/PRNewswire/ — Less than a year after being acquired by IgniteTech, Khoros today announced Aurora AI, an AI-powered evolution of the Khoros Community Platform. Aurora AI is not an upgrade. It’s a new platform that uses AI to handle support requests and product feedback and keep customer communities active without manual moderation. Aurora AI is designed to make customer communities a company’s most valuable business asset.
Aurora AI
Since 2001, Khoros communities have powered over 4,000 customer implementations, generated 1.8 billion website visits annually, and saved brands more than $500 million annually in support costs through self-service. Aurora AI builds on this foundation and redesigns it by integrating AI into every layer so that community knowledge becomes informed answers, member engagement drives customer loyalty, and every interaction drives measurable results.
The biggest problem Aurora AI solves: Answering 30% of questions asked in online communities that have remained unanswered. For brands that rely on these communities for customer support, product feedback, and user engagement, every unanswered question means a lost customer, a missed insight, or a support ticket that never needed to be raised. Aurora AI eliminates this gap.
“As a company that has fully transformed into one with AI DNA, we didn’t just add AI to our existing software,” said Eric Vaughan, managing director of IgniteTech and Khoros. “We built Khoros’ products from the ground up, drawing on twenty years of experience from customer conversations, community insights, and social interactions with Fortune 500 brands. Billions of data points that were unstructured and unused, waiting to be unlocked by AI. Aurora AI was born when we stopped thinking of this data as an archive and started using it as an intelligent layer.”
No forum with a subsequently integrated AI
Aurora AI consists of three integrated layers that reinforce each other and get smarter every day.
Die Human Engine promotes gamification, reputation and recognition systems that turn passive members into active contributors. Badges, leaderboards, expert levels, and member journey automation provide the human element that makes everything else possible.
Die Intelligence Layer operates three live AI systems that were trained on each community’s own data. The Community Language Model (CLM) learns the specific vocabulary and conventions of each community. Answer Assist monitors unanswered posts and creates informed, quoted answers. AI Moderation enforces policies in real-time using a three-tier trust architecture. All information remains with the customer, not with Khoros.
Die Action Layer is based on Orchestrator, a rules-based automation engine that handles routing, escalation, lifecycle management and workflow automation without any programming effort. It runs deterministically, without malfunctions and with a complete audit trail.
“With Orchestrator, a team of two can run programs that previously required a team of 10,” said Vaughan. “And it’s not just about efficiency. It’s about doing things that you literally couldn’t do before because manual labor made them impossible.”
AI agents powering the Aurora AI experience
Aurora AI is entering the beta phase with three AI agents: Answer Assist, AI Moderation and Orchestrator. The roadmap includes Recommendation Engine and Content Discovery in Q2 2026, Member Growth Agents in Q3 2026 and AI Brand Watch and Correction and AI Data Analyst in Q4 2026.
Every AI agent is reliable and verifiable. A source is provided for each answer. There is an audit trail for every decision. Compliance with company guidelines is already integrated.
Two forces. A refrain.
Aurora AI is not an isolated product. It is one half of a comprehensive, AI-based customer engagement platform that includes Iris® AI, Khoros’ newly developed social media management and brand management system. Your customers are a choir. Khoros will help you direct it. Aurora AI “is the place where the choir steps into the spotlight,” turning questions into enduring knowledge and peer networking into greatness. Iris AI is the messenger that brings what matters to every social stream.
Together, Aurora AI and Iris AI transform customer conversations into orchestrated intelligence. Aurora AI continues to develop the Khoros community platform. Iris AI combines social listening and content publishing to convert millions of voices into actionable signals across channels, monitoring billions of sources in 187 languages.
A customer who posts on a community forum, opens a support ticket, and tags the brand on social media is a customer with an issue. Aurora AI and Iris AI treat him the same way. Community interactions influence the allocation of care. Social moods are incorporated into the community analysis. AI agents on both sides learn from the same customer data. The result is a single, connected view of every customer relationship across every channel.
Since acquiring Khoros in May 2025, IgniteTech has used its AI-powered internal operations to increase support resolution rates from 5% to 60%, reduce support backlog by 82%, and reduce platform downtime by 97%.
Why selective solutions are not enough
Smaller providers such as Bevy, which originally started as an event and meetup management tool, have tried to expand their offerings to include community forums and AI-powered question-and-answer features. However, an event platform that has discussion forums added as an afterthought is not an enterprise-level community platform. It does not have real-time AI-powered moderation. It also doesn’t have a community language model that learns how each customer’s members actually communicate. Brand maintenance is not included. Social media management in 187 languages is not included. It does not include integrated customer service. And it doesn’t have the implementation depth, security certifications, or scalability that businesses need.
“There are companies with 70 employees and sales in the low tens of millions that run Khoros comparison sites,” Vaughan said. But we’ve spent 25 years figuring out what the corporate world actually needs. A point solution designed for meetups is not the same as a platform designed for the world’s biggest brands. Aurora AI and Iris AI together cover the entire customer contact surface. Community. Care. Social media. Analytics. Everything is connected. All of this is AI native and developed by the AI Enterprise software company. This can’t be replicated simply by attaching a forum to an event tool.”
Sell, design, build
Under IgniteTech, Khoros did not develop Aurora AI behind closed doors and only unveiled it on launch day. The team spent months using AI-powered prototyping to create working previews and present them directly to Khoros customers. Small teams ran short iterations over several days—rather than entire quarters—to show customers where the product was heading and incorporate their feedback in real time. The features were validated before they were built. The priorities were set by the platform’s users, not a roadmap committee.
“We don’t present slides anymore,” Vaughan said. “We quickly create prototypes, show customers something concrete and ask them what’s wrong with it. Then we fix it and show them again. By the time it’s delivered, customers have already helped shape the product. This way, you develop something that people actually want, rather than something that’s just a good way to present it.”
Free Community Classic migration until December 31, 2026
Khoros also announces that its AI-powered professional services teams will perform migrations from Khoros Community Classic to Aurora AI free of charge until December 31, 2026.
Under Khoros’ previous management, community migrations were projects that took many months and cost the customer up to $500,000. IgniteTech believes that AI-powered services can shorten this time frame and eliminate these costs completely.
“Old Khoros charged customers half a million dollars to migrate their communities, and the projects dragged on for months,” Vaughan said. “We walk the talk and offer the service free of charge because we want every customer to use Aurora AI. That’s how confident we are in what we’ve created.”
IgniteTech has not yet announced an end of support date for Khoros Community Classic. However, as has already been communicated to all customers, all new features have been developed exclusively for Aurora AI. Customers using Community Classic will continue to receive support and maintenance, but the innovation roadmap belongs to Aurora AI.
These announcements also coincide with the relaunch of Khoros’ digital presence at khoros.ai. “This is not a change of domain,” Vaughan said. “It’s a signal. We’ve fundamentally transformed this company, and khoros.ai is the place where that story lives on.”
Information about Khoros
Khoros exists because two companies refused to commit. When Lithium Technologies, a pioneer in online brand communities since 2001, merged with Spredfast, a leader in social media management, they created a connection between community and social media like no one else had. For 25 years, this bridge has been Khoros’ competitive advantage. Today, powered by IgniteTech and redeveloped as an AI-native solution, Khoros connects community, mentorship, social and analytics via Aurora AI and Iris® AI. The platform supports over 4,000 communities, receives 1.8 billion website visits annually, and saves brands more than $500 million in support costs each year. Visit khoros.ai to learn more.
Information about IgniteTech
Founded in 2010, IgniteTech is a leading AI-powered enterprise software company. IgniteTech’s solutions, characterized by successful acquisitions and rapid innovation, support companies worldwide. With the acquisition of Khoros in 2025, the company expanded its portfolio to include one of the most widely used digital-first customer engagement platforms in the enterprise market, operating over 4,000 communities since 2001 and receiving 1.8 billion website visits annually. IgniteTech is rebuilding the entire Khoros platform as an AI-native solution, including Aurora AI for community servicing and Iris® AI for social media management and brand maintenance. Visit khoros.ai to learn more.
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