A customer calls an arena with a last-minute request to replace regular seats with wheelchair and companion seating for tonight’s game. An AI agent confirms seat availability and acceptability, then brings in a human accessibility specialist, who joins the live call with the full context on their screen. The customer never repeats herself. The specialist proactively asks whether the customer would like someone from guest services to meet her when she arrives at the venue and escort her to the new seats. After the call ends, the AI agent texts a confirmation from guest services.

That is an experience most contact centers are not delivering today. AI deployments in customer service usually resolve one request at a time and, when required, pass the customer to a human queue, often on another vendor’s platform. The difference in the scenario above is continuity: AI and a human specialist work within the same interaction, with context intact and follow-through after the call.

Meet Ada

Dialpad and Canadian conversational AI company Ada are combining to help companies deliver the kind of personalized, concierge-like service described above. The transaction was announced on November 4th at an event at NASDAQ in New York. Craig Walker becomes CEO of the combined entity, and Michael Murchison, former CEO of Ada, assumes the role of Chief AI Officer.

As an entrepreneur, Murchison spent a year working as a customer service agent to understand the real problems. What he learned there led him and co-founder David Hariri to found Ada in 2016. In the intervening years, Ada has continuously used the latest AI models and technology to move the product they built from a rule-based chat builder to the autonomous, multimodal agentic customer experience platform it is today.

Over the past two months, I have attended several vendor, user, and analyst meetings where human-AI collaboration and the products that enable it were discussed. Some have taken it to the next stage of continuing customer work beyond a single conversation.

What stood out in the briefing and demonstration I was given of Dialpad + Ada is that the product code to bring the solutions together as a single platform is production-ready today. That gives substance to the proposition that Walker and his team have already started working on the joint solution.

Each side brings scale to the combination. Dialpad has analyzed more than 14 billion minutes of conversations since introducing real-time AI in 2018. Its enterprise customers include Netflix, T-Mobile, Financial Times, and the Denver Broncos. Ada’s AI agents run in production for more than 350 customers, including Ancestry, GoFundMe, Pinterest, and Barnes & Noble, in more than 130 languages.

Financially, two successful companies are coming together. The pro forma, unaudited figures as of July 31, 2026 put combined ARR at $470M+, with $50M+ from AI agents, 120% agentic net revenue retention, approximately 900 customers with $100K+ ARR, and a Dialpad non-GAAP gross margin of about 74%.

From Assistance to Task Completion to Collaboration

The leaders of Dialpad and Ada describe the opportunity as the next step in the progression of AI technology improving customer service. AI first assisted customers and contact center agents. Then it began closing tickets by completing tasks. Now, with Dialpad and Ada on a single platform, human and AI agents can work together in a single conversation; collaboration, not handoffs. The potential reward is a stronger customer relationship, making businesses easier to buy from and harder to leave.

Murchison drew a distinction I find useful. Hybrid means humans do some things and AI does others, while collaboration means they work together within the same interaction. He called it “next level orchestration.” In the 1990s, call center routing sent a call to a person. Later, skills-based routing improved upon that. Today, agent orchestration decides when to bring a human into the interaction, allowing an organization “to show up as a single coordinated company” from the customer’s point of view, said Murchison.

1+1=3

With both companies doing so well, why combine? I asked Walker what he saw in Ada’s agents that he couldn’t or wouldn’t build at Dialpad.

“We already have AI agents live with customers,” said Walker. “What stood out was Ada’s ability to complete complex, multi-step work and keep improving–testing changes before release and measuring whether the customer’s problem was solved. They’ve spent ten years on that challenge. Together, we can pair that expertise with our voice network, models and communications, bringing the right person into the conversation with the full context when AI needs help.”

Similarly, I asked Murchison how Ada’s existing customers will benefit from the combination with Dialpad.

“Nothing changes today,” he said. Over time, he expects customers to gain faster, more reliable voice experiences through Dialpad’s network and AI that learns from conversations and transcript insights across the business. Dialpad also contributes live guidance, automated quality reviews, and coaching. Together, these capabilities could give customers clearer insight into what to improve and automate next.

The technical rationale extends beyond adding capabilities. Dialpad/Ada agents now run on a carrier network and use speech models the same company owns. This removes the “brittle handoff” Murchison described when Ada’s agents pass a call to a third-party vendor’s contact center.

Taking the Combination to Market

Dialpad also brings reach to Ada, with 50,000+ business customers, a field team, and partners such as Google, T-Mobile, and SoftBank. Each side can now sell the other’s product to its own base.

The initial go-to-market plan is concrete. The first move is proposing AI agents to about 3,600 mid-market and enterprise Dialpad accounts that already fit Ada’s target profile. Agents can be configured from existing call data and deployed “in one click,” said Murchison.

The second strategy is selling through Dialpad’s channel partners. Eventually, the new company plans to introduce Dialpad to Ada’s enterprise customers. Alongside that expansion, collaboration between human and AI agents is expected to extend beyond service to sales, renewals, billing, and the back office.

Platform Is the Play

The combination of Dialpad and Ada brings an agentic product suite, contact center portfolio, and carrier network together with customer intelligence on one platform. That puts pressure on contact center vendors whose AI agents are not yet as advanced, and on pure-play AI agent vendors that continue to hand off to another vendor’s contact center solution.

The Dialpad-Ada announcement comes the same week Cresta was acquired by Salesforce, adding another pure-play company after it acquired Fin in September. These transactions point toward a broader contest over who will provide the platform to orchestrate customer work across AI and human agents.

The appeal of a single platform is clear: fewer integration boundaries, shared context, and access to real-time conversation data from not just the contact center but the entire enterprise. Openness to other vendors will still matter, particularly for customers with established technology investments. But a tightly integrated platform gives Dialpad and Ada an opportunity to make coordinated customer service simpler to deploy and operate.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles