Olark vs Forethought
Side-by-side trajectory, velocity, and editorial themes.
Olark rebuilds around v2 — new layout, AI Assistants surface, in-product bot evaluation.
Olark is mid-rollout of v2, a full interface rebuild that landed in mid-2025. The AI Assistants area is now structured around Knowledge / Persona / Evaluation tabs, with bot review and feedback (thumbs up/down on individual answers) happening directly in-product. Knowledge ingestion has expanded to JSON and ZIP files plus much larger website crawls. Smaller v2 quality-of-life touches keep landing — collapsed agent menus, static offline messages, Group ID exposure for API users.
The product is being rebuilt around AI-assisted chat support, not bolted on. The Evaluation tab in particular signals a closed-loop training direction — agents tune the bot from real conversations rather than configuring it abstractly. v2 is also shedding classic settings page by page; expect that migration to keep producing visible incremental wins.
Next moves likely deepen the bot evaluation loop — automatic quality scoring, suggested knowledge updates from low-rated answers — and continue retiring classic surfaces. A pricing/tiering revisit around AI usage is plausible once the v2 migration has run its course.
Forethought pivots from answering questions to executing outcomes via Orchestrator and Browser Agents.
Forethought is in the middle of a deliberate platform-narrative shift. April shipped two foundational pieces: Orchestrator, which routes business signals into deterministic AI actions across channels, and Browser Agents, which can take actions in apps that don't expose APIs. Test Suite landed alongside as the validation tooling for agent behavior before deployment. The CEO's 'Next Chapter' post frames the same direction in plain language: AI moving from answering to resolving.
The company is repositioning from a customer-support intent and triage AI to an outcomes-execution layer for enterprise customer experience. Browser Agents are the bet that the long tail of CX work lives in apps without proper APIs — making the agent capable of clicking through them is the moat. Orchestrator and Test Suite are the deterministic-control and validation pieces that make this defensible enough for enterprise procurement.
Expect a tightening of the integration story — pre-built Browser Agent flows for common CX systems like Zendesk and Salesforce Service Cloud — and an explicit outcomes-priced packaging emerging over the next quarter as the company moves past per-seat or per-resolution pricing.
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