NatWest starts rolling out its in-house voice AI for spending insights
NatWest's CAIRO team has put a real-time, voice-to-voice spending assistant built on its own small models in front of RBS customers, with NatWest next.
Mid-sized companies stall between AI pilots and scale, Make research finds
Make's report on companies with 250-1,000 staff finds ownership and governance, not technology, keep AI stuck in pilots.
New to the Conversational AI Marketplace: Famulor
A German AI voice agent platform that answers calls, runs outbound campaigns and follows up over WhatsApp, SMS and email, with EU hosting.
Virgin Media O2 puts a Sierra-built AI voice agent on broadband fault calls
The UK operator is rolling out a voice agent built with Sierra on routine broadband fault calls, with human advisors still on hand.
InTouchNow raises £2.3m to take its AI receptionist to more NHS GP surgeries
Ada Ventures leads the seed round for the former NHS call centre turned AI voice agent company.
Reecall raises €3.5m to sell white-label voice AI to software makers
Founders Future leads the round as the Paris company's pivot to selling voice AI infrastructure through partners quadruples revenue.
Recently added to the Conversational AI Marketplace
Seven vendors recently added to the Conversational AI Marketplace, from Arabic-first voice agents and on-premise live chat to AI governance.
AI Chatbots Fail Voters: The Human-Context Problem
Leading AI chatbots gave inaccurate election answers, with performance dropping 16% in Spanish. The real problem? AI can't understand why people ask questions.
AI Agents Need Identity Governance, Not Shared Credentials
Why autonomous AI agents need individual identities and clearly defined permissions—just like human employees—before they cause breaches at machine-speed.
Why the EU AI Act Shouldn't Stop AI in Customer Service
The EU AI Act encourages discipline in AI deployment. The solution: let AI manage conversations while business systems control decisions.
AI's 'Token-Maxing' Era Over as Subsidy End Forces Reckoning
The withdrawal of AI vendor subsidies has ended the token-maxing era, forcing businesses to confront the true cost of their AI consumption and scrutinise ROI.
Conversational banking AI goes off-the-shelf as MX packages it for smaller banks
Conversational AI over customer transaction data is years old at the neobanks. MX's pitch: a white-labelled, governed version the thousands of banks that never built their own can buy off the shelf.