Toronto-based Wysdom, which provides software and services to improve artificial intelligence (AI)-powered virtual agents, has been acquired by Minneapolis, Minn.-based Calabrio. The financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.
Wysdom founder and CEO Ian Collins will now serve as senior vice president of virtual agent solutions at Calabrio.
Both companies operate in a similar space. Wysdom aims to help chatbot operators improve the performance of their virtual agents, while Calabrio provides a suite of solutions for customer support centres.
Calabrio CEO Kevin Jones said the deal will allow its customers to optimize resource allocation across human and virtual agents.
“By unlocking core insights across all interactions at scale, Wysdom’s powerful AI [and machine learning]-fuelled analytics will ensure that our customers are able to leverage all of the valuable data in their omnichannel contact centre,” Jones said in a statement.
Founded in 2012 as CrowdCare by CEO Ian Collins and CTO Jeff Brunet, the company launched the AI-powered Wysdom app in early 2014, coinciding with a $1-million funding round. CrowdCare secured an additional $3.5 million later that year. The app would troubleshoot cell phone issues and customer questions by automatically gathering and analyzing mobile device data.
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CrowdCare officially rebranded to Wysdom in 2017 after raising $8.5 million to fuel its global expansion. The round saw participation from ScaleUP Ventures, Brightspark Ventures, and Mantella Venture Partners.
Now, Wysdom’s offerings are aimed at developing software and services that help fine-tine virtual agent performance, such as chat and voice bots, in real time.
Calabrio provides digital solutions for customer contact centers with its Calabrio ONE platform. The company says the platform helps boost workforce efficiency by using connected data, AI-fueled analytics, automated workforce management, and personalized coaching.
It was this divide between pure AI-driven support and live support that brought Wysdom to Calabrio, according to a recent LinkedIn post from Collins. He believes humans and virtual agents will soon be working together in a single department, rather than in competition.
“We realized that the days of virtual agents being an independent product within a customer experience strategy for the enterprise market were numbered. Virtual and human agents would soon merge onto a single contact center platform and leading enterprise clients were already working toward this goal,” Collins said in the post.
He added that, together, the companies will give clients “a full suite measuring customer experience, effectiveness, and cost across every channel in the AI-powered contact center of the future.”
Following the acquisition, Collins has become the senior vice president of virtual agent solutions at Calabrio.
Feature image courtesy Petr Macháček on Unsplash.
