Google LLC has acquired Onward, a small San Francisco-based startup that was building a customer service automation platform, in what appears to be essentially a talent buy.

The price of the acquisition is not known, but VentureBeat reported Tuesday that co-founders Rémi Cossart and Pramod Thammaiah have joined Google along with a small number of other employees from the company. Cossart was previously an analyst, while Chief Executive Officer Thammaiah was previously a product manager at Google.

“We started Onward with the mission of allowing computers to participate in natural, human conversations,” read a post on the company’s website, since deleted. “With Google, we’ll be able to expand the reach of the technologies that power Onward. These core technologies are what got us excited in the first place, and we are excited to bring them to Google.”

According to Crunchbase, Onward was a customer service automation platform that was seeking to allow customers to achieve something called “Automation40” where 40 percent of tickets and 40 percent of messages are automated and a 40-second average response time is achieved.

To achieve that promise, Onward offered an artificially intelligent enterprise chatbot platform that leveraged natural language processing to extract meaning from customers’ messages. To facilitate better decision-making, the platform drew on signals including location, login status and historical activity to personalize and contextualize responses. The platform integrated with Zendesk, Help Scout, Salesforce, Hubspot, Shopify, Spree and Solidus.

The status of the AI chatbot is unknown, but given that the website is dead, it can be presumed that the chatbot is too.

Image: Onward