A customer can tell a business what they need online and still have to explain everything again when they arrive in person. AI companies want to close that gap with agents that remember earlier conversations. For businesses, that could mean better service and fewer abandoned purchases. For customers, it raises a question about how much of a conversation should follow them.
Napster wants to make that experience the basis of its comeback. The brand that popularized music sharing in 1999 now sells conversational video agents, with Microsoft helping bring them into enterprise accounts. CEO John Acunto imagines the same digital personality accompanying a customer beyond a website.
“Imagine every website being able to remember somebody in a retail store from the website with our station where you can talk to the same agent,” Acunto tells me in an exclusive interview. “For instance, at Formula One, when you get to the race, you’re talking to the same agent to give you your tickets, and they recall your request about grandma needing a wheelchair.”
Microsoft’s Azure Native program makes it easier for Napster to buy through existing cloud agreements. For a brand still closely associated with music, the relationship offers a way to introduce its AI agents to enterprise customers through a platform they already use. Acunto sees that access as an important part of building a new business around the Napster name.
Microsoft Gives Napster a Route Back Into Business
Napster says Microsoft’s field organization of more than 35,000 sellers carries its product into Azure accounts, where buyers can use existing cloud spending commitments. Microsoft also uses the product, according to Napster.
“What we are excited about is that Microsoft now is offering our product as if it’s one of its own products, which is a significant upgrade from a typical partner where they’re making introductions and the co-selling process a little different,” Acunto says. Buyers can, he adds, “work with your Microsoft rep without ever talking to anyone from Napster at all”.
The relationship stretches back more than five years through Touchcast, which Napster acquired in June 2025 in a deal it valued at $500 million. Napster says its transition from standard partner to Azure Native took less than six months, but Acunto provides no revenue or customer totals for Microsoft-driven purchases.
He argues that businesses miss valuable information when visitors leave without buying. An agent could ask what went wrong and give the company a chance to fix it. “You don’t want to go through with the sale because the price is too high or because it takes nine days for shipping,” he says. “When you have an agent that’s having a conversation with the customer and really learning why it is they aren’t buying, that’s the value of owning the data.”
Napster’s “Omniagents” combine conversational video with memory across interactions. Its Station kiosks extend that idea into physical locations, while phone support connects agents to existing telephony infrastructure. The Azure offering lets businesses connect an OpenAI real-time model deployment or use a hosted option with a managed model. “We’re the top of the funnel. We’re what faces the customer and probably the most important independent piece of the AI stack,” Acunto claims. “When we approach a customer, it is important to explain that we want them to own their data, create their own models.”
He casts that independence as protection against model suppliers moving into their customers’ markets, describing a hypothetical investment in Anthropic. “It’s really scary stuff when you’ve just spent $50 million with Anthropic and then they announce a customer service portal that can put your customer service offering out of business,” he says.
Acunto wants businesses to own the information their agents collect. For customers, the more immediate concern is whether a conversation on a website will resurface in a store, and how much say they have over what the agent remembers.
When an AI Agent Remembers Too Much
Asked where useful recognition becomes unsettling, Acunto compares it to familiar customer accounts. “The guiding principle we share with customers is that recognition should not be a surprise. People already carry memory between a brand and themselves through loyalty programs and apps, and nobody finds that unsettling because they handed over the card or signed into the account and they know what it buys them,” he says. “Agentic memory works the same way.”
He assigns businesses responsibility for deciding what carries over and what customers can switch off. Companies also determine what customers can view or change. His benchmark is whether retaining a detail makes the next encounter better.
“We encourage companies to use that as the benchmark for what they keep and what they discard. Remembering a guest has a dog and asked for pet-friendly accommodations on their last three visits, for example, can make their next experience better,” Acunto explained. “It’s about using that information responsibly while also respecting and protecting customer privacy, and we work with businesses to do just that.”
Napster’s briefing promises “no new security review,” but Acunto’s answer leaves consequential decisions with the buyer. He does not specify a default consent setting or explain how Napster enforces customer choices.
Can AI Customer Service Help Sell More Tickets?
Acunto sees Napster’s work with Spa F1 Grand Prix as an early test of whether better customer conversations can generate more sales. On June 2, the company launched Jack, an AI concierge that helps fans navigate ticket options and choose where to sit.
“Our AI agent, Jack, held nearly 55,000 conversations with visitors to their site in 21 languages over two months, and in that time, checkout click throughs improved by 70%, resulting in an anticipated $623,000 in revenue with nearly 4,000 customer service hours saved,” he says. “We’re excited to see how this technology will further transform businesses.”
When I asked whether Jack persuaded more people to buy or helped visitors who already intended to purchase, Acunto acknowledged that the site attracted fans interested in attending the race. He believes the agent improved the buying experience for that audience, whose interest in the event already existed.
Jack also helped fans find suitable elevators and plan accessible routes from parking to their seats, Acunto says. Napster reports that about 2,000 fans used a 360-degree seat view to check their sightlines before buying tickets. “Some of it just has to be around making you feel good about joining that experience and having a positive one. In terms of the sales compared to the typical website, we did see a significant lift,” Acunto says. Spa has deployed Jack again for 2027 ticketing, according to Napster.
What Makes Napster Harder to Replace?
The question grows more pressing as conversational video becomes more widely available. Tavus and HeyGen compete in video agents, while Salesforce Agentforce and other platforms pursue customer-service budgets. Microsoft also offers its own agents through Copilot Studio, putting Napster’s distribution partner in competition for some of the same customers.
“If everyone picked up conversational video capabilities tomorrow, we’d still be extremely confident in our position in the market. Our bet on embodied AI is a differentiator, but our biggest advantage is the ecosystem we’ve built to support our customers and the cost we offer it at,” Acunto says. “Napster’s built large persona models and persistent memory to give our agents an identity and presence, and the ability to have the same agent operate across any surface your customer uses, at a fraction of the cost to just deploy video AI with our competitors.”
Napster advertises a price of 1 cent per minute. Its Google Cloud Marketplace listing offers customers another purchasing route, although Azure remains its primary platform.
Acunto predicts that businesses without customer-facing agents will begin losing market share rapidly within two years. He expects Napster to spend that period demonstrating its own value. “The next two years will be about proving just how much more effective embodied AI is at improving results with end users and sharing what that success looks like,” he says.
The Control Layer Verdict
As conversational video becomes commonplace, businesses will have more ways to offer it. Microsoft gives Napster a substantial distribution advantage, but competitors will keep testing whether its technology deserves a separate place in the customer-service budget. Napster’s opportunity rests on what happens after the first conversation. Remembering a customer should make the next interaction more useful, while leaving that person in control of what carries forward. Spa’s decision to use Jack again offers an encouraging start. A durable comeback will require more businesses to keep choosing Napster once a talking avatar no longer feels new.
