The era of dry, soulless AI tools is coming to an end. Cognition, the creators of the autonomous coding agent Devin, has acquired California-based The Interaction Company—the developers behind the social AI Poke. According to TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez, the deal is valued in the nine-figure range, at approximately $100 million. This sends a clear signal to the market: advanced interaction models have shifted from a "nice-to-have" bonus to a strategic requirement. While Devin built its reputation on technical prowess, leadership has decided to bet on anthropomorphism to dismantle the psychological barriers humans face when working with AI.
From Software to Colleague
Marvin von Hagen, co-founder of The Interaction Company, is blunt: users prefer working with personalities rather than robots. Launched in March 2024, Poke stood out from the crowd through its ability to communicate via iMessage and Telegram using slang and humor. Cognition now plans to port this social layer into Devin. As Cognition co-founder Scott Wu noted, the goal is to make working with the agent "proactive" and simply "pleasant." The logic is straightforward: Poke users sent over 100 million messages in just three months—engagement patterns that Cognition is eager to replicate in the corporate sector.
"You’d almost certainly rather work with colleagues who have character than those who behave like soulless machines."
This deal confirms that in the overheated AI agent market, technical performance is gradually becoming a commodity. To maintain its lead, Cognition is banking on "personality" as the primary lever for trust. By integrating Poke’s conversational style, the company is attempting to reduce the cognitive resistance engineers inevitably feel when delegating critical tasks to an autonomous system.
The Trust Economy and Plugging Holes
Beyond external "friendliness," the merger addresses pragmatic architectural challenges. The Poke team will gain access to Cognition’s compute power and models to improve the reliability and speed of their interfaces. However, reading between the lines, the acquisition also looks like a rescue mission for a popular but financially unstable product. Despite its massive reach and status as the first AI agent approved for Apple Messages for Business, Poke was burning through massive compute budgets and struggling to reach profitability.
By moving the interaction layer into the high-margin world of enterprise development, Cognition is effectively subsidizing social AI with B2B revenue. This sets an important precedent: AI "personality" is becoming a standalone stack layer that commands a much higher price than a standard chatbot. Moving forward, we will see emotional intelligence evolve from a novelty for Gen Z into a standard for professional systems, where user loyalty depends directly on whether an agent feels like a true teammate.