Khoros joins IgniteTech: To transform customer connections in the AI answer engine era

The digital engagement landscape is undergoing a fundamental shift. AI answer engines are rapidly changing how customers discover and interact with brands, with 100 million weekly queries on platforms like Perplexity often bypassing official channels entirely. This evolution is creating a widening divide:

• Forward-thinking brands leveraging AI technologies are seeing dramatic improvements in response times and cost reductions

• Unprepared communities face significant drops in visibility as AI bot traffic now exceeds human traffic by 10x

• Brands without AI-enhanced capabilities risk becoming increasingly marginalized as 95% of customer service interactions will be AI-powered by 2025

As Chris Tranquill, CEO of Khoros, notes: "Our customers have built valuable communities and care programs now challenged by AI answer engines. By joining the IgniteTech family, they'll gain critical competitive advantages as slower-adoptive competitors see their digital investments lose relevance and value in the AI-first world."

This acquisition brings exciting new capabilities to the Khoros platform you rely on:

For Khoros Communities:

IgniteTech is reimagining community engagement to thrive in an AI-dominated landscape. The platform will evolve to ensure your community expertise remains discoverable and authoritative across AI systems, while sophisticated orchestration capabilities will identify and nurture the vital members who progress from knowledge seekers to community champions. Advanced content synthesis will transform scattered community wisdom into comprehensive, trusted answers that maintain proper attribution to your expert contributors.

For Khoros Care:

IgniteTech is enhancing your unified inbox with intelligent capabilities that understand context beyond keywords. The platform will evolve to detect subtle issues like sarcasm that traditional filters miss, while AI-powered assistance will help agents maintain consistent brand voice across dramatically increased interaction volumes. Sophisticated routing and prioritization will ensure urgent issues reach the right experts instantly, while routine inquiries receive immediate, accurate responses.

IgniteTech's AI approach distinctly enhances both Khoros Communities and Khoros Care with a unified philosophy that keeps humans at the center. Rather than replacing humans with AI or leaving them struggling without assistance, the implementation creates a partnership where human expertise and AI capabilities amplify each other's strengths.

As Eric Vaughan, CEO of IgniteTech, explains: "As an AI-first innovation company, we recognize the fundamental shift in how customers interact with brands. AI answer engines are rapidly widening the gap between market leaders and those failing to understand the changes required to keep up."

Given the urgency of this market shift, we're implementing a phased approach to AI enhancement that builds on your existing Khoros investments. Our Q3 2025 initiatives focus on establishing foundational AI capabilities that deliver immediate value while setting the stage for more advanced features.

The transformation will begin with:

• Building a specialized knowledge foundation that deeply understands your community's unique content, from forums and knowledge bases to support history, ensuring AI responses reflect your brand's specific expertise

• Implementing intelligent detection systems within your care workflows to identify subtle negative sentiment and potential crises that keyword filters miss, enabling proactive brand protection

• Enhancing content creation efficiency with AI-powered suggestions for social media captions, hashtags, and accessibility features like automated alt-text generation

• Establishing comprehensive privacy safeguards and telemetry systems to ensure responsible AI deployment with full transparency and compliance

For Communities, we'll deliver immediate AI-generated answers to common questions, with every response citing trusted sources from your knowledge base. For Care, we'll provide early warning systems that flag emerging issues before they escalate. Throughout this journey, we'll maintain strict data privacy standards and give you complete control over AI feature adoption.

We're excited about this new chapter and the competitive advantages it brings to your business. By combining Khoros's industry-leading platform with IgniteTech's AI innovations, we're ensuring you'll be positioned on the winning side of this fundamental market shift.