Deep Learning with PolyAI

An agent that gets better every day compounds into a very different agent within months. That's the idea behind Wren, PolyAI's new release: an agent whose job is to make your other agents better. Some of what it finds is a small refinement, some of it is a big fix. Either way, Wren watches every real customer conversation, learns from what happens, and keeps improving your customer-facin...

Companies are pouring money into AI, but not everyone is getting the returns. Ian Jacobs, VP and Lead Analyst at Opus Research, thinks he knows why. In this episode, your host Nikola Mrkšić sits down with Ian to work through two ideas from his latest research.  The first is Conversation Experience Orchestration: the wall between conversational AI and conversation intelligence is coming down, and c...

When PolyAI built its Builder MCP, one client helped shape it: Vixxo Facility Solutions, one of the largest facilities providers in the US. In this episode, guest host Damian Sasso talks with Vixxo's CTO Derek Neighbors and VP of IT Bobby Hunnicut about getting AI agents into the hands of people who've never written code, from accounting to technicians in the field. They cover why an MCP...

PolyAI just launched Dialog-RSN-1, its first audio-native model, and your host Nikola Mrkšić sat down with its builder, Matt Henderson, to unpack why it’s a game-changer for building voice agents. Most voice AI either flattens a call into a transcript and loses the audio, or goes fully speech-to-speech and gives up control of the voice. Dialog-RSN-1 does neither. It hears the raw audio directly, d...

Voice AI vendors love to quote word error rate, usually somewhere around 2 to 3%, as proof their system understands customers. Oliver Shoulson, Agent Design & Engineering Lead at PolyAI, thinks it's one of the most misleading numbers in the business. He and Nikola Mrkšić go through a month of analysis across more than 100,000 real production call turns to explain why.  Turns out not all w...

Send us Fan Mail Engineering teams are shrinking. But is that a crisis or an upgrade? In this episode of Deep Learning with PolyAI, Nikola Mrkšić sits down with Helen Greul, PolyAI's new SVP of Engineering, to explore what AI is doing to the shape of technical teams, the nature of engineering leadership, and who actually thrives when the rules change. They discuss why a new generation of non-...

Send us Fan Mail Ten minutes to a working AI agent, tested and ready to deploy. In this episode of Deep Learning with PolyAI, Frank Ferro sits down with Ruari Phipps, Senior Forward Deployed AI Engineer at PolyAI, for a live demo of the Agent Development Kit — and a look at what it actually means to give developers real control over how they build AI agents. They explore why enterprise AI platform...

Send us Fan Mail What happens when the ability to build an AI agent is no longer limited to developers? In this episode of Deep Learning with PolyAI, Nikola Mrkšić sits down with Michael Chen, VP of Strategic Alliances at PolyAI, to explore what's driving the explosion in AI agent development — and what it means for how enterprises build, deploy, and think about AI. They cover the rise of per...

Send us Fan Mail Many AI models today are designed as generalists. But in customer experience, that approach often falls short. In this episode of Deep Learning with PolyAI, Nikola Mrkšić sits down with Matt Henderson, VP of Research at PolyAI, to unpack why specialized AI models outperform general-purpose ones in real-world CX environments. They explore the tradeoffs between speed, accuracy, and...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Deep Learning with PolyAI, Nikola Mrkšić sits down with Bill Staikos, Founder of Be Customer Led, to unpack why many CX leaders are still on the sidelines of the AI conversation — and what that means for the future of the function. They explore how AI is reshaping the “interaction layer” of customer experience, why traditional CX metrics like NPS are no longer e...

Send us Fan Mail Customer experience is often measured at the surface. But it’s built behind the scenes. In this episode of Deep Learning with PolyAI, Michelle Schroeder sits down with Sam Stern, who leads service design at LinkedIn, to explore how employee experience shapes every customer interaction. They discuss how LinkedIn is improving CX by fixing the systems employees rely on — from reducin...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Deep Learning with PolyAI, Michelle Schroeder sits down with Nate Brown, Head of Education and Enablement at Metric Sherpa and cofounder of CX Accelerator, to discuss how AI is reshaping the way companies think about customer experience. Nate shares a framework that’s gaining traction with CX leaders: make the quick parts quick, and make the slow parts meaningfu...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Deep Learning with PolyAI, Nikola Mrkšić sits down with Steven Fine, GM of Restaurants at PolyAI, to explore how technology has shaped the customer experience in restaurants over the past century. From the first phone reservations to online booking platforms and now AI-powered voice agents, the conversation traces how hospitality has continuously adapted to meet...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Deep Learning with PolyAI, Michelle Schroeder sits down with Sarah Wright, Vice President of Global Customer Service at ResMed, to talk about what it really takes to transform healthcare CX. Sarah describes the challenge as an Everest climb. Every step forward requires balancing innovation with responsibility, especially when patient health information is involv...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Deep Learning with PolyAI, your host Nikola Mrkšić chats with Alex Brown to unpack what happens when AI takes over the administrative work that quietly defines modern healthcare. Instead of replacing doctors and clinicians, AI is reshaping everything around them:  from documentation and scheduling to the workflows that consume hours of time. The conversation exp...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Deep Learning with PolyAI, Nikola Mrkšić sits down with Nathan Pearson, GM, Financial Services at PolyAi, to trace the evolution of personalized banking. From branch tellers and ATMs to digital channels and AI-driven experiences, they explore how banks have historically balanced scale, efficiency, and trust, and why personalization has always been central to cus...

Send us Fan Mail AI has become remarkably good at answering questions — but customer experience should go beyond answers. It’s about resolution. Too often, AI fails when customers can’t easily explain what they’re seeing on their screen. In this episode of Deep Learning with PolyAI , Jenn Cunningham sits down with Zaccari Scalzi of Cobrowse.io to explore why visual context is becoming essential fo...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Deep Learning with PolyAI , Michelle Schroeder sits down with Dom Nicastro , Editor-in-Chief at Simpler Media Group and longtime journalist covering CX, content, and enterprise tech. Dom has spent years watching AI reshape newsrooms — and he sees striking parallels with what CX leaders are facing today. Journalists and CX teams share the same challenge: cutting...

Send us Fan Mail Every customer expresses themselves differently, and their choice of language is no exception. So how can brands bridge the gap when customers come to them speaking different languages? In this episode of Deep Learning with PolyAI, Jenn Cunningham sits down with Matt Henderson, VP of Research, and Viola Lin, Product Manager, to explore the evolution of multilingual voice AI and wh...

Send us Fan Mail At VOX 2025 , one thing was clear: the best brands aren’t just adopting AI — they’re becoming fluent in it. In this episode of Deep Learning with PolyAI , Michelle Schroeder , CMO of PolyAI, sits down with Christopher Osborne , PolyAI’s Chief Product Officer, to unpack what we learned from our annual conference about how the world's top enterprises are moving from early adopt...

Send us Fan Mail The conversational AI market has exploded: ~650 companies, even more tools, and way too many promises. For business leaders, navigating all this can be paralyzing. In this episode of Deep Learning with PolyAI, your host Nikola Mrkšić sits down with Dan Miller, founder of Opus Research and the analyst who coined the term "conversational commerce," to unpack why the AI eco...

Send us Fan Mail Hello Sugar is one of the fastest-growing service brands in America, with more than 140 locations and counting. From the start, they built a text-first, digital experience that customers loved. But growth brought new insights: even in a digital-first world, voice calls were still critical to winning — and keeping — customers. In this episode of Deep Learning with PolyAI, Nikola Mr...

Send us Fan Mail Large language models are powerful tools — but why do they ramble on and on instead of just getting to the point? In this episode of Deep Learning with PolyAI, Nikola Mrkšić sits down with Oliver Shoulson, one of PolyAI’s original dialogue designers, to unpack why LLMs talk the way they do, and what that means for building natural-sounding voice AI. They dive into: Why LLMs are tr...

Send us Fan Mail Most companies measure CX through surveys, reviews, and dashboards. But there is real danger in “silent complaints”: the underwhelming experiences that customers never report, but quietly share with friends or that stop them from coming back. In this episode of Deep Learning with PolyAI, your host Nikola Mrkšić sits down with Adrian Swinscoe — author, Forbes columnist, and host of...

Send us Fan Mail Analytics has always been the hardest part of the contact center. Dashboards are slow, incomplete, and rarely used outside of specialist teams. But what if analytics could be as simple as asking a question? In this episode of Deep Learning with PolyAI, your host Nikola Mrkšić brings back Damian Sasso to explore how agentic AI is transforming analysis itself. Instead of waiting wee...