Can Sales Assist Supercharge SoundHound's Retail AI Growth?
SoundHound AI, Inc. SOUN has turned heads by announcing the launch of Sales Assist, a voice-powered AI agent for retail at the Mobile World Congress 2026. SOUNSOUN-- stock jumped 6.8% during yesterday’s trading hours and inched up 0.8% in the after-hours, reflecting investors’ optimism. The launch marks a strategic expansion of the company’s agentic AI platform into frontline retail sales environments, particularly telecom and high-complexity stores.
Sales Assist is designed to provide real-time, context-aware recommendations to in-store employees by analyzing live customer conversations (with consent). Leveraging SoundHound’s proprietary Polaris automatic speech recognition technology, the solution operates effectively in noisy retail settings and delivers instant prompts, including upgrade eligibility checks, product bundles, trade-in offers and compliance disclosures, directly to staff devices. By eliminating manual CRM lookups and accelerating decision-making, the tool aims to boost revenue per interaction, shorten sales cycles and improve workforce productivity.
Moreover, Sales Assist strengthens SOUN’s value proposition in the rapidly expanding enterprise AI market, particularly in telecom retail, where product complexity and upsell opportunities are significant. This move underscores the company’s broader push into enterprise AI beyond its legacy automotive and voice assistant footprint. Management highlighted that SoundHoundSOUN-- processed nearly 30 million AI-driven customer interactions in 2025, reflecting the growing commercial adoption of its conversational and agentic AI capabilities across industries.
While monetization timelines and competitive pressures remain key watch points, the announcement reinforces SoundHound’s innovation momentum and enterprise diversification strategy, factors that could support long-term growth prospects if execution remains solid.
SoundHound’s Competition in the Agentic AI Zone
SoundHound differentiates itself as a voice-first agentic AI specialist, focusing on real-time speech understanding and task orchestration across industries like retail, automotive, hospitality and telecom. Operating in this market, it faces competition from renowned names like C3.ai, Inc. AI, BigBear.ai Holdings, Inc. BBAI and Palantir Technologies, Inc. PLTR.
C3.ai offers a broad enterprise AI platform with agentic capabilities geared toward large industrial, energy and regulated environments. C3.ai’s strength lies in end-to-end data integration and customizable AI applications. On the other hand, BigBear.ai targets secure, government-focused AI and defense applications. BigBear.ai’s agentic systems are tailored for mission-critical workflows with recurring contracts, offering stability but slower growth outside federal budgets.
Moreover, Palantir combines powerful data analytics with agentic AI workflows across government and commercial sectors. Palantir’s deep enterprise penetration and high-value contracts underpin robust growth potential.
SOUN Stock’s Price Performance & Valuation Trend
Shares of this California-based voice AI company have trended downward 30.4% in the past six months, underperforming the Zacks Computers - IT Services industry, the Zacks Computer and Technology sector and the S&P 500 index.
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SOUN stock is currently trading at a premium compared with the industry peers, with a forward 12-month price-to-sales (P/S) ratio of 14.65, as evidenced by the chart below.
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research
EPS Trend of SOUN
SOUN’s earnings estimates for 2025 have remained unchanged over the past 60 days at a loss per share of 13 cents. During the said time frame, the earnings estimates for 2026 have expanded to a loss per share of six cents.
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Even though the company’s earnings estimates for 2025 and 2026 indicate a loss per share, the estimated values indicate 87.5% and 56.9% year-over-year growth, respectively.
SoundHound stock currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.
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