After acquiring AT&T's Watson speech recognition platform in 2014, Frankin-based Interactions is making another purchase in the artificial intelligence space to strengthen its product line for automated customer care.
The company announced on Tuesday that it has acquired Digital Roots, a Michigan-based startup whose software helps brands find customers on social media through the use of AI. Using natural language processing, machine learning and what it calls "social AI," the company is able to parse and prioritize which social media posts mentioning a brand should receive a response.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Digital Roots' 15 employees will join Interactions, which employs 350 people across offices in Massachusetts, Indiana, New Jersey and New York.
The acquisition comes after Interactions raised a $56 million round last year led by Revolution Growth, NewSpring Capital and Comcast Ventures, bringing total funding to $167 million. The company also hired Jason Bristow, who was Amazon's vice president of finance and treasurer from 2003 to 2014, as its CFO last summer.
Interactions provides virtual assistant software to help large enterprises offload work from human employees and help them save money by handling a wide range of complex customer service transactions. The company has about 45 customers, CEO Mike Iacobucci told me, including Hyatt Hotels, Humana and TXU Energy. While he declined to disclose any revenue figures, he said annual revenue has been growing about 50-60 percent.
Iacobucci said the company provides an omnichannel solution for its software, meaning its virtual assistant can be used to communicate with people on phone lines, text message or online chat. With Digital Roots, the company gets another important channel through which to communicate with people who have potential customer service needs. While Digital Roots' software will remain as a standalone service, it will integrate into Interactions' software, Iacobucci said.
Jay Wolcott, CEO and founder of Digital Roots, said his company's software can determine which social media posts a brand should respond to and whether a customer support or marketing employee should handle the respond. This is made possible by millions of social media posts fed through Digital Roots' system to help it learn which posts to pay attention to. It also lets brands respond to customers on their respective channels, which includes Twitter, Facebook, discussion forums, and ratings and review sites. From there, the software learns more about which interactions stick.
Iacobucci said Interactions used some of the money it raised last year to purchase Digital Roots. Does that mean the company will make more acquisitions in the future? Iacobucci doesn't rule it out.
"It's always possible," he said.
