February 25, 2026
SoundHound AI Launches Sales Assist, a Real-Time AI Agent for the Retail Sales Floor
SoundHound AI has announced the launch of Sales Assist, a voice-powered AI agent designed to support in-store retail staff during live customer conversations. The tool delivers instant, data-driven recommendations, including upgrades, bundles, trade-in promotions, and accessories, directly to a tablet or any device with a screen and microphone, within the natural flow of a sales interaction.
The launch builds on SoundHound’s existing enterprise AI portfolio and its next-generation agentic platform. In 2025, the company processed nearly 30 million AI customer interactions across telecom and retail businesses globally.
How Sales Assist Works
With customer consent, the AI listens to in-store conversations, analyses intent and context in real time, and surfaces relevant offers and compliance disclosures instantly. Staff no longer need to log into multiple systems or manually calculate upgrade options mid-conversation as the system handles that automatically, in seconds.
Powered by SoundHound’s proprietary Polaris automatic speech recognition (ASR), the agent can handle fast-paced, noisy retail environments with minimal latency. Behind the scenes, it coordinates multiple specialist AI agents pulling simultaneously from CRM systems, billing records, promotion databases, product catalogues, and coverage tools.
For example, a customer mentions their phone is damaged. Sales Assist can immediately check upgrade eligibility, retrieve account and billing data, surface relevant trade-in promotions, and suggest complementary bundles or accessories, all before the associate has to say a word.
Less Training, More Selling
SoundHound says Sales Assist helps retailers increase revenue per customer, shorten sales cycles, reduce training time for new hires, and ensure consistent, compliant sales practices across all locations. For telecoms providers specifically, the tool simplifies complex tariff and upgrade logic while unlocking data-driven retention and cross-sell opportunities.
The idea of AI that genuinely supports a salesperson mid-conversation, rather than adding steps, logins, or lag, was more aspiration than reality, but the infrastructure to make it work at enterprise scale has matured considerably in a short time. Research shows 96% of CX and contact centre leaders now consider agentic AI central to their strategy, up from 87% in 2024, with nearly half already deploying it to feed real-time guidance to agents during live interactions.
The Platform Behind the Product
Sales Assist runs on SoundHound’s next-generation agentic platform: a scalable multi-agent orchestration environment compatible with MCP and A2A protocols. The platform is currently deployed by hundreds of large-scale enterprise organisations to coordinate AI agents, whether self-built, pre-configured, or third-party, across complex multi-step workflows. Supported channels include voice, SMS, webchat, email, smart devices, social, contact centre, and in-vehicle.
Michael Anderson, EVP of Enterprise AI at SoundHound AI, said: “Voice assistants and chatbots have been around for years, but truly effective, enterprise-grade voice interaction is only now becoming possible. With AI maturing, voice is evolving into a central customer interface that doesn’t just respond but resolves.”
The move from responding to resolving is precisely what distinguishes genuinely useful AI from the frustrating chatbot experiences customers have endured for years. Over 70% of consumers prefer AI when it resolves an issue faster than a person, but trust still depends on speed and accuracy delivering in equal measure.
