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PolyAI
Enterprise Voice Agents
Last verified August 15, 2026 · Updated daily
What PolyAI is building
The phone call is the most important customer service channel that technology has consistently failed to improve. Despite decades of investment in Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems, chatbots, and call centre automation, the experience of calling a large enterprise for help remains, for most people, a reliable source of frustration: long hold times, scripted systems that can't handle anything outside a narrow decision tree, and the eventual transfer to a human agent who has to be told everything from the beginning. The problem is not that enterprises haven't tried to automate it. The problem is that every previous generation of voice automation was built on rules – rigid, hand-crafted logic that broke the moment a caller deviated from the expected script. PolyAI was founded in 2017 by three Cambridge PhD researchers – Nikola Mrkšić, Tsung-Hsien Wen, and Pei-Hao Su – who had spent years building the academic foundations of data-driven conversational AI at the University of Cambridge's Machine Intelligence Lab. Their specific insight was that the right approach to voice AI was not to build better rules but to build better models: AI systems trained on real conversational data that could handle the full messy, interrupted, accented, digressive reality of human telephone speech. Their platform's voice agents handle calls for Marriott, Caesars Entertainment, PG&E, UniCredit, Foot Locker, FedEx, and 100+ other enterprises across 45 languages and 25+ countries, managing over 500 million calls. The company's agentic AI does the work equivalent to 1,000+ full-time employees at multiple enterprises simultaneously. Their flagship product, Agent Studio, launched in April 2025, is the platform layer that sits above the voice models. It gives enterprises full visibility into how their AI agents behave, why they respond the way they do, and how to tune their performance over time, including safety filters, tone calibration, vocabulary customisation, and real-time analytics. An enterprise can build a voice agent with a "strong Texan accent" (a real customer request, per Nikola) or fine-tune the system to handle a specific regulatory disclosure requirement in financial services. The platform is self-serve: enterprises can modify their agents without requesting changes from PolyAI, which dramatically reduces total cost of ownership and accelerates deployment. PolyAI deploys in as little as two weeks for a proof of value and two months for a full production rollout. The Series D funding, announced December 15, 2025, will be used to expand Agent Studio's capabilities and accelerate go-to-market in North America, Europe, and new verticals beyond the company's current base in hospitality, financial services, healthcare, and retail.
Why this matters
The $540B global customer service industry runs on a labour model that is structurally broken. Contact centre attrition rates average 30–45% annually in the US and regularly exceed 100% in markets with high competition for labour, meaning the average contact centre replaces its entire workforce every 12 months. Training costs, quality inconsistency, and the human cost of repetitive, high-pressure work compound into an industry that spends enormous resources simply maintaining baseline function. The Forrester Total Economic Impact study of PolyAI customers found a 391% ROI, with an average of $10.3M in savings per enterprise customer per year. But voice AI's impact on customer service is only the first-order effect. Nikola Mrkšić's more ambitious framing is the "agentic enterprise" where AI agents don't just handle inbound calls but proactively monitor the full customer and operational landscape in real time, detecting and resolving problems before human agents are even aware they exist. PG&E uses PolyAI (Peggy) to handle power outage calls at scale, including during peak emergency events when call volumes spike by orders of magnitude and human capacity is physically insufficient. The regulatory dimension is significant and underappreciated. As voice AI handles increasingly consequential interactions across payment processing, medical appointment scheduling, financial account management, the requirements for accuracy, privacy, and auditability escalate. PolyAI has built its platform for enterprise-grade compliance from the ground up, which is part of why regulated industries are adopting it faster than consumer-grade voice AI alternatives. The Citi Ventures and Point72 Ventures participation in the Series D is a direct signal that financial services, one of the most compliance-intensive and highest-call-volume industries on earth, is a primary expansion target. The competitive dynamic is an important context. Sierra Technologies (founded by ex-Salesforce CEO Bret Taylor) raised at a $10B valuation in September 2025. Decagon AI is also well-funded. PolyAI's specific differentiator is not that it is the only voice AI company but that it has been building voice-first, enterprise-grade conversational AI since 2017, has proprietary models trained on hundreds of millions of real enterprise calls, and has the deployment track record (100+ enterprise customers, 2,000+ live deployments) that new entrants will need years to replicate. The moat is the data flywheel: every call PolyAI handles makes its models more accurate, which wins more enterprise contracts, which generates more call data. That cycle has been running for eight years.
Open roles at PolyAI
6 positions we're tracking. Roles are re-checked daily and removed when filled.
ML Engineers (Speech/NLU)
First seen 4 months ago
Backend Engineers (Python/Go)
First seen 4 months ago
Solutions Architects
First seen 4 months ago
Enterprise Sales (US expansion)
First seen 4 months ago
Customer Success Managers
First seen 4 months ago
Applied Scientists
First seen 4 months ago
Hiring outlook
2000+ live deployments, 45 languages, Fortune 500 clients
Working at PolyAI
Founded in , PolyAI is Enterprise Voice Agents. They're now people. Working at a AI company at this stage means opportunity to shape your role based on the company stage.
The majority of roles are in London + SF.
Frequently asked questions
How many jobs does PolyAI have open?
6 open roles at PolyAI, last checked February 2025.
Does PolyAI hire remotely?
No remote roles right now — all positions are in London + SF.
What roles is PolyAI hiring for?
PolyAI is hiring across Engineering, Other, Sales, Customer, Data. The most recent opening is ML Engineers (Speech/NLU).
How do I apply for a job at PolyAI?
Apply via the links above. For tips, read our guide on how to get hired at PolyAI.
Where is PolyAI based?
PolyAI is headquartered in London + SF.
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