Meet Nico: The AI Agent Built for the Next-Gen Buyer Journey

Every marketer I know has some level of AI anxiety. Most of us, if we’re being honest, have an existential dread that AI is coming for our jobs. But many of us are also worried that the playbook we’ve run for 10 years to engage and convert customers is now obsolete. For B2C marketers, this pain is particularly acute. 

AI-based search and LLMs are causing website traffic to crater. Most consumers now treat generative AI as a normal first stop. Our new 2026 B2C Buyer Experience Report shows that 58% of consumers used it to research a high-stakes purchase last year, up from 41% the year before. Buyers arrive informed and ready to move, and they expect you to keep up.

AI is also disrupting how we engage further down the funnel. But you don’t need to be Petyr Baelish to know that disruption creates opportunity, because the B2C buyer journey is fundamentally broken. 

Consumers fill out a form on your website, and don’t get a response for 24 hours. They call your business, and no one answers.  That experience is disconnected from consumers’ expectations, as our study also showed that 56% of consumers expect a response within an hour of submitting a lead form, and 79% will leave for a competitor that answers faster. Every slow reply is pipeline you already paid to generate, walking straight out the door.

Nico is How You Turn Conversations Into Revenue

Nico changes all of this. Nico is Invoca’s AI revenue conversion agent that enables you to engage, qualify, and convert more leads into revenue. Nico engages buyers across voice and messaging, reaching them in more of the places where high-intent demand starts, and too often disappears when buyers aren't engaged quickly. 

Powered by your first-party data from across the buyer journey, Nico engages leads in real time and connects every conversation to a measurable outcome. 

He works for businesses in considered-purchase industries — like healthcare, home services, financial services, insurance, automotive, and telecom — where prospects want to have a conversation before they commit.

Fully customizable to fit any brand, Nico draws on your business's first-party data and learns from your best-performing phone conversations where top reps turn interest into revenue. That means he mirrors how your best reps win, rather than relying on generic data trained on someone else's customers. 

He is also informed by digital intent data, like the ads a lead clicked, the web pages they visited, items in their shopping cart, and more, to provide personalized experiences and pass highly-qualified leads to the right human agent to convert them.

To see why that matters, it helps to look at what the buyer journey has actually become.

What The Next-Gen Buyer Journey Looks Like

The journey isn't a funnel you map and measure after the fact anymore. It's a live, often AI-driven conversation that runs from discovery through decision. Here are the five qualities that must define the conversation.

Responsive. It starts the instant someone shows intent. A form submission or form abandonment, a call, a text — each one gets an immediate response instead of sitting in a queue until someone gets around to it. That's a direct fix for the speed gap, and it's the difference between booking an appointment and the buyer booking one elsewhere.

Personalized, even for a first-time buyer. Because people arrive having already done their homework, and they expect you to pick up where they left off, not start from scratch. That means a conversation shaped by their real digital journey: the ads they clicked, the pages they browsed, and the intent they've already signaled. Someone you've never spoken to can still get an exchange that feels like you already understand why they're here.

Engaging. The conversations that work are natural and built around moving someone toward a decision. The bar has shifted, too, as 63% of consumers can't reliably tell whether they're talking to AI or a person. Sounding human is just the starting line now. What counts is whether the conversation actually gets the buyer to where they need to be.

Multichannel. Let the consumer drive. Some want to text, some want to talk, some want it in writing, and plenty want to switch partway through. A next-gen journey follows the buyer across text, voice, and email rather than forcing them into whichever channel is convenient for you.

Connected. This is the one most AI agents can't pull off, and it means two things. First, the conversation carries its context wherever it goes, so a buyer never has to repeat themselves when they move from a text to a call. Second, the whole journey is connected, linking the ad spend that drove the click to the revenue that closed. That connection is what makes everything else provable.

How Nico Performs in the Real World

University Hospitals put Nico to work and saw it pay off quickly.

"On the first night of launching Nico, it recovered 25 appointments," said Matt Eaves, VP of Digital Marketing, University Hospitals. "Additionally, the AI agent received a text from a patient within our hospital who was reaching out for help. Because he stated he was in the hospital, the AI correctly informed him to find a staff member for assistance. It's an impressive use case of something that wasn't in the AI's scripting, yet it handled it appropriately."

Recovering 25 appointments in night one is the revenue story. The rest is the trust story, where an unscripted, sensitive message was recognized for what it was and handed off to the people equipped to handle it.

The United States Gold Bureau also saw fast results with Nico. "Because Invoca already had our conversation data, the agent was trained and ready to go almost immediately, and it just keeps getting smarter," said Jody Farmer, CMO at U.S. Gold Bureau.

One Connected Platform to Drive Revenue Growth 

A live, AI-driven buyer journey only holds together if it runs as a single, connected system, not a stack of tools that hand buyers off to each other and drop context along the way. That's what Invoca is built for: a Data + AI platform that acts as the system of record and the system of action for revenue-driving buyer journeys, bringing intelligence, execution, and measurement together on a single first-party data foundation.

Your buyers are already having AI conversations across their whole journey. The work in front of you is making sure the one that matters most — the moment they're ready to act — happens with you, converts, and shows up as revenue you can actually prove.

Nico is available today through Invoca's AI Messaging Agent, with AI Voice Agent now in beta.

Schedule a demo to learn more and start driving more revenue with Nico.