9th annual program honors the marketing, sales, and AdTech innovators reshaping how brands engage, convert, and grow.
Boston, August 6, 2026 — Text, the AI-powered customer service platform built by the team behind LiveChat, ChatBot, and HelpDesk, has been named winner of the "Retail Technology Solution of the Year" award in the 9th annual MarTech Breakthrough Awards program.
Customer service as a profit engine, not a cost center
For most retail brands, customer service has long been managed as a cost center, with success measured in tickets resolved and minutes saved. Text takes a different view: support teams talk to more customers than any other function in the company, and those conversations carry buying signals and revenue opportunities that a traditional ticketing-and-deflection model leaves uncaptured. The Text platform is built around that idea — combining live chat, an AI agent, help desk ticketing and analytics in a single environment where customer conversations are treated as direct contributors to retail revenue, not just service interactions.
Built on two decades of conversational software experience
Built on more than 20 years of experience running LiveChat, ChatBot, and HelpDesk at enterprise scale, Text unifies customer communications across chat, email, SMS, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp in a single workspace. An AI agent handles common inquiries autonomously using a brand's knowledge base, product catalog, and business rules, while a Copilot feature supports human agents with reply suggestions and customer history. The platform integrates directly with ecommerce systems, including Shopify, with automation trained on intent detection and buying signals — helping retail customers drive higher conversion rates and chat-attributed sales.
"The way retail customers reach out to brands has changed significantly in the last few years, and the support inbox has quietly become the place where a lot of the actual buying decision happens, well before checkout. We built the new Text around that shift, so AI can handle a conversation with the same context and judgment that a senior agent would bring".
said Mariusz Ciepły, CEO of Text.
"The MarTech category continues to grow, and one of the more interesting frontiers in this year's program was customer service software, where AI is moving quickly from auxiliary tool to central platform. Text demonstrated that shift particularly well, bringing the depth of a long-established conversational software company into a category that is rapidly evolving with AI. We are proud to recognize Text as our 2026 Retail Technology Solution of the Year."
said Steve Johansson, Managing Director at MarTech Breakthrough.
About the award program
Now in its ninth year, the MarTech Breakthrough Awards serve as a benchmark for innovation across the global marketing, sales, and advertising technology industry, recognizing companies and solutions across the full MarTech stack — from marketing automation and customer experience to AdTech, SalesTech, RevOps, performance marketing, and content marketing. The 2026 program drew thousands of nominations from more than 15 countries.
Text by the numbers
Text serves more than 114,000 paid users across more than 150 countries, with the Text Platform processing more than 440 million monthly API requests at its peak in 2026. The company's product suite supports retailers and brands ranging from global ecommerce operators to high-traffic consumer marketplaces, with in-chat resolution rates exceeding 80 percent in customized deployments.
About MarTech Breakthrough
Part of Tech Breakthrough, a leading market intelligence and recognition platform for global technology innovation and leadership, the MarTech Breakthrough Awards program honors excellence in marketing, ad and sales technology companies, products and people across categories including marketing automation, AdTech, SalesTech, marketing analytics, CRM, content and social marketing, SEM and mobile marketing. Learn more at MarTechBreakthrough.com.
About Text
Text is a new product in Text Inc.'s portfolio. It’s a customer service profit engine that consolidates sales, support, and customer growth into a single, user-centric application. By replacing fragmented tools with a cohesive architecture, Text empowers departments to scale through seamless, data-driven interactions.
Text Inc. is built on the foundation of LiveChat, the category-defining platform that pioneered modern live chat and brings over two decades of experience in conversational customer experience, now extended through AI-driven capabilities. The company serves more than 35,000 customers worldwide, including Unilever, Atos, Wembley Stadium, MIT, Stanford, and Coop Travel. Text Inc. is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, and is part of the Text Group (WSE: TXT, TXT.WA).
