AppDirect acquires Soul Machines to expand enterprise AI experiences

For best results when printing this announcement, please click on link below: Soul Machines Joins AppDirect to Advance the Next Interface of AI: Digital Teammates This acquisition combines Soul Machines' category-defining technology digital teammates with AppDirect's global distribution network to redefine the future of work through human-centered AI Soul Machines, the experiential AI company behind autonomous digital teammates, today announced a new chapter following its acquisition by AppDirect, the world's leading B2B subscription commerce platform. By combining Soul Machines' category-defining technology with AppDirect's powerful B2B distribution network, this transaction will help expand a new generation of AI experiences that are more natural, conversational, and accessible for businesses around the world. AppDirect will showcase the next generation of Soul Machines experiences at AppDirect’s annual Thrive conference. AI has quickly evolved from chatbots to autonomous agents. What comes next is a more natural way for people to interact with AI: persistent, multimodal intelligence that works with employees, engages customers, and builds trusted relationships across text, voice, video and, eventually, robotics. As these systems become more responsive to facial expressions and other nonverbal cues, they evolve from tools to digital teammates, making AI more intuitive, conversational, and accessible wherever trust and empathy matter most in business. Soul Machines built this technology before the market was ready to adopt it at scale. Founded by two-time Academy Award winner Dr. Mark Sagar, whose facial technology powered Avatar and King Kong, Soul Machines pioneered its patented Digital Brain and Autonomous Animation technology, creating digital teammates that can see, hear, respond, and animate themselves in real time. Until recently, compute costs and latency kept lifelike, real-time AI out of reach for broad commercial adoption. Those barriers are now collapsing. Digital teammates are especially valuable where important work goes unsupported because time, expertise or staff are limited. Today, Soul Machines gives employees a natural, face-to-face way to access company knowledge, starting with common HR and IT questions. In the near to medium term, these capabilities are expected to expand into learning and development, including training-video creation, live coaching and role-play simulations. Over time, digital teammates will move beyond answering questions and guiding next steps to taking instructions, working across business systems and completing tasks on a user’s behalf, functioning as a virtual team. This makes AI easier to use without requiring people to master prompting techniques or navigate complex workflows. "Digital teammates go beyond white-collar work. They’re for every type of business that has never had enough people to do all the work that needs to get done,” said Chris Herd, General Manager, Soul Machines. “Digital teammat