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Agentic AI is moving from helping employees to serving customers. But getting the technology to work is only part of the job. At CCW Europe in Amsterdam, I spoke with Michiel Kouijzer, SAFe Product Manager at Essent, about the practical foundations behind customer-facing agentic AI: knowledge management, fast APIs, the experience customers receive, and bringing the organisation along with the change. We also explore what happens when customers send their own AI agents to businesses. Could personal assistants become a new sales channel? Will they call contact centres, use self-service, or connect directly to business systems? Michiel shares Essent’s experience with a small home-battery pilot and his perspective on how these customer channels may develop. His comments on future agent behaviour are predictions, rather than established outcomes. Show notes CCW Europe: https://europe.customercontactweekdigital.com/events-ccweurope Follow Kane on LinkedIn: ⁠https://linkedin.com/in/kanesimms⁠ Find out more about VUX: ⁠https://vux.ai

Automation Anywhere has agreed to acquire boost.ai. What could that mean for customer experience, personal AI agents and the autonomous enterprise?In this exclusive interview, Kane Simms speaks with Jerry Haywood, CEO of boost.ai, and Ankur Kothari, co-founder and COO of Automation Anywhere, about the proposed combination. They discuss how conversational and voice AI could connect to work across enterprise systems, where people remain involved and what customers need to prepare for.The conversation covers the rationale behind the deal, customer and employee operations, the changing relationship between CX and IT, personal agents, agent-to-agent interactions and the foundations of successful AI adoption. Kane closes with his view on why the combination matters.Acquisition status: the companies announced a definitive agreement on 7 October 2026. Completion is expected in Q4 2026, subject to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions. Show notes Follow Kane on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/kanesimms Find out more about VUX: https://vux.ai Subscribe to The AI Ultimatum Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/kanesimms

Reliable voice AI comes from rigorous testing and evals, and Rohan Vasishth from Bluejay sees trust as the fundamental bottleneck holding back enterprise deployment. Rohan is Co-founder and CEO of Bluejay, which tests and monitors voice and chat AI agents for companies including Google and DoorDash. We work through what to test, when to test it and what each approach costs. We discuss why testing voice AI introduces a whole new layer of complexity, from accents and background noise to interruptions and speech recognition errors. Rohan also shares how customers can stress-test agents, why starting with text-based evaluations can save time and money, and how businesses can identify and reduce the latency customers actually experience. Rohan closes by exploring the widening gap between rapidly advancing AI capabilities and slower enterprise deployment, and why evaluation is essential to building the trust needed to close it. Show notes
 Rohan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rohanvas/ Find out more about Bluejay: https://getbluejay.ai  Article - How to Reduce Latency in Your Voice Agent Pipeline: https://getbluejay.ai/blog/12-ways-to-reduce-voice-agent-latency Article - Introducing Bluejay Labs and MIVAS: https://getbluejay.ai/blog/introducing-bluejay-labs-and-mivas-the-multi-industry-voice-agent-simulation-bench Follow Kane on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Find out more about VUX: ⁠⁠⁠https://vux.ai⁠⁠⁠⁠ Subscribe to The AI Ultimatum Substack: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://open.substack.com/pub/kanesimms⁠

Stacey Kyler and Guy Tonye of Zammo return to the show for the first time since 2021. Back then they were building for Google Assistant, Alexa and Cortana. ChatGPT arrived soon after and reshaped what customers expected. They cover the move from NLU and diagram flows to agentic systems, why customers now want both the freedom of Gen AI and firm control, how Zammo enforces determinism at the code level while Gen AI handles the conversation, and why evals are the thing Guy would add to any conversation design course today. Show notes
 Stacey on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stacey-kyler-8b029614b Guy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/guy-tonye-5a0235141 VUX World episode with Zammo from 2021: https://vux.ai/the-importance-of-owning-your-nlu-with-guy-tonye-and-stacey-kyler-zammo-ai Discover more about Zammo: https://www.zammo.ai Follow Kane on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Find out more about VUX: ⁠⁠https://vux.ai⁠⁠⁠ Subscribe to The AI Ultimatum Substack: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://open.substack.com/pub/kanesimms⁠

The contact centre holds a record of almost every customer interaction. Every conversation carries a signal about why customers are calling and what is behind it. Processing those conversations at scale took the power the contact centre never had before. Ping Wu, CEO of Cresta, joins us to work through what that shift means for enterprise contact centres, from cutting the calls that should never happen to automating the ones that can be. We get into how AI changed what a contact centre can see. Every call, every screen, every exchange can now be processed rather than sampled. Human effort never scaled the way silicon does, so for years most of that record went unread. Large language models bring processing power and language understanding to work through millions of conversations, see what is driving them and turn that into insight, coaching and automation. Show notes
 Follow Ping on LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/pingwu Learn more about Cresta: https://cresta.com Download Cresta's CX Workforce Report: https://cresta.com/report/cx-workforce Register for our webinar - Meet contact centre 3.0. The playbook you're using is obsolete: vux.ai/3.0 Follow Kane on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Find out more about VUX: ⁠https://vux.ai⁠⁠⁠ Subscribe to VUX World: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/Qlo5aaeW?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Subscribe to The AI Ultimatum Substack: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://open.substack.com/pub/kanesimms⁠

Voice AI is the channel everyone is talking about in 2026. One of the biggest things slowing it down is often already sitting inside your stack. In this episode, I’m joined by Endre Davids from Seamly to explore what really happens when businesses take an existing chatbot and move it into the voice channel. We discuss why latency often starts deeper in the conversational platform than teams expect. Endre explains how companies can spend time optimising speech recognition and text-to-speech while the chatbot itself is responsible for much bigger delays. The conversation gets into why voice needs a different interaction model, because people speak differently from how they type. That puts far more pressure on getting the conversation design right. We also cover how to manage perceived latency, when it makes sense to reuse existing chatbot infrastructure and how sentiment, multimodality and customer context could shape richer voice experiences. Endre and I keep landing on the same point. The success of voice AI depends heavily on conversation design, and voice punishes the shortcuts that chat lets you get away with. Show notes
 Follow Endre on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/endredavids Learn more about Seamly: https://seamly.ai Conversational Conference 2026: https://events.frankwatching.com/conversationalconference Follow Kane on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Find out more about VUX: https://vux.ai⁠⁠ Subscribe to VUX World: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/Qlo5aaeW?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Subscribe to The AI Ultimatum Substack: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://open.substack.com/pub/kanesimms⁠

I'm joined by Cobus Greyling, AI evangelist at Kore.ai, for a wide-ranging conversation on where enterprise AI actually stands today. We explore why many of the ideas now being presented as breakthroughs, from graph engineering and orchestration to intent detection and state management, have deep roots in conversational AI.  We also get into one of the biggest barriers to enterprise AI adoption: data. We highlight why customer experience could become the entry point for much wider organisational transformation. We touch on how forward-deployed engineers could help businesses navigate that change and why security will become increasingly important as AI agents gain access to more systems and information. I close with a buzzword bingo round for Cobus covering fleet engineering, agent swarms, orchestration and universal agents, and Cobus explains why he thinks Open Claw was the biggest red herring of the year. Show notes
 Follow Cobus on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cobusgreyling Cobus's website: https://cobusgreyling.me Follow Cobus on Substack: https://cobusgreyling.substack.com/ Discover more about Kore.ai Article - The Untrainable by Sarah Guo: https://saranormous.substack.com/p/the-untrainable Video - Andrej Karpathy: Software Is Changing (Again): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCEmiRjPEtQ Follow Kane on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Find out more about VUX: ⁠⁠https://vux.ai⁠⁠ Subscribe to VUX World: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/Qlo5aaeW?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Subscribe to The AI Ultimatum Substack: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://open.substack.com/pub/kanesimms⁠

Plenty of AI assistants can answer the question in front of them. Fewer can work out what someone is actually trying to do and help them do it. In this episode, we're joined by Pete Kowalczyk, AI Conversation Designer at the Government Digital Service (GDS), to talk about designing AI experiences across the vast and complex landscape of UK government services. Pete explains how GDS is exploring knowledge graphs, persistent state and goal detection to move beyond basic RAG systems. The aim is to connect information with action and guide people through non-linear journeys, such as moving house or registering a birth. One of the key goals is to reduce the burden created by fragmented processes and legacy systems. We discuss why conversational systems need to track user goals, how small interaction loops can be built into rich experiences over time and why transitions between stages of a conversation carry so much weight for trust and usability. We also get into progressive disclosure, deciding when an AI should stay concise and when it should offer more, and how to judge whether a link belongs in a response at all. Pete points to a bank surfacing patterns in someone's spending as an example of how organisations can build proactive features from data they already hold, rather than only responding when asked. Pete shares how the designer role is evolving. Designers now need sufficient technical understanding to prototype and work directly with LLMs through practices like vibe coding, while maintaining the creative ability to understand experiences beyond incremental chatbot improvements. He closes with a warning against the industry's current resolution rut, where success gets defined too narrowly as fast ticket resolution rather than genuinely useful, proactive AI. Show notes
 Follow Pete on LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/petekowalczyk Video of Pete's talk at the Conversational AI Meetup in London: ⁠https://youtu.be/001PeZv3N0k⁠ Lead with Tempo 2026: https://www.leadwithtempo.com/2026schedule London Design Festival: https://londondesignfestival.com Follow Kane on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Find out more about VUX: ⁠https://vux.ai⁠ Subscribe to VUX World: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/Qlo5aaeW?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio⁠⁠⁠⁠ Subscribe to The AI Ultimatum Substack: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://open.substack.com/pub/kanesimms⁠

Almost a third of Simplyhealth's incoming calls are now resolved by AI, and email handling time has fallen from 12 minutes to 2. The company is achieving those gains while maintaining the service standards that placed it 31st in KPMG UK's Customer Experience Excellence report. In this episode, we're joined by Paul Atkins, Head of Business Optimisation at Simplyhealth, the UK's member-owned health cash plan provider serving around 2.5 million customers. Paul explains how Simplyhealth introduced voice AI gradually, tested more than 1,000 real customer calls and built trust across a highly regulated organisation. We also get into how Simplyhealth measures resolution, quality and customer effort, why intensive human listening still matters during rollout, and the organisational call to define what "good enough" looks like rather than letting advisors over-engineer every reply. Paul talks through the role of business readiness teams in driving adoption and why knowledge management could become the next major challenge in making AI work at scale. Show notes
 Follow Paul on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-atkins-1nsight Follow Kane on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms⁠⁠⁠⁠ Find out more about VUX: https://vux.ai Subscribe to VUX World: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/Qlo5aaeW?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio⁠⁠⁠ Subscribe to The AI Ultimatum Substack: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://open.substack.com/pub/kanesimms⁠

Safe, reliable, production-ready AI agents don't come from the model. They come from everything built around it. Rasmus Hauch is CTO of Boost.ai, one of the enterprise platforms banks, insurers and public sector organisations use to build customer-facing AI agents. His work sits one layer below every deployment: the orchestration, the guardrails, the testing infrastructure and the model choices that decide whether an agent holds up in front of millions of customers. In this episode, Rasmus opens that layer, explaining why conversational AI is shifting away from traditional conversation flows towards orchestration, testing and continuous evaluation. He walks through how Boost approaches it in practice: persona-based simulation across thousands of digital and voice conversations, predefined test suites for jailbreaking attempts and financial advice, layered guardrails inside and outside the agent, and a trust loop that feeds production results back into the build. Rasmus is direct about the hard parts. We touch on why the big LLM providers can't yet deliver the consistent response times voice demands, which is why Boost runs fine-tuned smaller models on its own infrastructure for latency-critical voice work. Rasmus explains why he advises clients against plugging in their own models. We also discuss where liability sits under the EU AI Act when an agent gets it wrong, and why a volcano eruption in Iceland is a good example of what no model can be trained for. Towards the end, Rasmus shares what's exciting him right now, including adaptive voice, real-time language switching and where agent-to-agent protocols are heading. Show notes
 Discover more about boost.ai Follow Rasmus on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rasmushauch Follow Kane on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms⁠⁠⁠ Subscribe to VUX World: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/Qlo5aaeW?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio⁠⁠ Subscribe to The AI Ultimatum Substack: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://open.substack.com/pub/kanesimms⁠

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 is live in the Netherlands, rolling out to Germany. Applications now complete in days, a full day faster since AI was introduced. The goal: the instant mortgage, within the next couple of years. We cover why ING chose its highest-stakes product for its first agentic deployment, why the agent handles operational work while underwriting remains with traditional machine learning, and how the team built a golden dataset of 400 mortgage applications to test a system no one had tested before. Furthermore, Bahadir shares how ING scaled to 114 AI initiatives with 42,000 employees using AI. We discuss why risk management came before ambition, and why only 10 of his 600 experts were ready to build agentic systems. Show notes
 Follow Bahadir on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bahadir-yilmaz-21170479/ Follow Kane on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms⁠⁠ Take our 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?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio⁠ Subscribe to The AI Ultimatum Substack: ⁠⁠⁠https://open.substack.com/pub/kanesimms⁠

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 repetitive conversations, and create genuine ownership from start to finish. Jordan also shares how AI is improving frontline performance through agent assistance, conversation summaries, quality assurance and real-time guidance, while offering a practical perspective on where large language models deliver real value and where they fall short. Jordan closes with his take on where AI attention in customer experience is currently misplaced, and where he sees low-hanging fruit that's easy to miss. Show notes Discover the CCW Europe Summit in Amsterdam: ⁠https://europe.customercontactweekdigital.com/events-ccweurope/?utm_source=vux.world&utm_medium=Media%20Partner&utm_campaign=27400.010_VUX_Podcast%20episodes%20post%20event&utm_term=&utm_content=&disc=&extTreatId=7638147⁠ Follow Jordan on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordan-anglin-a2672610b/⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Kane on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms⁠⁠⁠ Take our 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?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio ⁠⁠ Subscribe to The AI Ultimatum Substack: ⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://open.substack.com/pub/kanesimms⁠

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 Simplyhealth, alongside Shane Lynn, CEO and Founder of EdgeTier, to explore what successful AI adoption really looks like. We discuss how Simplyhealth scaled generative voice AI with PolyAI from 5% to 50% of interactions and how the company uses EdgeTier's conversational intelligence platform to turn everyday customer conversations into actionable business insights. We also cover why organisations should start with real business problems rather than chasing the latest AI trends. Simplyhealth funnels its conversational data through a prioritisation process to decide which customer journey improvements to make first. The team explains why progress comes from small measurable iterations and how they keep a human in the loop to handle the moments that automation should not touch. We also weigh in on where the AI narrative is overhyped, where its real value remains underutilised, and why the unglamorous work of digging through conversations to fix broken policies and processes is where genuine impact happens. Show notes Discover the CCW Europe Summit in Amsterdam: https://europe.customercontactweekdigital.com/events-ccweurope/?utm_source=vux.world&utm_medium=Media%20Partner&utm_campaign=27400.010_VUX_Podcast%20episodes%20post%20event&utm_term=&utm_content=&disc=&extTreatId=7638147 Follow Kane on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms⁠⁠ Take our 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?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio ⁠ Subscribe to The AI Ultimatum Substack: ⁠⁠⁠ https://open.substack.com/pub/kanesimms⁠

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 from a traditional contact centre into an AI-first operation, achieving AI resolution rates of 65-70% while maintaining a strong customer experience. We discuss how RVU rolled out AI across chat, email and social media without relying on engineering teams, and why building the right knowledge base mattered far more than chasing the latest model. Anna walks us through how AI categorisation and carefully designed workflows lifted resolution rates across genuinely complex customer journeys, where similar keywords across energy, broadband and mobile made accurate routing a real challenge. Anna also describes how Claude and Intercom now work together to analyse conversations and surface operational insights in the team's own language. People are a big part of this conversation. Anna explains how involving her team early gave each agent their own vertical to run and a real sense of ownership, and how AI even softened the stress of handling difficult complaints. She closes on what's next: data connectors and more agentic customer experiences. Show notes
 Follow Anna on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/anna-fedorchuk-b84232102/⁠ Follow Kane on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms⁠ Take our 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?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio Subscribe to The AI Ultimatum Substack: ⁠⁠ https://open.substack.com/pub/kanesimms⁠

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 leading conversational AI initiatives at Rakuten. He explains why the Japanese language has between ten and fifteen ways of saying sorry, why choosing the right level matters as much as solving the issue, and how generative AI prompts can now select an apology tone based on contact type and severity, something fixed NLU responses could never do. The conversation covers Aimai, the Japanese concept of ambiguity used to maintain conversational harmony. Japanese speakers rarely say no directly, and AI systems need specific prompting to catch these signals in sentiment analysis. We also discuss the escalation strategy, digital mascots, integration with the Japanese messaging app Line, and practical guidance for global brands deploying conversational AI in Japan. Show notes
 Read Daniel's Substack, Japan CX Insider: https://danielferrandez.substack.com/ Follow Daniel on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielorenesferrandez/
 Follow Kane on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms
 Take our 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?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio
 Subscribe to The AI Ultimatum Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/kanesimms