After the stock market closed today, Five9 announced the acquisition of intelligent virtual agent (IVA) company Inference Solutions. The purchase price is $172 million, $148 million in cash and $24 million when certain bookings targets are met. Inference brings 550 customers, among them several joint Five9 customers -- including Chick-fil-A and Wyndham Hotels. Inference was founded in 2005, spun out from Telstra Research Labs -- think of it as the Australian version of Bell Labs. Headquartered in San Francisco, the company has additional offices in Austin, TX and Melbourne, Australia.

According to IDC, global spending on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cognitive systems will reach $19 billion by 2018. This is an increase by approximately 54% over the total amount consumed in 2017. Mergers and acquisitions are constantly taking place. We all know that AI is creating new opportunities in every sector be it healthcare or travel. So, companies all around the world are enchasing on such opportunities to offer much-improved products or services to consumers through mergers and acquisitions.

Slack may have unleashed a new demand among the working world to have better tools to chat to each other about their projects and more, but it's also unleashed something else: a torrent of competing products from other tech firms that sell to the enterprise. Today comes the latest in that trend: BroadSoft, a company known for its cloud-based unified communications services, is launching Team-One, a platform for people to chat to each other, bringing in links and data from other projects, and more. Team-One is making its debut today, but it's built on a product that existed before. Earlier this year, BroadSoft acquired a Slack competitor called Intellinote, which it has now integrated with its bigger platform, including its calling and videoconferencing products, adding in new features such as artificial intelligence and bots to help you source data to get your work done. Apart from being a reflection of just how popular collaboration products have become among businesses, the launch of Team-One also another sign of how Slack's early success in this market is getting attacked by competitors from many angles. The startup has seen some of its fast growth slow down, which presents an opportunity for some of those rivals with established customer bases to move in, or for Slack to demonstrate that it definitely is better than the rest.