AppDirect Inc., the cloud-based business commerce platform and marketplace provider, today announced it acquired Soul Machines Ltd., an artificial intelligence human-like avatar experience provider, to expand the company’s ability to deploy interactive experiences for sales, advisers, support and services.

As more organizations move beyond experimenting with AI, many are looking for ways to use the technology to interface with users. By bringing in Soul Machines, AppDirect is seeking to provide a digital “human face” for apps on its platform for customers and employees.

AppDirect provides a commerce service that lets administrators make company-approved services available to users through a custom catalog that functions like an App Store on the front end and adds management features such as centralized billing on the back end.

The company bills itself as an “everything store” for business technology, including cloud applications, infrastructure, telecom and security tools. It automates everything from recurring billing, invoicing, user provisioning and mobile management. This simplifies how business customers discover, buy, sell and manage software and cloud services.

“Soul Machines helps us take the next step in making AI more useful and more accessible for businesses,” said AppDirect Chairman and Chief Executive Nicolas Desmarais. “Companies are no longer asking whether they should adopt AI; they’re asking how to put it to work in ways that improve customer engagement, support employees and drive real business outcomes.

Soul Machines provides human-like digital avatars that are highly engaging, see, listen, react and remember interactions. The company says the avatars even appear to empathize more like a real human, generating a greater sense of trust and engagement.

By recreating a human-like appearance that looks, acts and behaves close to a person, with a lifelike voice, the platform can automate face-to-face tasks for critical business functions such as customer support and self-service, learning and development, training, employee help desks and digital commerce assistance.

AppDirect said this acquisition will help its customers move beyond text-based AI interfaces to more engaging experiences by adding human-based avatars to applications. Soul Machine’s AI avatars will also soon be available in apps built in Devs.ai, an enterprise vibe-coding platform powered by AppDirect that lets developers build apps and agents.

Image: Soul Machines