AppDirect has acquired Soul Machines, the Auckland company behind lifelike AI avatars, to move its business marketplace beyond text-based interfaces.
Terms were not disclosed. Soul Machines builds digital humans that see, listen, react and remember interactions, producing an avatar with a lifelike voice that can handle face-to-face tasks such as customer support, self-service, training, employee help desks and digital commerce assistance.
AppDirect runs a commerce platform that works like an internal app store, letting administrators publish approved cloud, telecom and security services while automating billing, invoicing, provisioning and mobile management. Adding avatars lets customers deploy conversational experiences without assembling the stack themselves.
From dashboards to digital colleagues
Chairman and chief executive Nicolas Desmarais says buyers have stopped asking whether to adopt AI and started asking how to put it to work. The avatars will also be offered inside Devs.ai, AppDirect’s enterprise vibe-coding platform for building apps and agents.
The deal is a reminder that the agent boom is creating a market for interfaces, not only models, as vendors race to make automation feel less like a form and more like a colleague.
