How AI Voice Agents Are Replacing Contact Centres: PolyAI CEO Nikola Mrkšić on Customer Service AI, Leaving Apple and the Future of Voice

AI voice agents are not replacing contact centre jobs. They are answering the calls businesses stopped picking up years ago.

In this episode, Oliver Bruce sits down with Nikola Mrkšić, co-founder and CEO of PolyAI, the London-founded company building AI voice agents for customer service. PolyAI answers the phone for FedEx, Metro Bank, NatWest, Caesars and Gordon Ramsay's restaurants, and around 80 percent of its revenue now comes from the US. Nikola joined Apple's Siri team when it acquired his previous startup, then left to build something smaller that actually worked.

He explains how an AI voice agent handles a real customer call, why response times under 300 milliseconds matter less than understanding the UK's 63 dialects, and why contact centres with 200 percent annual attrition were never a safe place for people anyway. Most companies, he argues, have spent a decade deflecting customers rather than serving them, and AI is finally reopening the phone line.

The conversation also covers what makes an AI business sustainable and profitable, why PolyAI owns its own models rather than renting them, why a B2B company spent millions on a Super Bowl advert, why raising venture capital is harder in the UK than the US, and where voice, gaze and Neuralink take us once the keyboard starts to fade.

In this episode, you'll learn:

How AI voice agents work in real customer service calls

Whether AI is replacing contact centre jobs

Why latency and dialect recognition decide if a voice agent feels human

What makes an AI company sustainable rather than hype

Why PolyAI ran a Super Bowl advert as a B2B business

Why raising capital in the UK is harder than in the US

How voice, gaze and Neuralink could replace the keyboard