VUX World

What happens when AI agents spread across your business, each using different models, tools and data?I spoke with Anirudh (Ani) Narayan, co-founder and CGO of Lyzr AI, about the work involved in taking agents into everyday operations. We discuss where businesses are using them, how teams prioritise ideas and why some workflows need custom integration around legacy systems.Ani describes Lyzr’s approach to agent infrastructure and observability, including Opencontroller, the control plane for AI agents. We also explore an insurance company case study that keeps a human at the front of a sensitive customer journey while using AI behind the scenes.That leads into a practical discussion about when existing tools are enough and when a business needs something purpose-built.Guest: Anirudh (Ani) Narayan, co-founder and CGO, Lyzr AIHost: Kane Simms, VUX AICHAPTERS00:00 Welcome00:46 From an agent builder to enterprise infrastructure02:42 The agent-management challenge04:36 Where businesses are deploying agents07:14 Cost, flexibility and privacy12:02 Consulting, marketing and operational use cases17:19 Educating teams and prioritising ideas19:16 Keeping humans in sensitive customer journeys20:45 Kane’s AI video-editing experiment24:20 When custom agents make sense26:54 Observability and the control plane31:41 What AI providers and customers are getting right37:21 Automating the podcast workflowLINKSLyzr AI: https://www.lyzr.ai/Opencontroller: https://www.lyzr.ai/opencontrollerAni on LinkedIn:   / anirudh-narayan  Customer examples, figures and product observations reflect the speakers’ accounts at the time of recording.Subscribe for conversations about AI, customer experience and the practical work of deploying agents.Follow Kane on LinkedIn:   / kanesimms  Find out more about VUX: https://vux.aiSubscribe to The AI Ultimatum Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/kanesimms

What happens to your contact centre when customers have AI agents that can make calls for them?At CCW Europe in Amsterdam, I spoke with Nikola Mrksic, CEO of PolyAI, about personal agents, agent-to-agent communication and the possibility that easier access to automation could create more demand.We discuss authentication, customer context, voice versus text or APIs, and the practical work needed to make these interactions useful.Nikola also explains PolyAI’s approach to self-improving agents through Wren: helping business teams build and change agents, reviewing conversations to propose improvements, and adding greater autonomy as the business context and testing become sufficiently developed.For CX and contact centre leaders, this is a conversation about both the incoming customer channel and the operating model needed to keep improving AI after launch.The discussion includes Nikola’s observations, examples and predictions at the time of recording. His comments on demand growth and future leadership roles are his perspective. References to beta features and future releases reflect their status at the interview.Show notesCCW Europe: ⁠⁠https://europe.customercontactweekdigital.com/events-ccweurope⁠⁠Follow Kane on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠https://linkedin.com/in/kanesimms⁠⁠⁠Find out more about VUX: ⁠⁠⁠https://vux.ai

If an AI agent chooses your insurance, what makes you trust the insurer when you need to claim?At CCW Europe in Amsterdam, I spoke with Bogdan Tancic, Director of Customer Experience at Lemonade, about trust, AI and the changing insurance customer journey.Bogdan explains how Lemonade uses AI across onboarding, pricing, underwriting and fraud detection. We discuss how trust is earned through small interactions, why accurate APIs matter when personal agents research products, and what happens after the purchase when a customer needs help.The conversation considers an emerging shift towards personal AI agents. Bogdan separates the potential changes in distribution from the continuing importance of service, reassurance and the human experience of making a claim.In this conversation:00:00 Meet Bogdan and Lemonade00:38 An AI-native approach to insurance01:32 How AI affects customer trust03:52 AI across the insurance journey04:42 Personal agents and insurance buying07:57 How agents could change buying decisions09:44 The human experience after the purchase12:15 Retention, renewals and trustGuest: Bogdan Tancic, Director of Customer Experience, LemonadeHost: Kane Simms, VUX AIRecorded at CCW Europe, Amsterdam, October 5–7, 2026.CCW Europe: https://europe.customercontactweekdig...Follow Kane on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://linkedin.com/in/kanesimms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Find out more about VUX: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://vux.ai⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Subscribe to The AI Ultimatum Substack: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://open.substack.com/pub/kanesimms⁠

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 notesCCW Europe: https://europe.customercontactweekdigital.com/events-ccweuropeFollow Kane on LinkedIn: ⁠https://linkedin.com/in/kanesimms⁠Find 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 notesFollow Kane on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/kanesimmsFind out more about VUX: https://vux.aiSubscribe 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-latencyArticle - Introducing Bluejay Labs and MIVAS: https://getbluejay.ai/blog/introducing-bluejay-labs-and-mivas-the-multi-industry-voice-agent-simulation-benchFollow Kane on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Find out more about VUX: ⁠⁠⁠https://vux.ai⁠⁠⁠⁠Subscribe 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-8b029614bGuy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/guy-tonye-5a0235141VUX World episode with Zammo from 2021: https://vux.ai/the-importance-of-owning-your-nlu-with-guy-tonye-and-stacey-kyler-zammo-aiDiscover more about Zammo: https://www.zammo.aiFollow Kane on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Find out more about VUX: ⁠⁠https://vux.ai⁠⁠⁠Subscribe 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/pingwuLearn more about Cresta: https://cresta.comDownload Cresta's CX Workforce Report: https://cresta.com/report/cx-workforceRegister for our webinar - Meet contact centre 3.0. The playbook you're using is obsolete: vux.ai/3.0Follow Kane on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Find out more about VUX: ⁠https://vux.ai⁠⁠⁠Subscribe to VUX World: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/Qlo5aaeW?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Subscribe 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/endredavidsLearn more about Seamly: https://seamly.aiConversational Conference 2026: https://events.frankwatching.com/conversationalconferenceFollow Kane on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Find out more about VUX: https://vux.ai⁠⁠Subscribe to VUX World: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/Qlo5aaeW?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Subscribe 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/cobusgreylingCobus's website: https://cobusgreyling.meFollow Cobus on Substack: https://cobusgreyling.substack.com/Discover more about Kore.aiArticle - The Untrainable by Sarah Guo: https://saranormous.substack.com/p/the-untrainableVideo - Andrej Karpathy: Software Is Changing (Again): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCEmiRjPEtQFollow Kane on LinkedIn:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Find out more about VUX:⁠⁠https://vux.ai⁠⁠Subscribe to VUX World: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/Qlo5aaeW?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Subscribe to The AI Ultimatum Substack: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://open.substack.com/pub/kanesimms⁠