AUSTIN, Texas, April 11, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Less than one year since being acquired by IgniteTech, Khoros today announced Iris® AI, an AI-native social media management and brand care platform that unifies social listening, publishing, engagement and analytics into a single intelligent system for Khoros customers. Iris AI replaces the fragmented toolset that customers have navigated for years with one platform designed for speed, accountability and simplicity.
Named for the Greek goddess who carried messages between gods and mortals, Iris AI does what its namesake did: it carries your brand’s voice and your customers’ signals across every channel, fast, precise and connected.
The problem Iris AI solves is not subtle. Brand care teams today operate across disconnected tools that don’t share context. When a customer issue moves from social media to a support queue to an escalation path, context disappears at every handoff. Agents start over. Customers repeat themselves. Managers lose visibility into what’s happening and why.
Iris AI eliminates that fragmentation. Every interaction, every channel and every team member operates within a single system where context follows the conversation from first contact to resolution.
“Most brand care platforms are held together with duct tape,” said Eric Vaughan, CEO of IgniteTech and Khoros. “You’ve got a social listening tool that doesn’t talk to the care queue, a care queue that doesn’t talk to analytics and analytics that arrive two weeks after the moment has passed. Iris AI is one system. One view. One source of truth. That’s what brand care should have always been.”
What Iris AI Delivers
Iris AI gives brand care and social media teams capabilities that have historically required three separate platforms: AI-driven content creation, scheduling and cross-channel publishing; social listening across billions of sources in 187 languages; intelligent engagement routing and response recommendations; and analytics that turn social signals into strategic advantage.
The platform’s AI engine handles intelligent triage, routing incoming interactions to the right agent based on topic, sentiment, urgency and agent expertise. When AI can resolve an inquiry directly, it does. When human judgment is required, the handoff includes full context so the agent never starts from scratch.
Since acquiring Khoros in May 2025, IgniteTech’s internal operations, driven by AI, have achieved ticket resolution rates from 5% to 60%, reduced support backlogs by 82% and cut platform downtime by 97%.
“We built a complete X/Twitter channel management platform in ten days,” said Vaughan. “Not a prototype. Not a demo. A production-quality capability that customers could use on their own systems. That’s what happens when you stop treating AI as a feature you add and start treating it as the foundation you build on. Because we fully transformed into an AI-DNA company, we were able to rewrite over 15 years of legacy technical debt across multiple products into one cohesive, AI-generated codebase in less than a year. And the best part of this announcement for customers is Iris AI is fully data compatible. Customers get an entirely new platform from the neck up with zero data migration. That’s the difference between transforming a product and rebuilding it.”
Built for the Way Brand Care Actually Works
Iris AI supports real-time monitoring and response across X/Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google Reviews, YouTube, TikTok and more, with new channels deployable in days rather than quarters. AI-powered moderation flags brand risks in real time. Sentiment analysis identifies emerging issues before they escalate. Every interaction is tracked end-to-end, giving managers a clear view of team performance, response times and resolution quality without manual reporting.
“The brands that win at customer engagement are the ones that show up fast, respond smart and never drop context,” said Vaughan. “Iris AI is built for exactly that. Not for the way brand care worked five years ago. For the way it needs to work right now.”
Two Forces. One Chorus.
Iris AI is one half of a complete AI-native customer engagement platform. Alongside Aurora AI, Khoros’ reimagined community product, Iris AI completes a system that covers community forums, brand care, social media management and customer service, all AI-native and all sharing context. That pairing isn’t accidental. Khoros was born when Lithium Technologies and Spredfast merged because community and social were never supposed to be separate disciplines. Aurora AI and Iris AI are the AI-native expressions of that same conviction.
Your customers are a chorus. Khoros helps you conduct it. Aurora AI is where “the chorus comes into the light,” turning questions into enduring knowledge and peer connection into scale. Iris AI is the messenger that carries what matters into every social stream.
Every interaction across Aurora AI and Iris AI feeds a shared intelligence layer that learns your customers, your brand voice and your business. The platform listens, illuminates what matters and orchestrates action at scale. That is what separates Khoros from a market full of tools that attempt to manage channels but don’t connect them.
The two largest publicly traded companies in social media management have both seen significant enterprise customer losses and sharp stock declines over the past year. Their financials are public. One offers no community platform at all. The other has one but is seeing its largest enterprise accounts decline year over year. Neither connects social intelligence to community knowledge at the data layer.
“Sprout and Sprinklr are both public companies, so anyone can read the story,” said Vaughan. “One doesn’t have community. The other is losing the enterprise. We’re the only ones rebuilding community, care, social and analytics at once, AI-native from the ground up, everything connected, 187 languages. At some point the market stops debating architecture and starts following results.”
Sell, Design, Build
Khoros did not build Iris AI behind closed doors and unveil it on launch day. For months, the team used AI-accelerated prototyping to create working previews and put them directly in front of Khoros customers. Small teams ran short iterations over days, not quarters, showing customers where the product was heading and incorporating their feedback in real time. Features were validated before they were built. Priorities were set by the people who would use the platform, not by a roadmap committee.
“We don’t pitch slides anymore,” said Vaughan. “We prototype fast, show customers something real and ask them what’s wrong with it. Then we fix it and show them again. By the time we ship, customers have already shaped the product. That’s how you build something people actually want instead of something that just demos well.”
These announcements coincide with the relaunch of the Khoros digital presence at khoros.ai. “This isn’t a domain change,” said Vaughan. “It’s a signal. We fundamentally transformed this company, and khoros.ai is where that story lives.”
About Khoros
Khoros exists because two companies refused to pick a lane. When Lithium Technologies, the pioneer of online brand communities since 2001, merged with Spredfast, a leader in social media management, they built a bridge between community and social that no one else had. For 25 years, that bridge has been Khoros’s competitive advantage. Today, powered by IgniteTech and rebuilt as AI-native, Khoros connects community, care, social and analytics through Aurora AI and Iris® AI. The platform has powered over 4,000 communities, generates 1.8 billion site visits per year and saves brands more than $500 million annually in support costs. Visit khoros.ai to learn more.
About IgniteTech
Founded in 2010, IgniteTech is a leading AI-first enterprise software company. With a track record of successful acquisitions and rapid innovation, IgniteTech’s solutions power businesses worldwide. The company’s 2025 acquisition of Khoros expanded its portfolio to include one of the most widely deployed digital-first customer engagement platforms in the enterprise market, with over 4,000 communities powered since 2001 and 1.8 billion site visits per year. IgniteTech is rebuilding the entire Khoros platform as AI-native, including Aurora AI for community engagement and Iris AI for social media management and brand care. Visit khoros.ai to learn more.
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