Today marks an exciting new chapter at Invoca as we announce the acquisition of Symbl.ai, an AI-driven human intelligence platform. Together with Symbl.ai, we will accelerate our vision of empowering revenue teams to drive efficient growth using the best of digital, AI, and human touch experiences. I wanted to share our underlying perspectives in making this acquisition and where things are going, and how the combination of Invoca and Symbl.ai is uniquely positioned to benefit our customers in this evolution.
A Market Shift from Digital Transformation to AI-Powered Experiences
For more than a decade, brands — and especially incumbents — have been shifting their analog experiences to the digital-first world. They’ve built mobile apps, deployed eCommerce, launched digital self-service tools, and shifted budgets from offline marketing channels to digital advertising platforms, like Google and Meta.
But just as they’ve gotten the hang of digital, a whole new era of AI innovation is changing the game yet again. The slew of AI-related announcements at Google I/O and Google Marketing Live highlight the challenges for marketing and commerce teams to anticipate where things go next, while contact center teams are trying to figure out the balance of AI-powered automation with human engagement. Companies are looking for guidance and support as they navigate this shift from the digital transformation era to the world of AI-powered experiences.
The Imperative to Drive Business Outcomes and Growth
In recent years, business leaders have managed successive waves of economic instability — COVID, inflation, a spike in interest rates, and now tariffs. Every business has had to tighten their focus on tying new investments to measurable business outcomes, especially revenue growth.
The artificial divides and narrowly defined goals that typically pushed marketing, commerce, and contact center teams into their own silos are disappearing. Innovative leaders are looking at their top-to-bottom revenue funnel as a cohesive whole, tying the buying journey together and evaluating performance and investment opportunities around revenue impact. It is more important than ever to connect data, analytics, and technology around a true north revenue metric that spans acquisition, cross-sell, and retention.
Invoca + Symbl.ai: A Leap Forward in Orchestrating the Buying Journey
We believe that the combination of Invoca and Symbl enables our customers to navigate this shift from digital to AI, all while meeting the new budget standards for driving efficient growth. In particular, we plan to leverage Symbl technology in three specific ways:
1. Orchestrating AI-powered conversational experiences
Today, Invoca customers use the first-party data we collect to optimize digital advertising and empower agents in the contact center. But many buying journeys go sideways at this very intersection of digital and contact center when web experiences don’t fully deliver, agents aren’t readily available, or contact centers are closed.
AI enables a new class of conversational experiences that bridge these two worlds at the exact point where many companies struggle to connect the buying journey. Looking to book an appointment after hours, when the contact center is closed? Want to ask specific personal questions after browsing the website, but without making a call? Happy to make a purchase over SMS, without opening a laptop or fat fingering a mobile commerce flow? With Symbl technology, we will solve these micro-moments where friction in the buying journey frustrates consumers and reduces go-to-market efficiency.
2. Empowering higher quality human engagement in the contact center
For years, Invoca customers have used our AI technology to provide contact center agents actionable feedback on how to serve consumers better and drive top line results. We launched our contact center solution in 2021 and were named a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Real-Time Revenue Execution Platforms, Q2 2024, a few years later.
Symbl takes these capabilities to an entirely new level, with an LLM trained exclusively on human-to-human conversations. Unlike broad-based LLMs, these models are designed from the ground up to understand the nuances of human conversations in the contact center. By capturing interaction flow, emotional tone, and long-range context, its AI can surface insights that are emotionally aware, contextually persistent, and immediately useful, empowering your agents to deliver a top-tier experience in the moment of truth represented by a human connection.
3. Leaving no stone unturned in optimizing experiences and investments
With agentic AI, brands can measure and optimize every aspect of the consumer experience and the ROI on the investments behind that experience.
In the past, teams would automate where they could, and apply the 80/20 rule to improve the biggest areas where human engagement was still required. But agentic AI fundamentally changes what software can do on behalf of users and frees up whole new levels of human creativity.
What if you could individually prioritize every caller in your sales queue, based on real-time intent signals and likelihood to purchase? What if you could ensure that a sales agent understands exactly what your potential buyer wants, before anyone speaks a word? Or even use AI to complete more mundane tasks, like ensuring that calls to your locations are connecting to live numbers and staffed teams? We are embedding the agentic capabilities of Symbl.ai across the entire Invoca platform, giving you the ability to polish even the most minute sources of friction in your buying journey and thus increase your go to market efficiency.
I am incredibly excited by this new technology and the team of forward-leaning AI experts that are joining Invoca. You will start to see the impact of Symbl on the Invoca roadmap in the second half of this year. If you’re interested in learning more, feel free to ask your Invoca account team or drop me a line on LinkedIn. We look forward to shaping the future of AI-powered buying experiences with you!
