WIRE)-- 8x8, Inc. (NYSE:EGHT), a leading provider of cloud phone, meeting, collaboration and contact center solutions, today announced the acquisition of MarianaIQ (MIQ), a high-growth Silicon Valley startup, as part of the strategic investments it has been making in AI and Machine Learning. MIQ brings deep learning capabilities to the newly announced X Series to transform both employee and customer experience. The MIQ team, including founders Soumyadeb Mitra and Venkat Nagaswamy, have been leaders in applying AI and deep learning to practical business problems since 2013, and join 8x8 to strengthen AI capabilities for enterprise communications. "8x8 has continuously evolved itself to provide best-in-class enterprise communications to our customers. With the acquisition of MarianaIQ, we are fundamentally transforming how customers and employees interact through one system of engagement, and how companies optimize valuable moments of customer engagement with one set of data in one system of intelligence," said Dejan Deklich, Chief Product Officer, 8x8.

Until the last 5 years or so, it was infeasible to uncover topics and emotions across the web without powerful computing resources. Engineers didn't have efficient methods to make sense of words and documents at a large scale. Now, with deep learning, we can convert unstructured text to computable formats, effectively incorporating semantic knowledge for training machine learning models. Harnessing the vast data troves of the digital world can help us understand people more directly, going beyond the limitations of collecting data points through measurements and survey results. Here's a glimpse into how we achieve this at MarianaIQ.