VUX World

A traditional mortgage can take weeks to process. Every application moves through rounds of document requests, condition checks, and broker queries before a decision is made. ING is using agentic AI to change that. In this episode, Bahadir Yilmaz, Chief Analytics Officer at ING, explains how one of Europe's largest mortgage lenders has implemented agentic AI in its mortgage process. The system...

In this episode, recorded at the CCW UK Summit, we’re joined by Jordan Anglin from Vodafone to explore the company's approach to customer experience and how AI supports faster, more seamless issue resolution across digital and human channels. Jordan explains how Vodafone combines its AI assistant, TOBi, asynchronous messaging, and dedicated resolution teams to reduce customer effort, eliminate...

We recorded this episode at the CCW UK Summit in May, capturing some of the key conversations shaping customer experience, service and AI. AI is everywhere in customer experience, yet few organisations are turning that excitement into measurable business outcomes. We're joined by Paul Cuglietta, Customer Services Director at Simplyhealth, and Paul Atkins, Head of Business Optimisation at Simpl...

When you switch off your call centre, AI has no safety net to fall back on. RVU did exactly that, building an AI-first customer operations function that serves millions of UK consumers. In this episode, we’re joined by Anna Fedorchuk, Customer Operations Manager at RVU, the company behind brands including Uswitch, Confused.com and Money.co.uk . Anna shares how her team transformed customer support...

Japan has one of the lowest average NPS scores in the world, and the reason is cultural: Japanese customers expect more. Daniel Orenes Ferrández, Senior Manager of Customer Experience at Uber, discusses Omotenashi, the Japanese philosophy of anticipating customer needs and apologising sincerely before resolving a problem. Daniel has lived and worked in Japan for over a decade, including five years...

What happens when customers stop opening banking apps and start managing their finances through AI assistants? In this episode, we sit down with Mathias Fanschek, Head of Digital Transformation and Retail Strategy at Raiffeisen Bank International, to explore how one of Europe's largest banking groups is preparing for a future of headless banking, agentic commerce and AI-powered customer experi...

We sit down with Henry Vaage Iversen, Co-Founder and CCO at boost.ai, to explore why voice AI is finally reaching mainstream deployment across banks, insurers, telcos and other regulated industries. We dig into what's changed in the technology, why phone volumes continue to rise and how large language models are reshaping what's possible on the voice channel. Henry shares practical lessons...

Five years after his ⁠first appearance on the podcast⁠ , PolyAI CEO Nikola Mrkšić returns to VUX World to discuss how conversational AI has evolved from intent-based systems into enterprise-scale AI agents handling millions of customer interactions. PolyAI began as a research-led spinout from Cambridge University with a singular focus on making automated voice conversations genuinely useful. Since...

Enterprise AI projects fail more often than they succeed. The MIT figure Thomas Schaefer cites puts that at 95%. The reasons are rarely the model. They are the architecture beneath it, the data that feeds it, and the use case selection that determines whether any of it was worth starting. Thomas Schaefer is Director of Sales Engineering at Uniphore, based in Germany. He has over 20 years in enterp...

Enterprise AI tools can spin up a prototype in an hour. Getting that prototype to production with the accuracy, security, and scale a real business needs still takes months for most companies. Inbenta says its new Encore platform closes that gap in days or even hours. Merlin Bise, CTO at Inbenta, returns to VUX World to walk through how Encore builds production-grade AI agents on the fly when a cu...

Most teams are still asking where to use AI. The better question is where not to. In this episode, Adrian Matei, Product Manager from Jaja Finance, breaks down what actually happens when generative AI meets real users and real constraints. The result is far less hype, far more discipline, and a clear view of what it takes to ship AI that works. We talk about Jaja’s chatbot, Airi, which is a RAG-ba...

We hit the floor at the European Chatbot and Conversational AI Summit in Edinburgh with a mic and a simple rule: answer a question, then leave one for the next person. What unfolds is a chain of questions and answers from practitioners at Lebara, Lloyds Banking Group, Uber, ElevenLabs, Carrefour, Virgin Money, Tesco, Jaja Finance and more. The result is an organic, unscripted snapshot of what the...

Most companies sit on a goldmine of customer insight and do almost nothing with it. Every conversation holds signals about frustration, churn risk, and broken experiences, yet extracting that value can be a slow and manual effort. In this episode, Shane Lynn, CEO and Co-Founder of EdgeTier, unpacks how conversational intelligence is evolving in the age of large language models and what it means fo...

How do you test something that can behave differently every single time? In this episode, we speak with Amitha Pulijala, Chief Product Officer, and Christoph Börner, VP of Engineering, both at Cyara, about one of the most pressing challenges in conversational AI today. The shift from deterministic, scripted IVRs to generative AI agents is changing how conversational systems are built and tested. T...

Generative AI is changing how customer support chatbots are built, deployed and measured. In this episode, we sit down with Alia Azim, Product Lead for Chatbots at Citation Group, to discuss the company’s shift from traditional NLU chatbots to generative AI conversational agents. Alia brings a wealth of experience in conversational AI, including time spent at Lloyds Banking Group, and she gives us...

What happens when AI stops being treated like a tool and starts being hired like an employee? In this episode, we sit down with Gabe Larsen, Chief Revenue Officer at Atonom (formerly known as Signals), to explore a bold reframing of AI agents as “cloud employees” hired on salary to perform specific job roles. Rather than selling software seats or charging per conversation, Atonom packages AI as ro...

Generative AI has changed how conversations are built and experienced. Georgios Tserdanelis, VP of Conversation Design at JPMorganChase, draws on 15 years of designing voice and chat systems to explain what still holds up, what breaks and why conversation design matters more than ever. Georgios brings years of hands-on experience designing voice and chat experiences across startups and global ente...

HBX Group sits in the middle of one of the most complex customer service chains in travel. A single issue can span a traveller, a travel agent, a global booking platform and a hotel on the other side of the world. In this episode, we explore how HBX Group is leveraging artificial intelligence to transform its global customer service operations with Xavier Godoy Moya, Customer Experience & Auto...

From IVRs to multimodal AI experiences, the hardest problems are rarely technical. In this episode, we dive into the evolving landscape of conversational AI and enterprise automation with Anne Cantera, Senior Product Designer at Optimum. With extensive experience in transforming traditional IVR systems into conversational interfaces, Anne shares valuable insights on the practical implementation of...

AI has moved from pilot projects to boardroom urgency. Companies feel the pressure to act, hire, and keep up. Many start with tools or chase a single unicorn hire. Chris Morrow, Founder of Digitalent, explains why this approach fails and why the real battle is for people who can drive transformation, culture change and long-term value.  In this episode, Chris draws on two decades of experienc...

Cars are becoming one of the most competitive frontiers in AI, and most people don’t realise how complex it really is. In this episode, we’re joined by BalaKrishna Kolluru, Senior Director of AI at Cerence, the company powering conversational AI in over 500 million vehicles worldwide. With over 25 years of experience in machine learning and speech recognition, Bala brings deep insights into how ge...

What does it really take to build AI that can resolve customer support at scale reliably, safely, and with measurable business impact? We explore how Intercom has evolved from a traditional customer support platform into an AI-first company, with its AI assistant, Fin, now resolving 65% of customer queries without human intervention. Intercom's Chief AI Officer, Fergal Reid, discusses the company'...

In this episode, Joe Kim, the new CEO of DRUID AI, unpacks what might be the biggest shift in technology since the internet. We discuss the evolving landscape of artificial intelligence and its growing impact on businesses. Joe, who has been in his role for 70 days, brings fresh perspectives on how DRUID AI positioned itself as a workflow automation platform years before the market caught up, a be...

Everyone's slapping 'agentic' on their AI products, but what does that even mean? Anne Jenkins, Vice President of Solution Architecture at Teneo, helps us separate substance from buzzwords. In this episode, Anne shares her expertise on agentic AI and the evolution of conversational AI technologies. We explore what truly makes an AI ‘agentic’ versus the marketing hype all over your LinkedIn feed an...

Once switched off during busy periods, Lloyds Banking Group’s chatbot now handles more than 15 million conversations a year. Learn what it really takes to build AI solutions that customers trust with their money.  We sit down with Cainan Wright, Senior Product Owner, and John Young, AI Lead - Chatbots and Generative AI, from Lloyds Banking Group, to explore their remarkable nine-year journey...