Automation Anywhere Buys Boost.ai to Push Into Voice AI

Automation Anywhere Buys Boost.ai to Push Into Voice AI

Automation Anywhere has agreed to acquire Boost.ai, a company that builds conversational and voice AI, from its owner Nordic Capital. The deal gives the enterprise automation firm a direct route into customer-facing work: the phone calls, chats and support requests that usually sit in front of the back-office processes it already automates.

The two companies have not shared deal terms. What they have described is the strategy behind the deal, and it says a lot about where enterprise automation vendors are heading.

The "autonomous enterprise" pitch

Automation Anywhere sells agentic automation and orchestration software. Its stated goal is what it calls the "autonomous enterprise," an operating model in which a business runs up to 80% autonomously or with AI assistance.

Until now, that vision has focused mostly on internal processes. Boost.ai adds the front end. Its technology lets AI accept a request from a customer or an employee and then route it through the middle and back office until the task is done.

Chief Executive Mihir Shukla described the idea in terms of three kinds of work that every enterprise runs: serving customers, supporting employees and running the business. In his view, these usually operate separately. "With Automation Anywhere and Boost.ai, we intend to be the leading offering to give every enterprise an autonomous operation that listens, decides and acts across all three," he said.

What Boost.ai brings

Boost.ai is not a small experiment. According to the companies, it has:

  1. More than 650 deployments
  2. Roughly 600 live AI agents
  3. Support for more than 150 million automated conversations
  4. A platform that works in more than 36 languages

Its customer base numbers in the hundreds and leans heavily toward regulated sectors and Europe. Financial services, telecommunications and insurance are prominent. Named customers include Nordea Bank Abp, DNB Bank ASA, Credit Union of Colorado and the trading platform Trading 212.

Compliance is a large part of the pitch. Boost.ai says its platform keeps messages secure and private and complies with the General Data Protection Regulation, the European Union's main data protection law, and HIPAA, the US law that governs the privacy of health information.

Boost.ai CEO Jerry Haywood argued that his company's track record shows conversational and voice AI "can operate at enterprise scale with the reliability, compliance, and governance that regulated industries require."

Those customers should fit well with Automation Anywhere's own base, which runs into the thousands globally and includes many companies in similarly complex industries.

The second piece of a larger puzzle

This is not Automation Anywhere's first acquisition in this area. In late 2025 it bought Aisera and folded that company's agentic AI platform into its agentic process automation ecosystem. With Boost.ai added, the company claims it will have the most complete offering on the market for autonomous office work.

It describes that offering in three parts:

  • Customer operations: AI agents handling voice, chat and digital channels.
  • Employee operations: resolving requests in IT, finance and human resources.
  • Business operations: critical processes running on enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and other applications.

Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Ankur Kothari framed it as a shift in how companies should think about AI. "The real transformation from AI will come when enterprises stop measuring agents and start redesigning how work gets done around outcomes," he said.

A market still taking shape

Voice AI is still a maturing category. Today, most of what a voice agent could do for customer service is handled by contact centers: human staff working on existing telephone infrastructure to complete tasks for callers. The newer model lets a person simply talk to a computer that then triggers the right tool. Automation Anywhere wants to be the layer that makes that connection, whether the request comes from a customer, an employee or a business process.

Adoption is growing, but unevenly. Astute Analytica's AI Voice Agent Market report put the market at $3 billion in 2025 and projected it to reach $45.1 billion by 2035. Customer support automation held the largest share of that market in late 2025.

Our Take

This deal suggests that the line between "automation software" and "customer service AI" is starting to disappear. For years, robotic process automation vendors worked behind the scenes, while chatbot and voice companies handled the conversation. Automation Anywhere is betting that customers want one system that can both hear a request and finish the job.

It fits a wider pattern. Large platforms are trying to become the single agent layer across a company, as seen with SAP turning Joule into an agentic work layer and Google Cloud's push for one assistant everywhere. Voice in particular is drawing attention, with Microsoft also building speech models aimed at real-time voice agents.

It is worth watching how quickly Boost.ai's tools are integrated with the Aisera platform, and whether its strength in European regulated industries carries over to Automation Anywhere's wider customer base. The 80% autonomy goal is ambitious. Whether customers actually redesign work around outcomes, as Kothari suggests, will be the real test.