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Voice AI Agents Are Eating the Chatbot Business Alive
In 2026 the tidy world of customer-service chatbots split in two. On one side, legacy vendors like LivePerson and Verloop.io are being sold for parts; on the other, voice-native upstarts like Retell AI and deep-pocketed enterprise players like Kore.ai race to answer your next call in under a second.
Voice AI Is Eating the Call Center, One Angry Caller at a Time
Observe.AI, PolyAI, Botpress, Forethought and a shrinking pack of rivals are racing to replace hold music with software that talks back. The funding says they are winning. The person still stuck on the line is not so sure.
Six Live Chat Tools and the Bubble That Runs Your Website
HelpCrunch, WATI, Pure Chat, LivePerson, Rocket.Chat and Provide Support all sell the same small box in the corner of your screen. The differences between them explain how customer support quietly turned into a software industry worth billions.
Provide Support Skipped the AI Race to Keep Live Chat Simple
While LivePerson chased conversational AI and Fortune 500 contracts, this quiet New York shop has run the same unlimited-chat, all-features-included live chat since 2003 - and more than 10,000 customers still pay for it.
Tony Owens
Tony Alika Owens is the Chief Executive Officer of Amperity, the AI-powered lakehouse customer data platform, a role he took in November 2024. A veteran enterprise software operator with more than 20 years of experience, he spent a decade at Salesforce running field operations in the Americas as the company grew from $1.4 billion to well over $20 billion in revenue, held a group vice president role at Oracle, and served as president of worldwide field operations at LivePerson. He also sits on several boards and is known for a relentless focus on customer value.
Vitaly Gordon
Vitaly Gordon is the co-founder and CEO of Faros AI, an AI-native engineering intelligence platform he started in 2019 with former Salesforce colleagues. Before Faros, he founded Salesforce Einstein and led it as VP of Engineering and Data Science, scaling it from zero to a platform serving billions of predictions per day. Earlier in his career he was a data science lead at LinkedIn and a data science manager at LivePerson. He now builds tooling that helps engineering organizations measure and improve productivity, and navigate the shift to AI-augmented software development.
Justin Smith
Justin Smith is the CEO of SamCart, an Austin, Texas based e-commerce and checkout platform that has helped more than 75,000 creators and entrepreneurs sell over $3.5 billion in products and services online. He rose through the company from Head of Product to Chief Operating Officer before stepping into the CEO role, and he has become a frequent voice on the future of the creator economy, the shift from awareness to conversion in online selling, and how AI is reshaping how small businesses sell. Before SamCart he worked in marketing and business development at high-growth SaaS companies including Curalate and LivePerson.
Manlio Carrelli
Manlio Carrelli is the Chief Executive Officer of Stensul, the New York based marketing creation platform that helps enterprise teams build governed email and landing page campaigns at scale. Appointed in May 2026, he arrived from CB Insights, where he led the AI predictive intelligence company and launched one of the industry's first AI agent workforces. With roughly two decades leading consumer and enterprise software companies - including revenue leadership at LivePerson and product and marketing roles at Intermedia - Carrelli has built a career at the intersection of AI, growth, and go-to-market. At Stensul he is focused on a single idea: as AI floods the enterprise with content, governance and compliance are no longer optional.