“Intervision has been a market leader in delivering cloud customer experience solutions with AWS Connect and other AI cloud solutions,” says NWN CEO Jim Sullivan. “The capabilities that we are getting to accelerate what we have already built is a great game changer for us.”
NWN has made its biggest move yet to dominate the AI-powered managed services era by acquiring AWS AI superstar InterVision Systems, a leader in AI customer experience solutions.
The blockbuster deal accelerates NWN’s fast-growth AI ascent with the addition of St. Louis, Missouri-headquartered InterVision, an AI customer experience leader which last year received the top prize in the inaugural AWS GenAI Builder Bonanza contest.
“InterVision has been a market leader in delivering cloud customer experience solutions with AWS Connect and other AI cloud solutions,” said NWN CEO Jim Sullivan (pictured) in an interview with CRN. “The capabilities that we are getting to accelerate what we have already built is a great game changer for us.”
[Related: NWN Wins Blockbuster Five-Year Deal With The Kraft Group To Drive AI Era Tech Blitz]
Terms of the deal – which builds on NWN’s own innovative intelligent virtual agent AI customer experience and device-as-a-service offerings – were not disclosed.
The deal adds massive AI cloud customer experience capabilities in AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, and provides NWN for the first time with the ability to provide a full suite of GenAI-powered managed services with intelligent virtual agents from the desktop with device-as-a-service, to the data center, to the cloud.
“This fills out the entire stack,” said Sullivan, who has piloted NWN from $300 million to a $1.5 billion SP500 powerhouse since taking the helm six years ago. “So we now have a full stack [AI-powered managed services] stack from on-prem to the cloud, all the way from the end user to the full back end in the cloud. It’s full, end-to-end managed services, and then with our Experience Management Platform with GenAI solutions customers can co-manage these solutions. It is very unique.”
NWN’s ability to tie intelligent virtual agents into large language GenAI models mapped into a customer’s legacy data is a “huge” game changer for customers, said Sullivan.
“This is all about making AI very useful for customers with intelligent virtual agents and being able to make it really useful for customer success teams and the customer’s customers’ experience,” said Sullivan.
The deal adds 1,600 new accounts to NWN and an estimated $470 million in sales, catapulting NWN from No. 59 on the 2025 CRN SP500 into the top 50 rankings.
InterVision, which is ranked in the top 5 percent of all AWS Premier partners, also has elite AI talent in intelligent infrastructure and cybersecurity with the top Cisco AI Ready Infrastructure Specialization and a leading position in Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Juniper Networks (2022 Juniper Worldwide Services Partner of Year) and Arctic Wolf (2023 Rookie Partner of Year).
Besides the new AI customer experience tech talent, the deal expands NWN’s geographic reach into the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic and adds to an already robust NWN public sector footprint.
Sullivan praised InterVision CEO Jonathan Lerner and his team for delivering breakthrough customer experience innovation. “We’re very appreciative of what Jonathan Lerner and his team have built,” he said.
The deal represents a major leap forward in NWN’s fast-paced, big bet to scale up the business to capture a huge chunk of what market researchers estimate is a $1.9 trillion AI-powered managed services opportunity in the United States.
“We are focused on real [AI] with real ROI [return on investment] for customers that we’ve already been deploying for almost 24 months now,” said Sullivan. “It is really working. In every business process in IT infrastructure there is an opportunity for generative or legacy AI machine learning to make a positive impact on a customer’s business productivity.”
The combined NWN-InterVision AI-powered managed services portfolio covers the full market from commercial and enterprise to SLED (State, Local and Education) and the federal market.
The deal comes with NWN set to launch two new AI-powered digital employee experience (DEX) offerings aimed at setting a new bar for delivering AI-powered managed services cost savings for customers.
The first, AiVA, is an AI-powered virtual assistant that provides automated IT diagnostics and fixes that have resulted in a 45 percent reduction in IT support requests from employees.
AiVA allows employees to interact with their devices and data with a natural language interface that supports 100 languages with the ability to understand employee sentiment and intent.
The second NWN breakthrough is Managed DEX, a cloud-based platform that fulfills employee support requests, including fixing slow PC response times and monitoring and improving device health and compliance issues.
The two new offerings – which have been fine-tuned over the last nine months – provide customers with the “ability to get questions answered and the ability to do much more automated response to help desk tickets,” said Sullivan.
“What we have done is put intelligent virtual agents on large language models trained up on our data and our customers’ data,” he said. “We have really cracked that code. There is no hype here. We have had hundreds of deployments and scaled this very quickly.”
Both AiVA and Managed DEX work with NWN’s customer Experience Management Platform (EMP), which was launched in 2019.
“We now have over 2,500 customers on EMP,” said Sullivan. “So we’ve had incredible adoption, traction, and growth. That automation, AI and machine learning continues. The difference now is we’re adding generative AI capabilities.”
NWN Senior Vice President of Corporate Development Matt Curran, who worked on the deal, credited the backing of NWN’s private equity backer, American Securities, for providing the financial muscle to acquire one of the top AI customer experience managed service providers in the country.
“It speaks to the partnership we have with American Securities that we can get deals like this done in a market like this,” said Curran. “It’s a very productive relationship with American Securities that augments our deal team. We’re really proud of what we do and are highly selective when we look at acquisition targets. This deal checks all the boxes.”
The InterVision acquisition marks the second deal NWN has done with American Securities’ backing in the last eight months. Last September, NWN acquired Seattle-based Leverage Information Systems, one of the top Cisco federal market partners in the country with over 60 federal contracts and 200 customers.
“We do deals to solve customer problems faster and more broadly,” said Curran. “That creates the customer and employee benefit. We are doing really cool stuff that solves customer problems in innovative ways. Everyone is talking about generative AI but to be able to actually deliver the AI-enabled solutions sets us apart. It’s exciting to be taking this innovative technology to commercial, enterprise, SLED, and federal customers across the country.”
Curran said NWN’s strength is acquiring companies like InterVision and Leverage and then integrating them with a focus on systems, processes and people. “No one does what we do,” he said. “We bring these businesses together under one platform and make things easier for our customers. CIOs are being asked what they are doing around AI and security and we are there with the answers.”
Sullivan, for his part, said the NWN AI ascent is just beginning. “We’re not done,” he said. “We’re going to continue to grow this company and keep investing and innovating. We’re going to continue to make this a great place to work. It is exciting. I love what we’re doing here. It is really working and it is really special.”
