The acquisition of Passage AI comes less than a week after the company purchased another AI-focused startup, Loom Systems, one that concentrates on automating operations data.

FREMONT, CA: ServiceNow, the developer of information technology service management software, acquired Mountain View-based Passage AI, a conversational artificial intelligence platform that enables customers to build chatbots in multiple languages. The acquisition of Passage AI will help upgrade the company’s digital service platform and allow the company to automate crucial customer service tasks, such as responding to customer questions and enlist virtual agents to respond to customers in multiple languages. It will also be able to advance the potentials of its artificial intelligence, including the addition of support for all major languages on its Now Platform and products, including ServiceNow Virtual Agent, Service Portal, Workspaces, and emerging interfaces.

“Workflows more smoothly when people can get things done in their native language,” said Debu Chatterjee, senior director of AI Engineering at ServiceNow. “Building deep learning, conversational AI capabilities into the Now Platform will enable a work request initiated in German, or a customer inquiry initiated in Japanese to be solved by Virtual Agent. Passage AI’s technology will enable us to accelerate our vision of empowering great employee and customer experiences by delivering great workflow experiences. ServiceNow believes in making workflow more smoothly across the enterprise, in all major languages.”

Passage AI was launched in 2016 by CEO Ravi N. Raj, CTO Madhu Mathihalli and CTO Mitul Tiwari. The startup's customers included a list of large companies such as Mastercard, Shell, Mercedes-Benz, and SoftBank. The learning algorithms that Passage AI uses to power their chatbots are not pre-calibrated, which means it can be trained on custom data such as customer support tickets. The fact that companies can bring their own training data means it can be in virtually any language, and Passage AI natively supports over 100 languages.