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Explorance Honors 23 Organizations at Inaugural Metrics That Matter Learning Excellence Awards at Explorance World 2026

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MONTREAL, July 7, 2026 /PRNewswire/ – Explorance proudly recognized 23 organizations as recipients of the inaugural Explorance Metrics That Matter Learning Excellence Awards during a special ceremony at Explorance World 2026. These awards celebrate organizations demonstrating exceptional achievement in learning measurement, impact, and strategic value across three performance tiers: Gold, Silver, and Bronze.

The awards are based on rigorous benchmarks across vital learning KPIs such as learner satisfaction, Net Promoter Scores, reduction of Scrap Learning, and Estimated Performance Improvement. These distinguished organizations exemplify best-in-class learning and development functions that not only deliver effective programs but also prove measurable business outcomes.

The significance of these awards was further highlighted through two keynote addresses at Explorance World. Steve Lange, General Manager of the Metrics That Matter business unit, delivered a compelling keynote entitled “The MTM Vision & Roadmap: Optimizing the Value of Learning Investments.”  Lange emphasized the rising pressure on L&D teams to go beyond program delivery to build critical skills, show business value, and make smarter investments. He showcased how MTM is evolving from traditional measurement tools toward predictive intelligence, prescriptive guidance, and continuous optimization to help organizations surface insights faster and embed learning intelligence into business decision-making.

Complementing this forward-looking vision, Michael Rochelle, Chief Strategy Officer at Brandon Hall Group, delivered a keynote titled “Performance or Irrelevance: The Moment of Truth for L&D and Talent.” Rochelle underscored the urgent challenge L&D leaders face to clearly demonstrate the impact of learning on business outcomes, warning that learning functions must transform from activity reporting to strategic business drivers or risk irrelevance. His insights emphasized the growing expectations for CLOs to demonstrate ROI, influence strategy, and contribute measurably to organizational success.

“These award recipients represent the forefront of a transformational shift in learning and development,” said Steve Lange, GM Metrics That Matter. “They embody the integration of data-driven insight, strategic influence, and measurable impact that the business is asking for.”

The MTM Learning Excellence Awards further reinforce the importance of comprehensive, standardized learning measurement platforms to help Chief Learning Officers and learning leaders answer critical questions such as “what good looks like,” “how learning drives business outcomes,” and “where to best invest resources.”

Award recipients include:

Gold Award (Top 5% performance):

Belle TireHeartland DentalKuwait Institute of Banking StudiesUnited Health Group

Silver Award (Top 10% performance):

Pratt & Whitney Customer TrainingRegeneron PharmaceuticalsSaudi AramcoT-Mobile Corp

Bronze Award (Top 25% performance):

AllegionAramco LDDBlue Cross Blue Shield of AlabamaBlue Cross Blue Shield of MichiganChristiana CareDP WorldFederal ExpressJohnson Controls InternationalOptum UHGPalo Alto NetworksPetronas GroupSLBThermo Fisher Clinical ResearchT-Mobile Customer ManagementTrinity Health

Explorance World 2026 brought together L&D professionals, learning strategists, and industry innovators to explore emerging trends, practical frameworks, and cutting-edge analytics shaping the future of workforce development.

“Together, these awards and keynotes highlight that the future of learning measurement lies in the learning organization becoming a strategic partner to the business. To be a strategic partner, learning organizations need to predict business outcomes, guide business actions, and drive continuous workforce performance improvement at scale,” concluded Michael Rochelle, Chief Strategy Officer, Brandon Hall Group.

About the MTM Learning Excellence Awards

The MTM Learning Excellence Awards recognize organizations that demonstrate exceptional performance in learning measurement and outcomes. Winners are selected based on rigorous benchmarking across four critical metrics: Likert Average scores, Net Promoter Score, Scrap Learning reduction, and Estimated Performance Improvement. Drawing from billions of data points collected through MTM’s standardized measurement framework, these awards identify organizations that exemplify data-driven learning excellence and strategic L&D leadership.

About Explorance

Founded in Montreal in 2003, Explorance is a global feedback analytics company that helps organizations listen deeply, act confidently, and grow meaningfully.

Explorance supports over 1,000 organizations in more than 50 countries, including 30% of the world’s top universities and 25% of the Fortune 500. Explorance offers purpose-built platforms such as Blue, MLY, MTM, and BlueX, along with expert services in change management and analytics consulting.

With over 25 million users and more than 2 billion feedback data points, Explorance empowers institutions to enhance teaching effectiveness, employee engagement, and learning impact. With over two decades of innovation and a 95%+ customer retention rate, Explorance is recognized by Gartner, the QS Reimagine Education Awards, the Brandon Hall Group Excellence Awards, and Great Place to Work®.

Learn more at www.explorance.com.

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SOURCE Explorance Inc.

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Andy Hock Joins Accrete as Strategic Advisor

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Andy Hock, who serves as Chief Strategy Officer at Cerebras Systems, joins Accrete’s Advisory Board to help guide the company’s growth as enterprises adopt agentic AI.

NEW YORK, July 7, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Accrete, the cognitive infrastructure company building Knowledge Engines for autonomous work, today announced that Andy Hock, PhD, who serves as Chief Strategy Officer at Cerebras Systems, has joined Accrete’s Advisory Board to support the company’s continued product and commercial growth.

For more than a decade, AI has flourished on data, models, and compute–the raw ingredients of intelligence. As those ingredients become more abundant, another constraint emerges: the structure, context, and history of an organization’s knowledge. Legacy data organization is suitable, but not optimized for AI.

In the emergent era of agent-based AI, autonomous systems can reason, but they don’t inherit an organization’s hard-won experience, or keep it current, secure, and evolving. Encoding organizational knowledge to enable optimized agent workflows with judgement is exactly the problem that Accrete has solved since 2017.

Few people understand the frontier possibilities and constraints of AI scale better than Hock. At Cerebras, he leads product strategy behind the company’s revolutionary wafer-scale supercomputers that are breaking the speed limits of AI inference and training. Before joining Cerebras in 2017, he built AI data platforms at Google following its acquisition of Skybox Imaging, where he served as Senior Director of Advanced Technologies. He holds a PhD from UCLA.

According to Hock, “AI has moved from an emerging technology to a business imperative. As frontier compute and models become more accessible, enterprises need better ways to organize and operationalize institutional knowledge for agentic workflows, knowledge retention, learning, and AI-enabled decision-making. I’ve been impressed by what the Accrete team has quietly solved in the most demanding environments, and I’m excited to help the team deepen these capabilities for enterprise customers.”

“Andy helped build one of the industry’s leading AI infrastructure companies and brings deep experience in scaling advanced technologies from innovation to enterprise adoption,” said Prashant Bhuyan, Founder, CEO & Chairman of Accrete. “He gets what we’ve proven where the stakes are highest, in government, critical infrastructure, and highly regulated industries: expert judgement is what makes autonomous systems trustworthy, cost-efficient, and secure inside the customer’s trust boundary.”

As an advisor, Hock will counsel Accrete on product strategy, scalable autonomous systems, and go-to-market strategy required to move enterprises from copilots that assist people to autopilots that deliver the finished work.

About Andy Hock
Andy Hock, PhD, is Chief Strategy Officer at Cerebras Systems, where he leads product strategy, partnerships, and sovereign programs. He has more than 20 years of experience at the intersection of advanced algorithms, systems, and applied AI. Before Cerebras, he led AI data and geospatial products at Google following its acquisition of Skybox Imaging. He holds a PhD in Geophysics and Space Physics from UCLA.

About Accrete
Accrete builds cognitive infrastructure for government and enterprise customers. Founded in 2017, Accrete’s Knowledge Engine Platform unifies fragmented systems, siloed data, tacit knowledge, and decision-making into a continuously learning universal system of intelligence. Knowledge Engines give agents the shared context to reason, collaborate, decide, and act across the full complexity of an organization. As AI makes intelligence abundant, judgement is the scarce resource, and Accrete’s Knowledge Engines encode the expert judgement organizations accumulate over decades so agents can be trusted with consequential decisions. Accrete’s customers span Fortune 500 enterprises as well as U.S. defense and national security agencies. From commercial operations to national security missions, Accrete’s platform enables expert agents that deliver superintelligence purpose-built for high-stakes environments. Accrete AI Government LLC, based in Alexandria, VA, is the federal subsidiary of New York-based Accrete, Inc.

Media Contact
Dennis Yuscavitch
dennis.yuscavitch@accrete.ai
+1917-667-2523

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SOURCE Accrete

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Mr. Smokestack Joins Endura Services

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KANSAS CITY, Mo., July 7, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Endura Services announced today that Mr. Smokestack Chimney Service has joined Endura’s growing organization of chimney and hearth service companies.

Led by Jeremy Mitchell, Mr. Smokestack has built a strong reputation for quality service, customer care, and professionalism. As part of Endura, the company will continue operating with the same local team, day-to-day operations, and commitment to serving customers, while gaining access to broader support across recruiting, training, operations, marketing, technology, employee benefits, finance, safety, and growth planning.

“Jeremy and his team have built exactly the kind of company we want Endura to partner with — respected locally, serious about quality, and committed to doing right by employees and customers,” said Jerry Roche, CEO of Endura Services. “We are here to support the team and provide resources that help strong local operators continue to grow.”

“When you build and lead a business, you think about more than a transaction,” said Jeremy Mitchell. “You think about your people, your customers, your reputation, and what happens after closing. I chose Endura because their team understood that. They listened, earned my trust, and made it clear that the plan was to support Mr. Smokestack’s people and operations, not disrupt them.”

Mr. Smokestack joins other respected Endura companies, including The Mad Hatter (GA), ChimneyTek (MD), and others across the country. Each company continues to serve its local market with the benefit of additional resources, shared expertise, and a broader operating team behind it.

Endura continues to seek conversations with owners of high-quality chimney and hearth service businesses who are thinking carefully about succession, growth, and the long-term future of their teams.

About Endura Services

Formed in 2024, Endura Services is a growing chimney and hearth services organization focused on supporting strong local operating teams with the resources, systems, and professional infrastructure needed to help them grow. Endura partners with respected owners and operators who are committed to quality service, employee opportunity, customer trust, and the long-term professionalization of the chimney and hearth industry.

Contacts:

Endura Services
Joshua Isaacs
joshua.isaacs@endurapropartners.com 

Endura Services
Erik deStefanis
erik.destefanis@endurapropartners.com

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SOURCE Endura Services

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Portland DMA high schools and KOIN, more coverage than ever expected in 26-27, powered by uReport

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PORTLAND, Ore., July 7, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Since its recent announcement, over 60 Portland DMA schools have signed on to experience a rebirth in coverage for all school athletics and activities, with dozens more planning the onboard process. KOIN is fully funding this effort for the entire 26-27 academic year for every high school in the DMA.

“Schools will now be able to publish real-time stories about everything from marching band to all girls’ sports, to speech and debate competitions and much more. We look forward to students participating in this process and gaining incredible experiences through active journalism, media, tech and much more.” says Tom Keeler, VP & GM of KOIN Media. “All stories will be featured at KOIN.com to provide thousands more eyeballs on these great stories. A recent Seaside High School story was picked up from KOIN.com and seen on MSN, AOL and Yahoo Sports which shows the power of this partnership for schools to really shine!”

Seaside High School Golf State Champion: (Seaside Article – Featured on Yahoo

uReport has earned important recognition with 1EdTech TrustedED Apps Certification for Data Privacy. This recognition highlights uReport’s commitment to safeguarding student and educator data while providing schools with a trusted platform for storytelling, communication, and responsible AI use. This adds to uReport’s existing listing within the ISTE Learning Technology Directory (International Society for Transforming Education). 

“School leaders are paying attention to what KOIN is doing in Portland. It is special to bring back coverage to thousands of events long forgotten and to provide exposure to activities that have never experienced the limelight. Their stories need to be heard and are important to get into the community,” says Peter Fitzpatrick, CEO of DistrictWON, “The platform is best-in-class and schools can get their students involved in the coverage of everything, providing real-life experience and having lots of fun along the way. KOIN is leading the way to bring this coverage to the forefront.”

To learn more about KOIN’s plan to provide coverage see this video: KOIN – HS Coverage

School administrators can start immediately here: Easy School Account

For more information, contact uReport Director of Customer Success, Dan McGrath: 216-647-3857; dmcgrath@districtwon.com

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/portland-dma-high-schools-and-koin-more-coverage-than-ever-expected-in-26-27-powered-by-ureport-302819649.html

SOURCE DistrictWON

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