VANCOUVER — Telus International announced Tuesday it has completed its acquisition of Lionbridge AI, a global provider of managed training data and data annotation services and platform solutions.
When the acquisition was first announced in November, the purchase price was estimated to be approximately $1.2 billion (or US$935 million), an amount confirmed yesterday in a separate announcement by Lionbridge Technologies. Telus International’s purchase of Lionbridge AI closed on December 31, 2020, and received clearance by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS).
“The integration of digital CX (customer experience) services and solutions, powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, has quickly become a key differentiator for brands in today’s experience economy, driving significant benefits by way of increased customer loyalty and satisfaction, larger market share and revenue growth,” said Jeff Puritt, president and CEO of Telus International, in a press release.
“The caveat is that these next-gen capabilities, such as intelligent chatbots, voice-activated virtual assistants and optimized search engines, must be trained on large amounts of accurate, reliable and unbiased data in order to be effective. With Lionbridge AI integration activities well-underway since the start of the year, Telus International is able to meet these heightened and critical requirements while simultaneously meeting our clients’ digital transformation needs across the full customer experience value chain, ultimately defining a new market category at the intersection of digital IT and digital CX,” he added.
Lionbridge AI provides scalable data annotation services for text, images, videos and audio. “The company sources multilingual training data in more than 300 languages and dialects to build premium, ground truth data for some of the world’s largest technology companies in social media, search, retail and mobile,” reads the press release.
Lionbridge AI’s proprietary data annotation platform is used in combination with a crowdsourced community of one million professional annotators, qualified linguists and in-country language speakers across six continents, continues the release.
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