Following a recent round of $40m Series B funding, customer-led conversational assistant provider, PolyAI today announced a number of major initiatives and leadership appointments to support growth in key US and European markets. This includes the opening of a new R&D facility in New York, focusing on US customer projects and global initiatives around machine learning, as well as the appointment of a new SVP Marketing, Michelle Schroeder who will be based in the US and lead the marketing function. This follows a period of significant recruitment globally as PolyAI doubled its team over the last six months, with a quarter now based in the US, and moved into larger HQ offices in London.
According to a report, “Gartner® estimates the market size for conversational AI to be at $3.8 billion globally (software and services included) growing at 55% annually.” This report also states that “the average deal size increased by 28% in the last year, as implementations scale while expansion into new use cases realizes greater business value1.”
Indeed, voice support in conversations has recently been mentioned as an area that will gain investment and drive acquisitions by Arup Roy, Research Vice President at Gartner who said: “The conversational AI platform market is likely to see increased investments in R&D in developing and furthering voice support in conversations. The market may also witness many vendors striking strategic partnerships and/or acquisitions to augment voice tech capabilities.”
PolyAI’s new US-based R&D team will focus on both customer-specific development in the US, as well as global innovation. A major US hotel and gaming customer has already benefited from the team, who identified issues associated with local accents and developed a solution ahead of the deployment across the continental US. This made the PolyAI conversational assistant more effective from day one by allowing it to understand a broad variety of local accents. In effect, one agent that is able to cater for multiple regional customer bases.
“We are extremely excited about what we have achieved over the past year. As we continue to grow rapidly in the US and other markets, we believe investing in talent, such as our new US R&D team and our new marketing leader Michelle, will help us further accelerate the footprint of our conversational assistants in the market,” commented Shawn Wen, CTO at PolyAI, “Giving customers the freedom to lead and be in control of the conversation creates a more natural experience. This establishes confidence in the technology and makes it a game changer for our customers. Indeed, Gartner predicts2 that Enterprise Conversational AI Platforms with be transformational for customer service within the next two years.”
Michelle Schroeder, PolyAI’s new SVP Marketing and team lead, joins from Ometria at the end of January to continue building out the marketing team and a wider-ranging value proposition.
“It’s an incredible time to join PolyAI, with the momentum it is experiencing both in the market and its product development,” added Michelle Schroeder, SVP Marketing and marketing lead at PolyAI, “For so many businesses, achieving Zero Touch Resolution is a lofty and potentially fraught goal, particularly for those where conversation is the preferred method of customer communication. This is what PolyAI provides, and I look forward to continue spreading the message with the team!”
- Gartner Competitive Landscape: Conversational AI Platform Providers | Published 31 October 2022 | ID G00774810
- Gartner Hype Cycle for Customer Service and Support Technologies, 2022 | Published 19 July 2022 | ID G00770253
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, HYPE CYCLE is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
About PolyAI
PolyAI builds customer-led conversational assistants that conduct natural conversations with customers to solve their problems. Our voice assistants understand customers, regardless of what they say or how they say it. We serve enterprises where customer conversation is an important part of doing business. Our customers include some of the leading names in banking, hospitality, insurance, retail, and telecommunications.
Our enterprise clients deploy PolyAI voice assistants to cut down on wait times and free up live staff to focus on calls requiring empathy and judgment. As a result, our enterprise clients see improved customer satisfaction, employee retention and operational efficiency.
PolyAI was born in the same University of Cambridge lab that pioneered speech recognition. Together, we have published over 200 papers which have been cited over 14,000 times, and registered 7 patents with 4 more pending. PolyAI has offices in London, New York and San Jose.
