Pegasystems acquires In The Chat digital messaging platform

Pegasystems' recent acquisition of In The Chat promises to bring new capabilities into Pega's existing AI engagement tools, enabling users to deliver omnichannel communications to customers.

In The Chat is an enterprise communication technology that unifies text messaging, social media, live chat, email messengers and chatbots. And as Pegasystems acquires In The Chat, customers will gain access to more modern channels.

"Pega has made investments in AI, but what they haven't had is those prepackaged chatbots to interact with different channels," said Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of research at Nucleus Research. "This gives Pega customers more prepackaged functionality. It means faster time to value; less development, consulting and support costs; and more flexibility in being able to support and grow those channels in the future."

This gives Pega customers more prepackaged functionality to meet multiple channels.

Pega will demonstrate and extrapolate on these new capabilities at its annual PegaWorld user conference in Las Vegas from June 2 to 5, said Kerim Akgonul, senior vice president of products at Pegasystems, based in Cambridge, Mass.

"This technology will allow Pega's customers to provide a better end-to-end customer service experience that works across multiple platforms and be prepared for changes in the future landscape of messaging," Akgonul said.

Pegasystems will integrate In The Chat's capabilities into its client engagement products, which will extend the messaging capabilities of Pegasystems' applications and enable users to deploy new communication channels faster.

According to Akgonul, one of the goals of the acquisition is to be able to deliver the latest customer experience capabilities to market more quickly than if they had developed the capabilities themselves. Currently, this means investing in chatbots that can accelerate customer case resolution without negatively affecting customer satisfaction. 

Acquiring In The Chat also puts Pegasystems in the position to compete with Salesforce, which has well-established chatbot capabilities with Einstein AI, and Microsoft, which has chatbot tools, but hasn't packaged them together yet, Wettemann said.

"We see with Salesforce their chatbot engine capabilities enabling customers to spin up chatbots quickly. [That capability] is really important and really effective," Wettemann said. "To be able to compete effectively, Pega needs to be able to at least come close to a similar model, and this gives them that."