SoundHound AI Acquires LivePerson for Enhanced Customer Engagement

Major news for LivePerson and SoundHound AI! A powerful combination of voice, agentic AI and digital messaging with an exciting future ahead!

Back in the day when I was in the BPO, LivePerson was one of the vendor tools we used for human-to-human chat. To be honest, the early versions felt very clunky. But customer engagement has changed. AI has changed the game. I would have expected LivePerson to be doing the acquiring, not being acquired. That sends a signal. AI-native customer engagement platforms can now do what many manual legacy platforms simply cannot do, and do it at scale. That matters, especially in a world where customers expect faster, smarter, more natural support. Having spent over a decade in the BPO space and worked with many of these tools firsthand, I understand both their value and their pitfalls. It is also a reminder of why we are building ChatFlow the way we are, focused on the future of customer support, not the past.

The future of CX isn’t voice or digital. It’s both, seamlessly connected. Today, SoundHound AI announced an agreement to acquire LivePerson. The full customer conversation lifecycle, end-to-end. This is what enterprise customers have been asking for. The companies that win in CX won’t be the ones with the best channel. They’ll be the ones that make the channel invisible. 🔗 Read the full announcement here: https://lnkd.in/gi_dg9XC

Today we announced the definitive agreement for SoundHound AI to acquire LivePerson. The merging of these two class-leading AI organizations will create a new powerhouse for Agentic Customer Engagement and ever more intelligent CCaaS. SoundHound is an undisputed leader in Voice AI; LivePerson in enterprise digital messaging, automation, and AI orchestration. Together, with new scale, expanded capabilities, and a bit of grit, we will close longstanding gaps that brands face when advancing their AI engagement initiatives across all voice and digital channels, and take on the titans in our space. I’m looking forward to this next era for our companies, and what we will achieve. Thank you Keyvan Mohajer, John Sabino, and John Collins for giving us this chance and setting up for a bright future together.

Excited to for this next chapter as SoundHound AI and LivePerson come together, combining best-of-breed voice AI with the leading digital conversational experience platform. This is a powerful step toward delivering more connected, intelligent customer engagement across every channel!

This is an important step forward for LivePerson. We’ve entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by SoundHound AI. The reality is customers don’t think in channels. They expect to start a conversation in one place and continue it in another, without losing context or starting over. For enterprises, delivering that has historically meant stitching together multiple specialized systems across voice and digital. It’s complex, expensive, and difficult to scale. This combination changes that dynamic. By bringing SoundHound’s voice and agentic AI together with LivePerson’s enterprise conversational platform, we have the opportunity to deliver a truly end-to-end, omnichannel solution. That means simpler architectures, better performance, and the ability to deploy AI across the full customer journey with greater consistency and confidence. It also gives us the scale and resources to continue pushing innovation forward for the customers we serve. Excited about what this unlocks.

Two awesome companies driving forward customer engagement in the AI space. SoundHound AI announced an agreement to acquire LivePerson Congrats to Christopher Mina John Sabino and the rest of the LivePerson team

This is a meaningful shift in how customer experience is going to be delivered. With SoundHound AI acquiring LivePerson, voice and messaging are finally coming together in a real way. Customers don’t care what channel they’re on. They’ll call, switch to messaging, jump to web, and expect the conversation to follow them without starting over. That’s been the gap for a long time. Now we can actually close it. For the teams I work with, this opens up better containment, stronger automation, and a cleaner way to scale AI across the entire contact center. One conversation, carried across every channel. We’re just getting started.

One month into LivePerson, and the industry is already moving fast! Since joining, I have been spending a lot of time learning the CX, Contact Center, and CCaaS space. Last week, thanks to some of our trusted partners, I joined a small roundtable with industry leaders, vendors, and people actively building communities in this space. The topic with the most energy was, unsurprisingly, AI. Industry leaders are thinking hard about where AI can actually fit into customer support workflows, where it makes economic sense, where it removes friction, and where it improves the experience for both agents and customers. The impact goes beyond business efficiency. Better customer engagement touches everyday people at scale. Anyone who has waited too long for support, repeated the same issue 3 times, or struggled to get a simple answer knows exactly why this matters. That is what makes this space so interesting to me. Then, just 2 nights ago, LivePerson announced it will be acquired by SoundHound AI. It came as a surprise, of course. But my honest reaction is positive. SoundHound Japan has been operating in Japan for almost 20 years, and that kind of local heritage matters in this market. There is still a lot to understand, but I see real strength in bringing together LivePerson’s enterprise customer engagement platform, SoundHound AI’s voice AI technology, and its long standing presence in Japan. For SoundHound AI, this also feels like a meaningful strategic move beyond its traditional core business. A clear bet on the future of CX, where messaging and voice come together more naturally. A lot is still unfolding, but I am excited to be part of this change and to help shape what it can mean for CX in Japan.

Customer engagement platform Braze (Nasdaq: BRZE) has released two new research studies from Forrester Consulting and Cowry that highlight fundamental shifts in how brands must approach customer engagement in the age of AI. Braze has also recently delivered a new set of AI capabilities that aim to deliver engaging and relevant experiences for their customers... https://lnkd.in/eZe8p_h3