Directly Acquires AI Startup Kylie.ai

Directly, a provider of customer support automation, has acquired artificial intelligence start-up Kylie.ai, expanding its conversational AI capabilities and use cases to include processing refunds, returns, cancellations, and order tracking. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Kylie.ai's artificial intelligence lets companies automate customer conversations while simultaneously ensuring that all back-end processes are executed seamlessly and completely.

"AI has the power not only to increase retention and loyalty, but to build deeper and more meaningful relationships between people and brands," said Jamasen Rodriguez, co-founder and CEO of Kylie.ai, in a statement. "We couldn't have found a better partner than Directly. They are committed to building a better, more human AI experience for businesses and their customer support operations."

As a result of the acquisition, Directly's intelligent automation solutions will be able to perform a broader set of tasks, allowing customers to intelligently trigger actions from internal systems, providing automatic answers for interactions that would typically require agent intervention.

"With the technical enhancements to our platform delivered by the brilliant Kylie.ai team, I believe Directly is poised to play an even bigger role in delivering a modern customer experience," said Directly CEO Antony Brydon in a statement. "This technology is the future of customer engagement, and we're proud to bring it to our customers."

Kylie.ai's solution will be fully-integrated into the Directly expert intelligence platform and available to all customers by the spring.