KANSAS CITY, Mo. – All Remote – Service Management Group (SMG), a global experience management (XM) firm, today announced the launch of Ignite®, a proprietary AI platform built specifically to power faster and smarter decision-making across brand, customer and employee experience. Ignite sits at the center of SMG’s next chapter and offers organizations an advanced ecosystem of AI agents, predictive intelligence and unified data to uncover insights faster and act in real time. 

“Ignite is built for the complexity of experience management. It’s not repurposed or retrofitted. It’s purpose-built,” said Jami Ferguson, SMG’s Vice President of Product Management. “We designed Ignite to give every team—from frontline users to executive leadership—direct access to trusted insights and intelligent tools that improve experiences.” 

Unlike other platforms that bolt AI on top of legacy data solutions, Ignite was engineered from the ground up as an AI-native solution, built on a unified data model designed to eliminate silos among brand, customer, and employee experience data, support real-time decision-making and scale with enterprise data needs. 

Ignite provides AI-native solutions via a secure, unified platform that empowers faster, smarter decision-making across all experience programs with autonomous intelligence. Its purpose-built architecture combines a unified data model, embedded AI agents and automated workflows to help brands move from reacting to past feedback to shaping future experiences proactively. These agentic capabilities surface patterns, recommend actions and guide teams toward improvements in loyalty, operations and growth. 

Knowledge Agent, SMG’s recently launched AI assistant, demonstrates Ignite’s practical value. Knowledge Agent allows users to explore unstructured feedback in a conversational way. Teams can ask direct questions, such as what customers are sharing about a specific topic, and receive targeted responses in seconds. 

“Knowledge Agent helps teams focus on what’s important,” Ferguson said. “Instead of digging through data or clicking through filters, users can just ask a question and get a clear answer. It’s a faster, easier way to understand what customers are saying and know what to do next.” 

SMG plans to expand Ignite through 2025 with additional AI agents that analyze structured data, forecast trends and deliver prescriptive recommendations. Future releases will expand the platform’s capabilities and deliver even faster, more accurate improvements. 

The Ignite launch supports SMG’s broader transformation and enables its new Unified Experience Management® (UXM) solution, which brings together always-on co-creation, real-time measurement, and AI-powered insights in a single platform. The fall 2024 acquisition of Bulbshare helped shape this approach by introducing new ways to involve customers and employees early in experience design—a shift that drives measurable impact. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, 86% of consumers are more likely to trust and stay loyal to brands that invite them to co-create, and research from Accenture shows employee-designed programs are 30% less likely to fail in the first few years. 

“Our Unified Experience Management approach helps clients shape the experiences that matter most,” said SMG CEO Jonathan Berkowitz. “We are building platform and partnership models that match the speed and complexity of the environments in which our clients operate. It’s not just a more modern version of XM. It’s a fundamentally smarter way for our clients to run their business.” 

To bring the transformation to life, SMG has launched a redesigned website that reflects its updated positioning, expanded product ecosystem and commitment to helping brands turn insights into meaningful business impact.