SoundHound AI, Inc. (NASDAQ: SOUN) is making a significant strategic push toward proprietary artificial intelligence models to strengthen its position in the conversational and agentic AI market.
The company believes owning the full AI stack can improve performance, lower costs and create a sustainable competitive advantage over rivals.
The clearest example of this strategy is OASYS, SoundHound’s newly launched self-learning agentic AI platform, which management describes as a system where AI can automatically create, orchestrate, evaluate and improve AI agents.
Management says OASYS reduces deployment times from months to minutes and is designed to operate across voice, text, web, kiosks, vehicles and other channels.
A key driver behind the push is cost efficiency, with OASYS set to increasingly rely on Polaris, SoundHound’s proprietary speech foundation model, alongside internally developed large language models and speech synthesis technologies.
Management stated that most customer interactions could eventually be powered by SoundHound’s own models rather than expensive third-party frontier models, generating meaningful long-term cost savings.
Rather than building general-purpose AI systems, SoundHound is developing specialized models focused on customer service, order processing, financial transactions and workflow automation.
The planned acquisition of LivePerson is expected to further strengthen this strategy by combining SoundHound’s voice AI with LivePerson’s digital messaging platform and its tens of billions of annual customer interactions.
SoundHound reported first-quarter 2026 revenue of $44.2 million, representing 52% growth year over year, with demand growing across multiple industries.
Two notable competitors, NICE Ltd. (NASDAQ: NICE) and Five9, Inc. (NASDAQ: FIVN), have both invested heavily in AI-powered customer engagement platforms, though their approaches differ from SoundHound’s proprietary model strategy.
NICE primarily integrates AI capabilities into its customer experience platform to automate service workflows, taking a more platform-centric rather than model-centric approach.
Five9 has focused its strategy on orchestration and workflow automation to enhance agent productivity across voice and digital channels, rather than building a fully proprietary AI stack.
SoundHound believes its vertically integrated AI approach, built around its own speech foundation model, specialized AI models and the OASYS platform, could provide a competitive edge over both rivals.
From a valuation standpoint, SOUN trades at a forward price-to-sales multiple of 16, above the industry average of 13.48, while shares have lost 7.2% year to date.
The Zacks Consensus Estimate for SoundHound’s 2026 loss per share has widened to 18 cents over the past 30 days, wider than the previous year’s loss of 13 cents, and the stock currently carries a Zacks Rank of 4, signaling a Sell.
