PolyAI

Cambridge University spin-out that builds AI voice assistants to handle complex customer service calls for big companies.

About PolyAI

PolyAI builds AI voice assistants that can hold natural conversations with customers. Rather than making callers press buttons or repeat themselves, a PolyAI agent can answer the phone, understand what someone wants and deal with it, whether that is a hotel booking, a bill, a delivery problem or a question about an order. Businesses use it to answer calls around the clock in many languages.

The company was founded in 2017 by researchers from the University of Cambridge's machine learning community, who believed voice AI could handle complex conversations and not just simple requests. Its founding team includes Nikola Mrkšić (co-founder and chief executive), Shawn Wen (co-founder and chief technology officer), Eddy Su and Matt Henderson. It has offices in London, New York, San Francisco, Belgrade and Toronto.

PolyAI says it helps companies "become the best version of themselves in every customer interaction". Its aim is to make customer service conversations feel genuinely helpful, by letting enterprises build, run, govern and continually improve voice agents for the most complicated calls, while keeping control over what the agents say and do.

Its main product is the Agentic Dialog Platform, which includes tools to design and run agents (Wren and Dialog Studio) and its own language models. Typical uses are verifying a caller's identity, making bookings, handling billing and order queries, routing calls and troubleshooting. Its customers named on its website include Marriott, Volkswagen, Foot Locker, UniCredit and Atos, across industries such as hotels, financial services, healthcare and retail. The company says its agents have handled more than a billion conversations in 75 languages.

PolyAI's research heritage shows in its team of machine learning researchers and engineers, and the company says its researchers have published more than 200 academic papers. The pages we read do not describe its culture or values, or early-careers schemes, in detail, so students should check the careers page for current roles.

What they do

• {'desc': 'AI that answers customer calls and resolves requests.', 'title': 'Voice agents'}
• {'desc': 'Tools to build, run, govern and improve conversational agents.', 'title': 'Agentic Dialog Platform'}
• {'desc': 'Developer tools and APIs for designing and connecting agents.', 'title': 'Dialog Studio and APIs'}
• {'desc': 'Agents tailored for hotels, banks, retail, healthcare and more.', 'title': 'Industry solutions'}

Key facts

• Founded: 2017, by University of Cambridge machine learning researchers
• Offices: London, New York, San Francisco, Belgrade and Toronto
• Co-founders include Nikola Mrkšić (CEO) and Shawn Wen (CTO)
• Customers named by PolyAI include Marriott, Volkswagen and Foot Locker
• Says its agents handle conversations in 75 languages

Website: poly.ai