Microsoft and Yobi Unveil AI to Level Enterprise Marketing Field

NEW YORK, NY – April 09, 2026 – Behavioral AI company Yobi and technology giant Microsoft today announced a strategic partnership to bring predictive consumer intelligence to U.S. enterprises through the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. The collaboration aims to level the playing field for businesses by unlocking access to vast, ethically-sourced behavioral datasets, allowing them to develop powerful predictive AI models without compromising consumer privacy.

This alliance introduces Yobi's behavioral foundation model, which is built on what the company calls the largest consented consumer database in the United States. It marks a significant challenge to the long-held dominance of large online advertising platforms, offering a new path for businesses to understand and anticipate customer needs. By placing privacy and consent at the core of its technology, the partnership signals a potential shift in how companies approach customer data to drive growth.

“Understanding and predicting customer intent is a competitive necessity, but enterprises today face a data disadvantage,” said Max Snow, CEO and co-founder of Yobi AI. “As the leading cloud provider for AI, Microsoft Azure offers infrastructure and best-in-class tooling that allows Yobi to train proprietary 700B parameter models.”

A New Model for Privacy-First Intelligence

At the heart of the partnership is a fundamental distinction in how data is processed. Unlike Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on immense volumes of public text, Yobi’s behavioral foundation model is trained on real-world consumer actions, such as purchases, store visits, and marketing conversions. This allows it to model and predict commercial intent with a focus on business outcomes.

The critical component is Yobi's privacy-first architecture. The company emphasizes that it does not sell or share raw behavioral data. Instead, it creates what it terms “privacy-preserving customer representations” through a process of creating vector embeddings. These mathematical representations capture behavioral patterns and intent signals without exposing personally identifiable information, effectively anonymizing consumer profiles while retaining their predictive value. This methodology is designed to comply with a suite of U.S. privacy laws, including the CCPA/CPRA and VCDPA, and is underscored by a SOC 2 Type II certification.

“By combining Yobi’s consented behavioral data with Microsoft’s cloud and AI platform, organizations like Wolverine Worldwide are gaining critical insights that improve customer engagement and drive meaningful business growth,” said Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft’s commercial business. “This partnership reflects our commitment to building AI solutions that are both innovative and responsible, with trust and privacy at the core.”

Democratizing Access Through Azure

The collaboration seeks to address the significant “data disadvantage” that most enterprises face when compared to the handful of tech giants that have historically controlled large-scale behavioral data. For years, only the largest advertising platforms could capture these signals at scale, often at a prohibitive cost to other businesses and with varying degrees of transparency.

Yobi and Microsoft position their joint offering as an equalizer. By integrating Yobi's platform with Microsoft Azure, the partnership makes sophisticated predictive intelligence accessible to a much broader market. Microsoft customers can now acquire Yobi’s services directly through the Azure Marketplace. This integration allows businesses to securely centralize their own permissioned first-party data, enrich it with Yobi’s behavioral signals, and activate the resulting insights in real time.

The technical integration runs deep. Yobi’s entire platform is built on Azure, leveraging a suite of services including Azure Databricks for machine learning model training, Azure Data Factory for data ingestion and orchestration, and Azure Blob Storage for scalable data storage. This robust infrastructure is what enables Yobi to train its massive 700-billion parameter models, processing petabytes of consented data to generate its predictive insights.

The Wolverine Case: Proving Incremental Growth

To demonstrate the real-world impact of its technology, Yobi points to its work with Wolverine Worldwide, one of the world's largest footwear designers and brand licensors. The case study highlights a key strategic benefit: moving beyond simple ad conversion to drive true incremental growth.

Today’s dominant social and search platforms are highly optimized for capturing late-stage shoppers who are already in-market and close to making a purchase. While effective, this often means advertising budgets are spent sustaining existing demand rather than creating new demand. Yobi's model, in contrast, enables brands to reach net-new audiences earlier in their customer journey.

In 2025, Wolverine’s Merrell and Saucony brands utilized Yobi's AI to identify and reach high-value shoppers at the top of the funnel. The results were reportedly some of the strongest incremental returns the brands had ever recorded outside of their core paid search and social channels. The campaign drove meaningful net-new customer acquisition and powered revenue that outperformed legacy channels, validating the thesis that highly personalized outreach to previously untapped audiences can unlock outsized returns.

Chris Hufnagel, President and Chief Executive Officer of Wolverine Worldwide, affirmed the value of the approach. "Yobi’s Behavioral AI enables us to target the right audiences with precision," he stated. "By supplementing our customer knowledge with enriched data, Yobi helps us personalize at scale — driving stronger engagement and measurable results across Wolverine Worldwide’s portfolio of brands."

This success has prompted Wolverine to leverage Yobi’s AI on Microsoft Azure for its largest campaign of the year, signaling deep confidence in the platform's ability to deliver measurable business outcomes. The partnership between Yobi and Microsoft provides a powerful, privacy-aware framework for enterprises to move beyond merely competing for existing customers and begin cultivating the next wave of high-value shoppers.