Forward Deployed Engineer

Genesys hooks Pinkfish. Contact center vendor Genesys snaps up agentic AI automation platform provider Pinkfish, bolstering its ability to orchestrate and govern AI agents. June 30, 2026 No Jitter Brief: * Contact center solution vendor Genesys acquired Pinkfish on Tuesday. Pinkfish brings more than 500 integrations supporting 25,000 MCP tools spanning CRM, ERP, IT, HR, order management, billing and other business applications into the Genesys Cloud platform. * Pinkfish described its Agentic Automation platform as a way to create automations using natural language. "Pinkfish understands your intent and builds the automation by connecting to hundreds of systems," wrote Charanya "CK" Kannan, Co-founder & CEO of Pinkfish last October. It combines document processing, API integrations and AI agents into a "single deterministic platform...[that] runs exactly the same way every time." * According to Rebecca Wettemann, CEO and principal analyst with Valoir, Pinkfish has looked at how to orchestrate and build automation so that customers don't have to decide themselves between what they do via deterministic workflows versus probabilistic reasoning. "If I can automate a workflow where I don't have to call an LLM, it's going to be faster, more efficient and more cost-effective," she said. No Jitter Insight: Many customer service inquiries are similar and highly structured: order status, order refund, billing inquiry, etc. Generative and agentic AI-powered solutions can answer those questions but can't necessarily act to resolve them. When an AI agent does act autonomously, organizations need to rest assured that it not only does the right thing but doesn't also run up exorbitant token bills by re-reasoning its way through resolutions that have a replicable process. "How do I make sure that AI is not going to run off in the middle of the night and do something deleterious to my business, and I'm not going to wake up in the morning and find this huge token bill that I hadn't planned on," Wettemann said. "Those are the two things that customers are really worried about right now." The Pinkfish acquisition builds on Genesys's February Agentic Virtual Agent announcement, which was itself the first fruit of its Scaled Cognition, large action model partnership last October. (Scaled Cognition raised $100 million in a Series A funding round led by Khosla Ventures, The Wall Street Journal reported last week. Genesys also participated in that funding round.) Wettemann noted that the Pinkfish purchase is also about securing talented people and bringing them in house. "There are a limited number of people who can deliver this kind of innovation and do it well," she said. "As much as a IP and code arms race that we're seeing in the AI space right now, we're seeing a talent arms race, where acquiring a company and having those people on the team for a couple of years is a real way to accelerate things." Pinkfish launched in January 2024, co-founded by two former Talkdesk executives. A year later, the company received $7.6 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Norwest Venture Partners. Genesys expects Pinkfish capabilities to become available to Genesys Cloud customers through the Genesys AppFoundry by the end of July 2026 and expects to begin introducing Pinkfish capabilities natively within Genesys Cloud by the end of January 2027. Terms of the Pinkfish acquisition were not disclosed. Senior Editor Matt Vartabedian is the senior editor for No Jitter, a role he has held since March 2023. Matt covers generative and agentic AI as it pertains to enterprise communications - i.e., unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) and the contact center. He also covers related areas, including customer experience (CX) and customer relationship management (CRM). Matt began his B2B journalism career in the late 1990s writing for several call center and telecommunications print magazines. He then spent two decades as a cellular industry analyst, where he authored market reports, articles, presentations and opinion pieces grounded in significant primary and secondary research. You can reach Matt at [email protected] and on LinkedIn. Want more No Jitter stories in your Google search results?

Scaled Cognition raises $100M in Series A funding round. Scaled Cognition, an AI lab, recently raised a $100M Series A to develop their APT (Agentic Pretrained Transformer) model, which is designed to deliver human-like conversational fluency while eliminating hallucinations for high stakes enterprise actions. Scaled Cognition announced a $100 million Series A funding round, led by Khosla Ventures with participation from Genesys. The round values the company at approximately $750-850 million post money, reflecting strong investor conviction in its specialized approach to enterprise AI despite the competitive landscape. What is Scaled Cognition? Scaled Cognition, based in Mountain View, California, develops Super-Reliable Intelligence for customer experience (CX) and high stakes enterprise workflows. Its flagship model, APT (Agentic Pretrained Transformer), targets the core limitation of general purpose LLMs: hallucinations and unreliability in production environments. APT delivers conversational fluency comparable to leading frontier models but guarantees: * Zero hallucinations through architectural innovations rather than post-hoc guardrails. * Policy fidelity: enforced permissions, constraints, and business logic that cannot be broken. * Verifiable action execution via structured predictions (e.g., programs and system queries) alongside token streams. * Model agnostic, open design: stateless RESTful API, self hosted/VPC/on-premises deployment, with prompts and logic staying under customer control. The company provides a full platform including agent authoring tools (no code/low code/SDK), GenAPI(TM) simulation for testing, agent evaluators, and production monitoring to detect drift and violations. This enables rapid POC to production timelines (days rather than months) with provable reliability before deployment. Target markets focus on CX in banking/finance, retail/e-commerce, travel/hospitality, telecom, insurance, healthcare, and BPOs. It emphasizes high containment, CSAT improvement, compliance, and cost savings by resolving more issues autonomously. The broader vision extends to insourcing parts of the $600 billion BPO market with owned AI workforces. Genesys already integrates APT into its Genesys Cloud platform for agentic virtual agents, and the company claims production use with Fortune 500 customers. It projects over one billion customer service interactions automated in the next 12 months via its models. Who are Scaled Cognition's leaders? * CEO Dan Roth: Serial entrepreneur with prior experience as Microsoft Corporate VP of Conversational AI. Co-founded Semantic Machines (pioneering agentic AI), acquired by Microsoft in 2018. * CTO Dan Klein: UC Berkeley professor and leading NLP researcher. * CFO Damon Pender: Also involved in the prior Semantic Machines venture. The team's deep expertise in agentic systems and enterprise deployment gives them credibility in addressing reliability from first principles. They argue that current LLMs are "plausibility engines" optimized for fluent output rather than truth, necessitating a new architecture for narrow domain, high stakes applications. This Series A follows earlier seed/early funding (including a reported ~$21M round involving Lerer Hippeau, SilverCircle, and others). The $100M infusion is substantial for a specialized AI lab at this stage and will primarily: * Expand the research team (PhD researchers and engineers). * Accelerate enterprise deployments and commercialization. Vinod Khosla highlighted the research heavy approach and developmental risk taken to build reliability into the core architecture, contrasting it with layering solutions on frontier models. The strategic investment from Genesys signals validation in the CX space. In a market saturated with general LLMs and agent frameworks, Scaled Cognition differentiates through deterministic reliability engineered from the ground up. Key advantages include: * Suitability for regulated, action oriented domains where errors have real costs (financial transactions, medical records, claims, etc.). * Reduced vendor lock-in and deployment flexibility. * Comprehensive tooling for simulation, evaluation, and monitoring, lowering enterprise risk and speeding time to value. Challenges in the space remain significant: scaling reliable agents beyond CX, competing with hyperscalers and well funded generalists, and proving consistent ROI at massive scale. However, the focus on a "reliability gap" in enterprise AI aligns with growing customer frustration over hallucinations in production. The round underscores continued investor appetite for differentiated AI infrastructure plays that solve specific, painful enterprise problems rather than chasing general intelligence. At a ~$750M+ valuation post Series A, Scaled Cognition positions itself as a high potential specialist in the agentic AI wave, leveraging proven founders, strategic partnerships (e.g., Genesys), and early production traction. Funds will likely fuel talent acquisition in a competitive AI hiring market and further R&D to expand beyond CX. Overall, this funding validates the thesis that reliability, not just capability, will be a decisive factor in enterprise AI adoption, particularly for customer facing and operational automation. The company is well placed to capture value in high stakes CX and BPO transformation. Please email Superbcrew your feedback and news tips at hello(at)superbcrew.com