SASKATOON, SK — July 6, 2026 — Vendasta, the AI workforce platform for small and medium businesses, won three awards at the 2026 SIINDA Digital Marketing and Innovation Awards in Berlin, held in partnership with Yext. An independent panel judged 23 entries across six categories. Vendasta was the only company to place in three categories: Gold in Location Platforms and Lead Generation for Vendasta Search AI; Silver in Innovation Through Leveraging AI for its AI Workforce; and Silver in Sales Automation, Attribution, and Analytics for Vendasta CRM AI and the AI Sales Assistant. Vendasta outperformed entrants including Wix, Duda, and Insites.
“Most software is built to be great at one slice of the problem. We built a platform to carry the whole thing,” said Sanjay Manchanda, Vendasta’s CMO. “A customer goes from a search to a sale in one motion, so the software should too. For a small business that can’t hire a marketing team, a sales team, and a front desk, that’s the whole vision: an AI workforce that does the work, not one more tool to manage.”
“We judge entries from across the digital media and local marketing industry, and the standard rises every year,” said Kimberli Lewis, General Manager, Siinda. “Placing in three categories is rare. Vendasta did it because our judges kept seeing the same thing across search, AI, and sales: technology that actually does the work for small businesses, instead of handing them one more tool to run. That’s where this industry is heading.”
The three categories map to a problem most software makes worse. A local business runs its search presence in one tool, its reviews in another, and its CRM in a third, then pays someone to carry data between them. In a 2026 Vendasta survey of agencies and business owners, 35% said their platforms don’t connect to each other and another 35% said their tools don’t connect to their data. The hand-offs are where customers go cold. Vendasta built its AI Workforce to close those gaps, with AI employees that share the same customer record and pick up where the last one left off.
The AI Workforce is a roster of role-based AI employees that do the work, not just surface it:
- AI Receptionist answers and qualifies inbound calls 24/7. It has handled more than 93,000 calls at a 54% average conversion rate.
- AI Reputation Specialist monitors and responds to reviews at scale, with replies calibrated to the sentiment and context of each one.
- AI Sales Assistant captures every virtual sales meeting, updates the CRM within seconds, and surfaces coaching insights. It has processed 29,336 meetings and reclaimed 3,936 hours of admin work.
Each one runs on its own. Together they compound: better discovery feeds more inbound, faster response converts more of it, and a clean CRM closes more deals. The judges in the Innovation Through Leveraging AI category recognized that the integration across the journey, not any single feature, is the innovation.
The thinking that won is already building Vendasta Vibe
Vendasta Vibe, in beta since June 3, is an AI application builder that opens with the business already loaded: brand, CRM, customer history, and AI employees wired in before the first prompt. Partners describe what they need in plain language and ship client-ready websites, dashboards, and internal tools without writing code.
“For decades, you bought software and bent your business around it,” said Brendan King, Vendasta’s co-founder and CEO. “Vibe inverts that. You describe what you need, and the software arrives already knowing your customers, your brand, and your AI workforce. Software should be a living system that adapts to each business, not a rigid set of features you work around.” King calls the shift “liquid software”: the people closest to a problem shaping the tools they use, in real time.
Partners are already building on it. Brett Prieskorn, co-founder and CEO of Black Feather Digital, opened Vibe during a client video shoot, drones still in the air, after the client mentioned spending hours each night writing proposals. By the time the shoot wrapped, Prieskorn had built a working proposal generator. “It’s really like building the product for him, right there on the spot,” he said.
Vendasta tested the idea on itself first, building its internal support platform on Vibe in days and retiring a Zendesk subscription that cost more than $100,000 a year.
Availability
Vendasta Search AI, CRM AI, the AI Sales Assistant, and the full AI Workforce are available now through Vendasta’s platform and its global network of more than 60,000 partners. Vendasta Vibe is in beta, free to try, with add-on credits for scale.
About Vendasta
Vendasta is the AI workforce platform for small and medium-sized businesses. Vendasta provides AI Employees that execute the work of marketing, sales, and operations automatically, helping local businesses reclaim time and scale without the overhead of traditional hiring. Founded in Saskatoon, Vendasta has a global network of 60,000+ partners to help SMBs stop managing software and start achieving outcomes.
Learn how to hire your first AI employee at Vendasta.com.
About Siinda
Siinda, the Search and Information Industry Association, is the leading European-based non-profit association bringing together agencies, brands, media, and technology companies across the local search, digital advertising, media, mobile, and on-demand sectors. Headquartered in Zürich, Switzerland, its member network includes many of the most prominent media outlets in Europe and globally. Each year, the Siinda Digital Marketing and Innovation Awards convene an independent panel of judges to evaluate digital products and solutions submitted across categories, recognizing the most innovative, resourceful, and impactful work in the industry.