Three companies that couldn't look less alike — SPANX in shapewear, Herschend in theme parks, and Turo in car sharing — turn out to share the same architecture underneath: a CRM-first, cloud-native contact center on UJET, no stored PII, deployment measured in weeks or hours, and one hard number each that moved. This profile examines the common pattern behind three very different customer-experience turnarounds.
Filmed on the expo floor of CCW 2026, this CX Today conversation with UJET's Matt Clare cuts against the deafening tradeshow chorus of 'automate everything.' Instead of using AI to stop customers from reaching out, UJET's newly acquired Spiral analyzes 100% of customer conversations to explain WHY customers are calling, so companies can fix the underlying problem. Clare argues that people still trust people, that AI's real job is to superpower human agents rather than replace them, and that customers deserve choice in how they get help. The talk touches on UJET's brandable mobile and chat SDK, its analytics-to-action loop, and the emerging world of agentic experience orchestration.
Shawn Melamed is the co-founder and CEO of Spiral, a New York fintech that plugs charitable giving into the banking apps of credit unions and community banks. Before Spiral he ran Morgan Stanley's Technology Business Development and Innovation Offices and built two prior fintech companies, StrikeNET (sold to TMX Group) and Correlix. He was named one of The Financial Technology Report's Top 50 Fintech CEOs of 2024.
Every is a New York-based applied AI lab and media company that bundles a daily AI newsletter, a suite of consumer AI software products, and a consulting arm under one subscription. Founded by Dan Shipper and Nathan Baschez in 2020 as a bundle of business newsletters, it has evolved into an AI-native studio that ships products like Cora (email), Spiral (writing), Sparkle (file organization), and Monologue (voice dictation) - largely built with AI-written code by a team of roughly two dozen people.
Spiral by UJET is an AI-powered conversational analytics platform that uses Deep AI Research to autonomously analyze 100% of customer interactions across voice, chat, email, surveys, social media, and reviews. Rather than deflecting customers with AI walls, Spiral finds the root cause of why people contact support in the first place and helps teams eliminate avoidable contacts at the source. Founded by Elena Zhizhimontova and acquired by UJET on November 18, 2025, Spiral continues as a standalone product while feeding conversational intelligence into UJET's cloud contact center platform.
Dan Shipper is the co-founder and CEO of Every, a New York-based applied AI lab that publishes a daily newsletter read by more than 130,000 builders and ships a bundle of AI software products. He writes Chain of Thought, a weekly column on how AI reshapes work and thinking, and hosts the AI & I podcast. A philosophy major who sold his first company before graduating from Penn, Shipper has become one of the most-read chroniclers of the AI era, arguing that the line between writer and builder is dissolving.

Will Manning is the co-founder and CEO of Spiral, a New York data company building infrastructure for the moment machines became the main consumers of data. He spent nearly a decade at Palantir co-creating and scaling Foundry, then set out to fix a bottleneck nobody else seemed bothered by: GPUs that can swallow terabits per second, fed through legacy file formats that make CPUs decompress everything first. His answer is Vortex, an open columnar format he donated to the Linux Foundation, and Spiral, the exabyte-scale system built on top of it. Spiral launched from stealth in September 2025 with $22M from Amplify Partners and General Catalyst.