October 29, 2026 • 6 min read
Automation Anywhere Steps Toward the Autonomous Enterprise with Boost.ai Acquisition
Director of Content & Market Research
October 29, 2026
In early October 2026, Automation Anywhere signed a definitive agreement to acquire Boost.ai.
Boost.ai is a conversational AI solution widely deployed in regulated industries, typically to autonomously resolve contact center queries.
Its financial services customers include Santander, Nordea, and Metro Bank, while it also has a deep roster across insurance, telecoms, and the public sector.
Automation Anywhere has a strong presence in those very same industries, among others.
Yet, it’s the ability to connect the customer conversation, which Boost.ai owns, with the processes running across the broader business that defines this acquisition.
Automation Anywhere will take the workflows that guide customer conversations and extend them throughout the organization, enabling more sophisticated actions across enterprise systems.
As Mihir Shukla, CEO & Chairman of Automation Anywhere, told CX Foundation: “Conversational AI is only as valuable as an enterprise’s ability to turn intent into action.”
“By combining Boost.ai with Automation Anywhere’s orchestration, enterprise context, and governance, we can help organizations move from answering a customer request to completing it securely and at scale.”
Some may note that Automation Anywhere already has a similar conversational AI capability, thanks to its Aisera acquisition in November 2025.
The difference? Aisera focuses more squarely on automating employee conversations; Boost.ai adds the customer specialism.
By combining both providers’ capabilities with its own portfolio, Automation Anywhere extends its mission to manage, automate, and govern business processes across both employee and customer operations.
In doing so, it steps forward toward its vision for the Autonomous Enterprise.
Why Boost.ai?
In 2025, CaCube Consulting estimated that the conversational AI market includes over 650 vendors selling to customer service and sales teams.
So, why did Automation Anywhere choose Boost.ai?
Like many similar acquisitions in this space, including the recent SoundHound-Liveperson deal, Boost.ai’s customer base was likely a motivating factor.
Yet, alongside that and broad industry validation of its product (as evident in the latest Magic Quadrant for Conversational AI), Boost.ai’s sharp focus is another significant draw.
In a market with many disruptors, Boost.ai wanted to work with customers that managed difficult, deeply integrated, and highly regulated environments.
“Boost.ai has earned the trust of customers in some of the world’s most complex and regulated industries by solving hard problems and delivering real outcomes.”
Take financial services. There, it orchestrates experiences across core banking systems, loan origination solutions, authentication platforms, and more. It understands the complexities and guides customers through the transformation.
That aligns closely with Automation Anywhere’s philosophy of partnering closely with customers and owning the complexity of integrating their environments.
What Will Boost.ai’s Role Be in the Autonomous Enterprise?
Automation Anywhere’s Autonomous Enterprise vision is to enable enterprises to operate autonomously wherever they choose, without limitations.
Critically, that involves using AI, contextual business intelligence, and unified orchestration to coordinate people, systems, workflows, and agents so that work completes itself end to end.
There are three elements to the Autonomous Enterprise: autonomous customer operations, autonomous employee operations, and the autonomous business processes that drive everything else.
Boost.ai is the chapter that sits under autonomous customer operations, providing the agentic front door for customers into the enterprise. Automation Anywhere operates the enterprise.
“Boost is hugely powerful in the regulated space at the front end. Automation Anywhere is very powerful in the same industries, with a deep understanding of the processes and over 40,000 integrations into back-end systems,” noted Jerry Haywood, CEO of Boost.ai.
“Where they can’t integrate, they have computer-interface technology that gets into systems through a username and password, much as personal agents do today.”
“Bring those two together, and there’s no limit. You can understand everything and have access to everything. It becomes a customer design choice about where to take the customer journey, because you could automate everything now.”
To this point, chatter around conversational AI is becoming less about: "How much can we automate?” And more about: “How does the AI experience reflect our brand?”
Other Benefits for Automation Anywhere & Boost.ai
Alongside broadening the scope for conversation automation, another advantage of the acquisition is that it brings Automation Anywhere and Boost.ai closer to key enterprise decision-makers.
Historically, Boost.ai didn’t need the CIO. Its platform spoke to customer operations leaders.
However, with the CIO wrapping their arms around everything AI-related inside the organization, especially in larger enterprises, boost.ai needs that voice.
Automation Anywhere had the opposite challenge. It’s highly relevant to the CIO and not as relevant to the customer side.
Together, Automation Anywhere & Boost.ai aim to deliver a platform that serves both.
“You need a platform that can address both the CX and IT sides, and I think this combination does that well.”
Another benefit is in how Automation Anywhere can bolster Boost.ai’s current core platform.
For instance, Haywood highlights opportunities to strengthen Boost.ai’s email proposition and enhance its document ingestion and understanding capabilities. These are areas that require significant investment and expertise to deliver securely for regulated organizations.
With the depth of capability and resources available through Automation Anywhere, Boost.ai can seize these opportunities and accelerate innovation.
The Market Outlook
Once the acquisition goes through, Haywood expects to accelerate innovation, leveraging Automation Anywhere’s broader resources and capabilities while also adapting to evolving consumer engagement preferences.
On the latter, the CEO points toward the rise of personal agents acting as machine customers, who don’t mind sitting in a queue, will spam different channels, and will not stop until they achieve an outcome.
Haywood also believes this trend may drive further consolidation in a space where, over the past year, Salesforce snapped up Fin.ai, Zendesk rolled up Forethrought, and SoundHound acquired LivePerson (after previously purchasing Amelia and Interactions).
Yet, for Wayne Butterfield, Founder of STX, this acquisition stands out. “This acquisition closes the gap between the customer conversation and the work actually getting done in the background, " he summarized. “Nobody else has put those two together at this scale yet.”
For Haywood, this ultimately makes the acquisition “the most compelling combination of two organizations in this space today.”