swap
- Best SEO Platform: Semrush One – Semrush, an Adobe company
- Best Creator Marketing Platform: Influencity
Across categories, the winners reflect a maturing martech and adtech market: platforms are being judged on outcomes such as ROI, store visits, revenue per user and hours saved. For marketing leaders, the next step is to connect these point solutions into a workflow with clear measurement rather than collecting more tools.
Source: Digiday
