2024 Speech Industry Award Winner: PolyAI Optimizes Conversational AI for Contact Centers

PolyAI, the London-based startup behind many of the call center artificial intelligence assistants in use today, has been receiving a lot of financial and technological support in the past year, culminating in the closing of a $50 million funding round and a $500 million valuation.

With this funding, PolyAI has now secured more than $120 million to continue redefining what’s possible with voice-first, artificial intelligence-powered automation in contact centers.

Its flagship product, a fully white-label, customer-led voice assistant, boasts an impressive voice-driven interface, robust analytics capabilities, and generative AI.

Company CEO and cofounder Nikola Mrkšic, who previously worked on Apple’s Siri voice assistant, said his company’s goal is to overcome call center worker shortages with AI voice assistants that can conversationally guide customers through complex inquiries.

“Anyone who has ever picked up the phone to get support from their favorite brands has experienced the frustration of dealing with bad customer service. Our mission is to make every company the best version of itself in every customer interaction,” Mrkšic said in a statement. “This raise is a testament to the work we’ve put in to make that mission a reality.

“We aim to be the voice that handles, and handles well, over half of all automated customer service calls within the next five years,” Mrkšic added.

The company, which spun out of Cambridge University’s Machine Intelligence Lab in 2017, today serves close to 100 businesses. PolyAI’s platform is pretrained on billions of customer interactions carried out over the past few years.

In the past year, one PolyAI enterprise customer launched one of the world’s first voice assistants to be fully powered by generative AI, now used by millions of consumers. Another major customer worked with PolyAI to launch what is believed to be the world’s most multilingual enterprise assistant, speaking 12 languages. Its technology has also been shown to be able to do the work of more than 1,000 full-time employees.

That kind of innovation has spurred PolyAI to grow tenfold in just the past two years.

Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, one of the companies involved in PolyAI’s latest funding round, shares Mrkšic’s enthusiasm. “We bet early on PolyAI and the team as a category creator for AI-powered, voice-based customer support and are thrilled to continue supporting them in making customer service the top brand experience for any company,” he said in a statement released by PolyAI.

And the contact center industry is also a solid backer of PolyAI on its mission.

Through one new partnership signed this year, PolyAI’s Customer-Led Voice Assistant is now available on the Genesys AppFoundry, a marketplace of solutions for customer and employee experiences, and is integrated with Genesys Cloud CX, an all-in-one composable solution for customer and employee experiences.

PolyAI also this year partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS), making it the preferred cloud provider and leveraging Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Bedrock to accelerate adoption of generative voice AI within contact centers. By using Amazon SageMaker, PolyAI will train and fine-tune an integrated suite of speech recognition, large language models (LLMs), and text-to-speech for the unique demands of spoken customer service interactions. And with Amazon Bedrock, PolyAI gains access to a range of foundation models and supporting features around security and safety, responsible AI guardrails, and agile model selection.

Additionally, PolyAI voice assistants are now available on AWS Marketplace with an integration to Amazon Connect, Amazon’s cloud contact center platform.

Also this year, AVANT, a technology services distributor, partnered with PolyAI to offer PolyAI’s voice assistants via its Pathfinder platform. PolyAI, in turn, will leverage AVANT’s network of trusted advisers to increase market share.

“PolyAI’s voice assistants are truly world-class, with the potential to transform call center experiences for both customer and business alike,” said Shane McNamara, executive vice president of engineering and operations at AVANT, in a statement.