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 experiences.

With 18 million customers across 11 markets and managing over €200 billion in assets, Mathias shares what it really takes to move generative AI from experimentation to production. We had a good discussion about virtual mobile assistants, transforming legacy data infrastructure, and managing executive expectations in a rapidly changing, highly regulated landscape.

You'll also hear Mathias' perspective on Revolut's new PRAGMA model, why context is the missing ingredient in today's AI experiences and how banks can remain trusted intermediaries as customers increasingly interact through AI-powered distribution channels.

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 from deploying conversational AI at scale, including how some customers are now achieving 60-75% voice automation. We also discuss why the gap between chat and voice experiences still catches companies off guard, and what it really takes to get voice AI right in terms of testing, latency, and conversation design.We explore why layering AI onto legacy channels only gets you so far, and why the real opportunity lies in rethinking customer journeys from scratch. The conversation wraps with a story about what happens when AI agents start calling other AI agents, something our team recently experienced firsthand.

Show notes

• Find out more about boost.ai
• Follow Henry on LinkedIn
• Take our updated AI Maturity Assessment
• Subscribe to our newsletter
• Subscribe to The AI Ultimatum Substack

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 then, the company has grown from a handful of pilot deployments to powering customer service operations for nearly 200 enterprises worldwide, including highly regulated industries such as banking, healthcare, insurance and utilities.

In this episode, we explore what it actually takes to build production-ready conversational AI systems at scale. We go deep into PolyAI's proprietary Raven model, the realities of building and training purpose-built language models for enterprise customer service. We also talk about why most businesses underestimate the complexity of deploying AI agents into real-world operations.

The conversation also touches on PolyAI's brand campaign starring Gordon Ramsay. Ramsay's restaurants have been a PolyAI client for a few years, and the company launched a campaign timed to the Super Bowl in February 2026 with Ramsay dramatising the contrast between legacy phone menus and PolyAI's voice agents. Nikola explains how the partnership came about and why Ramsay's standards made him a fitting brand ambassador for the company.

Show notes 

Find out more about PolyAI: ⁠https://poly.ai/⁠

Follow Nikola on LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikola-mrksic⁠ 

Follow Kane on LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms⁠

Sign up for our upcoming webinar - Cutting headcount isn't an AI strategy: ⁠https://events.vux.ai/getvocal?utm_source=podcast_network&utm_medium=podcast⁠  

Take our updated AI Maturity Assessment: ⁠https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/a26bf9Rr?utm_source=podcast_network&utm_medium=audio⁠

Subscribe to our newsletter: ⁠https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/Qlo5aaeW/?utm_source=podcast_network&utm_medium=podcast⁠ 

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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 enterprise technology, including 12 years at Jacada across solution architecture, professional services and presales leadership across EMEA and APAC. He joined Uniphore in 2021 and works with enterprise clients on AI transformation, agentic workflow design and the operationalisation of business AI at scale.

Show notes

Discover more about the CCW UK Summit: https://europe.customercontactweekdig...

Find out more about Uniphore: https://www.uniphore.com/

Follow Thomas on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-schaefer-4027a611/

Follow Kane on LinkedIn: / kanesimms

Take our updated AI Maturity Assessment: https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/a26b...

Subscribe to VUX World: https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/Qlo5...

Subscribe to The AI Ultimatum Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/kanesimms

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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 customer deploys a use case. The platform ingests content from websites, documents, recordings and connected systems like SharePoint, then combines large language models with Inbenta's proprietary NLP, customer-specific lexicons and real-time intent generation to deliver near-zero hallucination rates.

The hallucination numbers from raw models remain striking. We discuss a report that shows hallucination rates across different LLMs, including those from companies such as OpenAI, Google, and xAI. Inbenta's approach constrains the model to verified content and context, then layers intent-based NLP on top. In one customer test of 200 questions, they found a single hallucination, caused by a query that fell outside the content boundaries. 

We also discuss the broader trajectory of enterprise AI. Most deployments today focus on replacing existing activities or functions. The bigger opportunity lies in using AI to imagine entirely new kinds of value. Merlin predicts that hyper-automation, which combines agentic intelligence with robotic process automation, will be the defining shift in the next 12 months.

Show notes

Find out more about The European Chatbot & Conversational AI Summit: https://europe.customercontactweekdigital.com/events-ccw-uk/agenda-mc/?utm_source=VUX%20World&utm_medium=Media%20Partner&utm_campaign=47758.003_VUX_Social_Post_Agenda&utm_term=&utm_content=&disc=&extTreatId=7634824

Find out more about Inbenta: https://www.inbenta.com

Follow Merlin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/merlin-bise-8277696b

Follow Kane on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms

Take our updated AI Maturity Assessment: https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/a26bf9Rr?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio

Subscribe to VUX World: https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/Qlo5aaeW

Subscribe to The AI Ultimatum Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/kanesimms

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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-based agentic system with six agents in production, serving customers who often face sensitive financial situations, such as debt.

Adrian explains the design philosophy behind Airi’s tone, which was developed in collaboration with Jaja's commercial and communications teams to ensure it matches the brand across every customer touchpoint.

A significant part of the conversation focuses on the practical realities of building production-grade generative AI systems. Adrian shares his thinking on when to use generative AI and when deterministic, rule-based approaches are simply the better choice.

We also touch on broader themes, including the future of AI at the edge and the emerging role of personal AI assistants. 

Show notes

Discover more about the CCW UK Summit: https://europe.customercontactweekdigital.com/events-ccw-uk/agenda-mc/?utm_source=VUX%20World&utm_medium=Media%20Partner&utm_campaign=47758.003_VUX_Social_Post_Agenda&utm_term=&utm_content=&disc=&extTreatId=7634824

Follow Adrian on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adriangmatei

Follow Kane on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms

Take our updated AI Maturity Assessment: https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/a26bf9Rr?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio

Subscribe to VUX World: https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/Qlo5aaeW

Subscribe to The AI Ultimatum Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/kanesimms

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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 conversational AI community is actually thinking about right now.

Topics spiral from enterprise AI adoption and the talent crunch, through agentic banking and agent metrics, to some surprisingly personal territory, including AI for mental health support, cardiac research and simplifying the mundane parts of everyday life.

Chapters

00:00 Intro

02:24 Chris Miles, Group Product Lead - Chatbots & AI at Lebara

03:12 Kellin Sjoerds, AI Engineer at Essent & Willeke van de Wetering, AI Engineer at Essent

04:39 Andrew Lavis, Chatbot Analyst at Virgin Money

05:08 Mathias Fanschek, Head Retail Strategy & Digital Transformation at Raiffeisen Bank International AG

06:12 Andrei Spiridon, Head Retail Strategy & Business Transformation at Raiffeisen Conversational AI Lab

08:20 Alan Nichol, CTO at RASA

09:44 Adrian Matei, AI Product Manager at Jaja Finance

11:00 Nikoletta Ventoura, Senior AI Conversation Designer at Tesco

11:37 Maria Guermonprez, CX and Product Manager at Spix Industry

12:19 Damien Bird, Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft

13:12 Gabriele Iuculano, Senior Test Platform Engineer, Schindler Group & Salvatore Raieli, Senior Data Scientist at Oncodesign

14:53 Jared Browne, Group Head of AI Governance & Privacy at Fexco

15:32 Laura Brady, GTM at ElevenLabs

16:20 Laura Ball, Global AI CX GTM and Sales Lead at Zoom

16:50 Sabrina Brunner, Technical Lead at Allianz Direct

18:10 Lorraine Burrell, Conversation Design Lead at Lloyds Banking Group

19:00 Jana Richter, Executive VP AI and Innovation at NFON AG

19:44 Daniel Orenes Ferrandez, Senior Manager - Customer Experience at Uber

21:06 Guillaume Blaquiere, Group Data Architect at Carrefour

21:42 Laura Macleod, Business Applications, Centre of Excellence Lead at Virgin Money

21:57 Kane’s closing thoughts

Show notes

Find out more about The European Chatbot & Conversational AI Summit: https://theeuropeanchatbot.com

Follow Kane on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms

Take our updated AI Maturity Assessment: https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/a26bf9Rr?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio

Subscribe to VUX World: https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/Qlo5aaeW

Subscribe to The AI Ultimatum Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/kanesimms

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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 for contact centres.

Shane explains how EdgeTier can now model metrics such as resolution rate and customer satisfaction across every interaction, rather than relying on the 10–15% survey response rate most contact centres achieve.

We also get into the organisational challenge that underpins all of this: contact centres often hold the richest customer insights in the business, but lack the tools or organisational standing to act on them. Shane argues that data-driven contact centres can shift from being reactive cost centres to genuine strategic assets, influencing product, policy and process decisions across the wider business.

Finally, we touch on the growing challenge of monitoring AI agent conversations and why automated analysis of those transcripts may actually matter more than it does for human-handled interactions.

Show notes

Discover more about EdgeTier: http://edgetier.com/

Follow Shane on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shanealynn

Follow Kane on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms

Take our updated AI Maturity Assessment: https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/a26bf9Rr?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio

Subscribe to VUX World: https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/Qlo5aaeW

Subscribe to The AI Ultimatum Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/kanesimms

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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.

The episode covers how Cyara approaches testing in a non-deterministic world, including using AI agents to test AI agents, and why traditional ideas like test coverage no longer apply in the same way.

Christoph and Amitha share what they are seeing across Cyara’s clients and the wider industry. The discussion unpacks what AI trust means in practice. We talk about hallucinations, model drift, factual accuracy, bias and regulatory compliance.

We explore the economics of generative AI. The cost of running it at scale in production and in testing, and how organisations are rethinking where large language models are necessary versus where smaller, domain-specific models are more effective.

The discussion also highlights how failure can scale in AI systems, where a single bad response can affect thousands of customers.

Show notes

Get a free pass to Cyara’s Xchange 2026 in Dallas, TX, using code VUX: https://cyara.com/event/xchange-2026

Find out more about Cyara: https://cyara.com

Follow Amitha on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amitha

Follow Christoph on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christoph-b%C3%B6rner-7721ab147

Follow Kane on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms

Subscribe to VUX World: https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/Qlo5aaeW

Subscribe to The AI Ultimatum Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/kanesimms

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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 an honest account of what it actually looks like to move from NLU-based chatbots to generative AI in a real business environment. 

Citation Group provides HR, compliance and business services for thousands of small and medium businesses. Supporting those customers means handling everything from platform troubleshooting to account access issues. Alia explains how their team rebuilt the chatbot strategy around generative AI, focusing on specific use cases, improved knowledge management, and outcomes that actually resolve customer problems.

We explore the limitations of traditional intent-based bots, why generative AI dramatically changes how conversational systems are designed and why success metrics like containment are being replaced by resolution rate.

We also get into the debate around whether conversation design is dead. Designers and engineers still play a critical role, but the work now focuses less on building rigid flows and more on shaping AI behaviour through guidance, knowledge design and customer journey thinking.

Show notes

Follow Alia on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aliaazim/

Follow Kane Simms on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms

Download our exclusive report on how AI agents keep CX stable when volume explodes: https://vux.la/scale

Take our updated AI Maturity Assessment: https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/a26bf9Rr?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio&utm_campaign=vuxconsulting25

Subscribe to VUX World: https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/Qlo5aaeW

Subscribe to The AI Ultimatum Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/kanesimms

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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 role-based digital workers. You hire an AI SDR, a customer service rep, or a recruiter. You coach them and you measure their output. And if they do not perform, you let them go.

Gabe explains why the traditional SaaS model failed to deliver outcomes, how AI agents are shifting from tools to teammates, and why pricing AI like a human employee simplifies adoption. We dive into multi-channel AI employees, autonomous multi-agent systems, role-based templates and the realities of scaling AI across sales, customer service and recruiting.

Gabe also shares his views on the broader AI market, where Signals sits relative to other AI players and why he believes multi-channel autonomy is a key differentiator.

Show notes

Find out more about Atonom: https://atonom.ai/

Follow Gabe Larsen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gabelarsen

Follow Kane Simms on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms

Download our exclusive report on how AI agents keep CX stable when volume explodes: https://vux.la/scale

Take our updated AI Maturity Assessment: https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/a26bf9Rr?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio&utm_campaign=vuxconsulting25

Subscribe to VUX World: https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/Qlo5aaeW

Subscribe to The AI Ultimatum Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/kanesimms

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