💻Components

How does Captivate work?

Captivate is built on a flexible middleware system that integrates AI chatbots, live chat platforms, and communication channels into a unified platform.

Whether you're coordinating the usage of your AI tools via our Vienna AI orchestration engine or building custom applications like our clients or using our flagship Athena sales acceleration engine, Captivate's components work together seamlessly to power your AI-driven solutions. Here's how each component works:

Applications

Our clients are building their own applications using Captivate's platform but we've built Athena, our revolutionary AI sales acceleration application. You can also coordinate your AI tools with Vienna, our AI orchestration engine. Here's how everything works from a top-down perspective:

Vienna

Vienna is the AI orchestration engine at the heart of the Captivate platform, designed to offer a vendor-neutral approach to managing all your AI tools. Here are its main components:

  • Lifecycle Management: Vienna treats AI agents and conversational workflows as modular components, enabling enterprise-grade change management.

  • AI Router: Use Agent Groups to "link" AI agents together, so Vienna can re-route users to the appropriate AI agents based on the context of their queries.

  • Governance and Compliance: Vienna enforces robust security and compliance controls across your entire conversational AI infrastructure. Our governance layer provides: ​

    • Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Granular permission management ensuring users only access what they need.

    • Compliance: Evaluate AI agents based on legislative and regulatory rulesets.

  • Objects (ETA 2026): Transform AI agents, workflows, and guardrails into modular components that can be transferred across users and organisations.

  • Vienna Insights (ETA 2026): Obtain insights regarding your conversations, focusing on key metrics you want to track. You can input your desired parameters using natural language, and Vienna can generate the relevant dashboards and visual components to best present the information.

Athena

Athena is the intelligent sales execution engine of Captivate, serving as your team's virtual sales assistant built to support sales professionals at every stage of their workflow. It has these main components:

  • Knowledge Bot: This is an AI agent trained on all your relevant marketing and sales materials.

  • Mini-Courses: Athena can help you create personalised Mini-Courses based on your ingested materials and other relevant context. These are five-minute short courses with a Knowledge Test to ensure you're actively learning at any pace you wish.

  • Call Pilot: This is our meeting planner, where you can transform meetings into dynamic "Athena Calls" that affect every aspect of the sales conversation through three modules:

    • Before - Generates real-time call briefings from CRM, email, calendar, and news sources, plus delivers bite-sized training based on conversation needs

    • During - Provides AI live sales support with instant product details and real-time audio analysis for upsell opportunities and objection handling

    • After - Automates CRM updates, follow-up scheduling, contact reports, and conversation-based email generation

  • Athena Insights (ETA 2026): Athena can analyze conversations you've had with both the Knowledge Bot and the Call Pilot and provide meaningful insights based on various parameters such as sentiment, intent, and other relevant metrics.

Your Company

Companies can use Captivate as the foundation to develop their own AI-powered apps by leveraging its flexible SDK, API, and prebuilt components for rapid customisation.

Integrations

Chat Flows

The Chat Flow is the core of Captivate. It seamlessly brings together AI Chatbots, Channels, and Live Chat into one cohesive system. At the heart of Captivate is Chat Flow, allowing businesses to:

  • Assign an AI to a specific channel

  • Enable live chat escalation when needed

  • Deploy the same AI assistant across multiple channels

When you create a Chat Flow with Captivate, it manages all necessary integrations—ensuring that all human-machine conversations across its connections are compatible and interchangeable.

AI Chatbots

An AI Chatbot is a computer program designed to simulate human conversations through text or voice interactions. Within Captivate, you can integrate your existing AI Chatbots or create new ones. Our platform supports the following AI Chatbot infrastructures:

  • OpenAI – GPT-powered AI for natural language conversations

  • Custom Chatbot – We can create a personalised LLM to fulfil your specific objectives

Channel

A Channel is the platform that your users access to get information about your company and avail your services. Using a Chat Flow, you can deploy your AI Chatbot in these Channels to assist users with their concerns.

Available Channels include:

  • Web Widgets – Embed AI-powered chat on your website

  • WhatsApp – Automate customer support via messaging

  • Social Media – Seamless integration with Facebook Messenger and Instagram

  • Custom Channel – Our team can create a personalised Channel for your preferred deployment area

Live Chats

Live Chats pertain to messaging platforms with special app integration features. Thanks to Chat Flows, we can use Live Chats to provide real-time contact between your agents and the users that your AI Chatbots are conversing with.

Your Chat Flow is programmed to analyse incoming messages from various Channels, directing them to Chatbots for general responses and to Live Chat agents for specialised answers. Currently supported platforms include:

  • Microsoft Teams – Ideal for customer support and internal collaboration

  • Slack – Organised team communication with third-party integrations

  • Custom Live Chat – The Captivate team can create a custom-tailored Live Chat for your team

Systems Integrations

Captivate supports Zapier AI Actions, unlocking access to 7,000+ integrations with business tools.

Platform

Captivate is built on a unique chat routing middleware, designed to seamlessly route conversations between any AI, channel, or live chat platform whilst eliminating vendor lock-in, giving businesses complete flexibility.

  • Open & Flexible – Integrate with any AI, live chat, or CRM system

  • Enterprise-Grade Security – Encryption, anonymisation, and full compliance

  • Scalable – Suitable for small businesses and large enterprises alike

  • Deploy Anywhere – Cloud-based or on-premises hosting options

  • Custom AI Models – Integrate DeepSeek, Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, and more

  • Flexible Channels – Add TikTok, Signal, Telegram, and other platforms as needed

  • CRM Integration – Connect with Zoho, Eloqua, HubSpot, and any modern system

  • Bespoke Development – Custom web and mobile chat experiences built by our expert team

We've been building AI chat platforms for nearly a decade, with skilled AI engineers and developers who can rapidly create cost-effective solutions. For businesses that want complete control over their AI strategy, Captivate offers the perfect blend of off-the-shelf functionality and full customisation—without vendor lock-in.

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