Soul Machines renamed its studio and its underlying technology

The persona

Soul Machines is a New Zealand company that builds 'Digital People' and, more recently, 'AI Agents,' animated on-screen characters intended to hold real-time conversation. The company's earliest public branding for its underlying technology was 'Digital DNA,' used in a 2019 press release archived by the Wayback Machine announcing 'Fatema,' a digital employee built for Bahrain's Bank ABC and described as 'the World's First Digital DNA™ Human.' Soul Machines, not Bank ABC, is the technology's builder and operator in that release; Bank ABC is named as the deploying client.

What the documents establish

Requesting the tool's page at soulmachines.com/digital-dna-studio/ today, 16 September 2026, redirects to a page titled 'Soul Machines Studio,' which does not use the phrase 'Digital DNA' anywhere in its text; the company's current branded technology name there is 'Experiential AI.' That page states Soul Machines Studio is 'LLM Agnostic,' offers 'Completely Customizable' character appearance and personality, and is sold in tiers from a free trial up to enterprise pricing with named limits on interactive-conversation minutes and assistant counts. The company's current homepage markets three separate product lines: Digital Workforce, Workforce Connect, and Soul Machines Studio.

Character versus company

Fatema, in the 2019 release, was introduced as a bank's 'digital employee' who 'accumulates experiences' and 'learns' — language attributed by Soul Machines to the character, though the claims about what the underlying system does are properly Soul Machines' and Bank ABC's own statements about their joint product, not an independent capability assessment. The same discipline applies to today's marketing language on the Studio page describing agents that 'act, react, emote, and behave like real people': that is Soul Machines' own promotional description of its tooling, not a verified account of what any specific deployed agent does for a given client.

What to watch

The company's technology brand has changed at least once, from 'Digital DNA' in 2019 material to 'Experiential AI' on the current Studio page, alongside a product name change from any 'Digital DNA Studio' naming to 'Soul Machines Studio.' No document opened here explains the rebrand; this reading of the naming history is an editorial inference from comparing the two dated captures, not a stated company timeline.

• Has Soul Machines published its own account of why 'Digital DNA' gave way to 'Experiential AI' as its branded technology name?
• What does Bank ABC's own material, if any survives, say about Fatema independently of Soul Machines' description?
• How does Soul Machines Studio's customer-facing pricing tier structure compare with UneeQ's Digital Human OS pricing model?

Soul Machines' own pages, read across seven years, show a company that renamed both its underlying technology brand and at least one flagship tool while keeping the same basic pitch: software for building animated characters that a client organisation, not Soul Machines itself, puts to work.