/PRNewswire/ –Less than a year after being acquired by IgniteTech, Khoros today introduced Iris® AI, an AI-powered social media management and brand curation 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 used for years with a single platform designed for speed, reliability and simplicity.
Named after the Greek goddess who carried messages between gods and mortals, Iris AI does exactly what its namesake did: convey your brand’s voice and your customers’ signals across all channels – quickly, precisely and connected.
The problem that Iris AI solves is not exactly trivial. Today, brand management teams work with siled tools that don’t share a common context. As a customer issue moves from social media into the support queue and ultimately into an escalation process, context is lost with each handoff. The agents start over. The customers repeat themselves. Managers lose track of what is happening and why.
Iris AI eliminates this fragmentation. Every interaction, every channel and every team member operates within a single system where context accompanies the conversation from initial contact to resolution.
“Most branding platforms are poorly held together,” said Eric Vaughan, CEO of IgniteTech and Khoros. “You have a social listening tool that doesn’t talk to the edit queue, an edit queue that doesn’t talk to the analytics, and analytics results that aren’t available until two weeks after the event in question. Iris AI is a system. One view. One source of truth. This is exactly what branding should have always looked like.”
What Iris AI offers
Iris AI provides branding and social media teams with capabilities that previously required three separate platforms: AI-powered content creation, scheduling and publishing across channels; Social listening across billions of sources in 187 languages; intelligent routing of interactions and recommendations for replies; and analytics that turn social signals into strategic advantages.
The platform’s AI engine handles intelligent triage and routes incoming requests to the right agent based on the agent’s topic, mood, urgency and expertise. If AI can solve a query directly, it does. When human judgment is required, the handoff includes full context, so the agent never has to start from scratch.
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%.
“We built a comprehensive X and Twitter channel management platform in 10 days,” said Vaughan. “Not a prototype. Not a demo. A production-grade capability that customers can use on their own systems. This is what happens when you stop thinking of AI as a feature you add and start thinking of it as a foundation you build on. Because we have fully transformed into a company with AI DNA, we have managed to rewrite the technical legacy accumulated over 15 years in various products into a unified, AI-generated code base in less than a year. And The best thing about this announcement for customers is that Iris AI is fully data compatible. Customers get a new platform from the ground up, without data migration. This is the difference between evolving a product and redesigning it.”
Developed for the practice of brand management
Iris AI supports real-time monitoring and response across X/Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google Reviews, YouTube, TikTok and other platforms, with new channels able to be deployed in days rather than quarters. AI-powered moderation displays brand risks in real time. Sentiment analysis identifies emerging issues before they escalate. Every interaction is captured end-to-end, giving managers a clear view of team performance, response times, and quality of issue resolution without the need to create manual reports.
“The brands that excel at customer engagement are the ones that respond quickly, respond smartly and keep context in mind,” said Vaughan. “Iris AI was designed for exactly this. Not for the way branding worked five years ago. For the way it needs to work today.”
Two forces. A refrain.
Iris AI is one half of a complete AI-native customer engagement platform. In addition to Aurora AI, Khoros’ newly developed community product, Iris AI completes a system that covers community forums, brand management, social media management and customer service – all AI-based and with shared context. This combination is no coincidence. Khoros was born from the merger of Lithium Technologies and Spredfast, as community and social media activities were never intended to be separate disciplines. Aurora AI and Iris AI are the AI-based manifestations of the same belief.
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.
Every interaction through Aurora AI and Iris AI flows into a shared intelligence layer that gets to know your customers, your brand voice and your business. The platform collects information, highlights the essentials and coordinates measures on a large scale. That’s what sets Khoros apart in a market full of tools that try to manage channels but don’t connect them together.
The two largest listed companies in the social media management sector suffered both significant losses from their corporate customers and sharp declines in share prices last year. Your financial information is public. One offers no community platform at all. The other does have one, but has seen year-on-year declines in its largest corporate customers. Neither combines social intelligence at the data level with community knowledge.
“Sprout and Sprinklr are both publicly traded companies, so anyone can see the report,” Vaughan said. “One doesn’t offer community maintenance. The other loses the corporate area. We are the only ones who are rebuilding community, support, social and analytics at the same time – AI-based from the ground up, everything connected, in 187 languages. At some point the market stops discussing architecture and starts orienting itself on the results.”
Sell, design, build
Khoros did not develop Iris AI behind closed doors and launch 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.”
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 provider of AI-based enterprise software. With a track record of successful acquisitions and rapid innovation, IgniteTech’s solutions 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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