VUX World

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
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.