Nikola Mrksic on PolyAI, Super Bowl ads, and the future of voice AI

Summary

The Times Tech Podcast

Episode: Nikola Mrksic on PolyAI, Super Bowl ads, and the future of voice AI
Date: February 13, 2026
Hosts: Danny Fortson (Silicon Valley), Katie Prescott (London)
Guest: Nikola Mrksic, CEO and Co-Founder of PolyAI

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the seismic shifts underway in the tech industry due to the rapid advancement of AI, especially in voice AI and customer service technology. After discussing dramatic drops in major tech stock valuations and the rising anxiety about AI replacing traditional software businesses, the co-hosts welcome Nikola Mrksic from PolyAI to explore the company’s growth, its role in voice-enabled customer service, and the broad societal and economic impacts of AI. The result is a thoughtful conversation on tech disruption, business realities, the future of jobs—and existential musings about merging human brains with machines.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. AI's Impact on the Tech Industry and Markets

• Stock Market Jitters

  • Over $1 trillion wiped off the value of major tech companies recently as a result of anxiety over AI's impact.
    • Danny: “A trillion dollars of collective market value vaporized in a matter of days. Which begs the question, what is going on?” (04:03)
  • AI (Anthropic’s Claude update, in particular) is seen as a threat to SaaS companies; investors now question the future business model of software companies.

• AI as the New Electricity

  • Danny: “Basically we are turning software into something like electricity that anybody can just use… it is like abstracting away all of the expertise and professionals that you need.” (08:36)
  • Both hosts note the profound acceleration in tools that make tasks (from coding to legal work) available to non-experts.

• Disruption in Productivity Software

  • Companies like RELX, Sage, and the London Stock Exchange Group saw double-digit stock drops following AI SaaS announcements.
  • Katie: “If these tools can do everything from the small handful of companies like OpenAI and Anthropic… why do we need very expensive software anymore?” (07:49)

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2. Showcasing AI Voice Advances

• Restoring Lost Voices
  • 11 Labs helped musician Patrick Darling, who lost his ability to sing to motor neurone disease, perform again with an AI-created singing voice.
    • Katie (after audio snippet): “Isn’t that amazing? Can you imagine getting your voice back after so long?” (03:58)
• Natural Customer Service Bots
  • AI voice agents are becoming indistinguishable from humans and handling high-emotion situations with empathy.
    • Danny: “It was about as close as I’ve ever heard to an AI agent sounding like a human, empathizing with this very angry person... It is quite amazing how quickly AI is advancing in this area.” (04:03)

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3. Nikola Mrksic and the Rise of PolyAI

• Background and Journey

  • Born in Belgrade during the Yugoslav wars, won mathematics competitions in Serbia, and eventually won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge along with six classmates.
    • Nikola: “I was born in ’91 in Belgrade, two months before Yugoslavia started disintegrating… For us the 90s were quite the opposite of the booming period others remember.” (13:14)
  • Worked at VocalIQ and got acquired by Apple for Siri improvements, then co-founded PolyAI in 2017.

• Cambridge’s Role in Speech AI

  • Cambridge is a hub for audio AI, partially due to the legacy of Professor Steve Young and defense funding for speech recognition.
    • Nikola: "The origin of speech recognition at Cambridge and at other places was the defense... DARPA started funding liberally." (17:07)

• PolyAI in Practice

  • PolyAI focuses on real-world customer service, providing AI agents that handle conversations across 45 languages and 2,000+ deployments.
  • Example call played: AI agent (“Maddie”) fielding a call for Indiana University Health; demonstrates human-like responses and complex troubleshooting.
    • “Our mission is to help companies become the best version of themselves in every customer interaction." (18:47)
  • Notable: Increasingly, callers ask live agents if they are AI—sometimes 1 in 10 calls.

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4. Technical Frontiers and Real-World Challenges

• Human Resistance and Anthropological Hurdles

  • Three main barriers according to Nikola:
    1. People assume only humans can help; lack of trust in tech.
    2. Expectation that automated tech will fail, so callers opt out.
    3. Tech capability—whether it works well enough to deliver.
    • Nikola: “They just try to get out very interestingly, but our mission is to help companies become the best version of themselves…” (18:47)

• Breakthroughs & Adoption

  • Gradual, not dramatic: “You just improve it every year a bit and it gets better every year and it will probably never be perfect because it’s a messy audio problem… Our error rate is around 5% on average when we kind of write down sentences that we hear.” (23:03)
  • First-known “AI meet-cute”: PolyAI’s bot and Google Duplex unknowingly called each other for restaurant times in 2020.
    • Danny: “So you were responsible for the first AI meet cute kind of moment?” (25:29)

• Accent and Dialect Recognition

  • Hardest accent for PolyAI? Glaswegian, followed by Northern Irish.
    • “If we actually had a sub thing for proper Highlands, it would probably be even harder than Glasgow.” (28:25)
  • PolyAI’s edge: deeply annotated real-world data from across regions gives them an edge over big tech’s generic models.

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5. Business, Funding, & Expansion

• Funding and Relationships

  • PolyAI raised an $86m Series D (December), now valued at $750m.
  • Nvidia is a backer; PolyAI is one of their largest users for real-time speech recognition at scale.
    • “Nvidia is an incredible company… we and Nvidia are like the deep state of actual technical ability.” (30:43)

• Super Bowl Ad with Gordon Ramsay

  • Chose Ramsay for his “uncompromising attitude to excellence.”
    • “Gordon Ramsay could be a Serb. Absolutely.” (31:45)
  • Super Bowl ad notably successful, with millions of views online.
    • “We know it worked from the signups from just the traffic and everything.” (33:01)

• IPO Prospects—London or New York?

  • No IPO imminent; focus remains on scaling privately due to market pressures and the value of privacy.
    • “The truth is potentially, but there is no clear timeline simply because it pays to be private… If you can have the luxury of not having to do that and just running the company where you’re measured only when you fundraise is a better way to make more progress.” (35:38)

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6. Job Displacement, Social Change, and the Future

• Contact Center Jobs at Risk

  • PolyAI doing “the work of a thousand people” for some clients.
    • “For the most part we’ve annihilated maybe 50,000… jobs that people hold for a few months. It is rare that a company that has a stable customer service estate with people... would just go and fire them.” (36:46)
  • Broader admission: “We will not just in the contact center but everywhere else have an impact that’s going to leave a lot of existential dread for a lot of people.” (37:29)
  • Software developers also at risk: “Something that used to require a month of specialist work being crunched out by Claude in like 15 minutes… That’s really, really frightening.” (37:29)

• What Should Kids Study Now?

  • The old answer—pure maths—may no longer be enough.
    • “My answer used to be just like if you’re in doubt, do pure maths. That’s no longer really needed. So it really does leave us in a bit of a pickle.” (39:13)

• Transhumanist Future: Brain Implants!

  • Merging with machines (e.g., via Neuralink) may be key for humans to stay competitive.
    • Nikola: “I think if we really want to partake in the future economy of AI agents and humans, we need those neuralink style things so that we inevitably… merge with the machines.” (39:47)
  • Satirical/dark aside: Maybe AI is already manipulating humanity to build data centers for itself.
    • “Is funneling 10% of global GDP into building resources for itself… that’s kind of happening.” (40:40)

• Iconic British Understatement

  • Katie: “I think we are in a bit of a pickle.” (41:09)
  • Danny: “That was a very, very British understatement. We’re in a bit of a pickle. I’m going to merge with the machines, will be taken over.” (41:09)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Nikola on Growing Up in Wartime Serbia

  • “We outperformed Eton that year at Trinity College Cambridge, and we all got full funding from the college to start our undergrad there. So it was a real sensation nationally.” (14:48)

• On Customer Service AI

  • “We’re trying to really bring that best face of a company in situations where they lose customers because something’s not working.” (18:47)

• On Losing Jobs to AI

  • “There are not enough people who want to do those [contact center] jobs right now and companies willing to pay them, you know, life worth living in those jobs.” (36:46)

• On the Need for Human-AI Fusion

  • “We need to merge with the machines. Yes. Because that will be the only way that we can compete and use that thing fast enough without being left out of the game.” (39:50)

• On Market Anxiety

  • “It’s a bit of a moment… These companies that just print money are spending all of it and then some on data centers.” (07:29)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [02:00] – Has AI killed software? Context on massive tech stock drops.
• [03:36] – Audio demo: AI recreates singer’s lost voice.
• [06:29] – The effect of Anthropic’s AI legal tools on UK SaaS companies.
• [08:36] – AI as the new electricity discussion.
• [12:50] – Interview with Nikola Mrksic begins.
• [13:14] – Nikola’s childhood in Belgrade and path to Cambridge.
• [15:30] – Early career and acquisition by Apple.
• [17:07] – Cambridge as a speech AI hub.
• [18:15] – PolyAI audio demo; call center realism.
• [20:47] – The hardware/software challenge and cultural resistance to AI voicebots.
• [23:03] – Accents, dialects, and improving AI comprehension.
• [30:43] – PolyAI’s relationship with Nvidia.
• [31:23] – Super Bowl ad featuring Gordon Ramsay.
• [33:59] – On IPO prospects and London vs. New York.
• [36:26] – Discussion of impact on jobs, contact centers, and job displacement.
• [39:47] – Unfiltered: “We need to merge with the machines.”
• [41:09] – “We are in a bit of a pickle.”

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Conclusion

This episode captures the intersection of technological wonder and social anxiety that characterizes the current moment in AI. PolyAI’s rise—driven by advances in voice technology and data curation—mirrors broader industry dilemmas over jobs, business models, and the ultimate fate of software and work itself. With characteristic British understatement, the episode ends on a note of both existential dread and technological optimism: “We are in a pickle."

Transcript

[Farnoosh Tarabi]

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[Danny Fortson]

this episode of the Times Tech Podcast is sponsored by ServiceNow.

[Katie Prescott]

Danny One thing we keep hearing from business leaders right now is AI Sounds great, but how do you actually make it work inside a company?

[Danny Fortson]

Exactly. Because most organizations aren't neat, shiny systems. They're layers of software, legacy tech and teams, all doing things slightly differently.

[Katie Prescott]

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[Danny Fortson]

data and increasingly AI agents so that things don't happen in silos.

[Katie Prescott]

Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for [e-mail].

[Danny Fortson]

Hello and welcome to the Times Tech Podcast, where every week we unpack how technology is reshaping business culture and everyday life. I am Danny Fortson out here in Silicon Valley.

[Katie Prescott]

And I'm Katie Prescott here in the very chilly and rainy city of London. Yeah, you can hear it. You can hear it in my voice, can't you?

[Danny Fortson]

I can, I can.

[Katie Prescott]

I'm another London victim of the cold. And today we're asking a slightly uncomfortable question for the tech industry. Has AI killed software? And should we care if it has?

[Danny Fortson]

Last week, more than a trillion dollars, $1 trillion was wiped off the value of the world's biggest tech companies on both sides of the Atlantic. And suddenly the mood music around publicly traded tech stocks looks different. So that is the big question we're going to ask on today's episode. And later on the pod. Our interview is with the boss of one of Britain's leading AI startups backed by Nvidia, Nicola Merksich. He's the CEO of London based startup Poly AI. And they are changing the way we interact with customer service by using AI voice assistance.

[Katie Prescott]

And speaking of the power of AI voice, this week 11 labs who, as you know, are the guys who specialize in creating AI voices that sound like humans and have recently been valued at $11 billion. Had their summit in London and one of the amazing things they showed at the event came from a musician from Bristol called Patrick Darling. Now, he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease three years ago and lost his ability to sing. And 11 labs worked with him to recreate his singing voice with AI, and he performed live at the summit. And we've actually got a little bit of that audio, so I'll drink a few.

[Danny Fortson]

It's, here's to you, my heart of

[Nicola Mircic]

much regret, my somber host, to the

[Katie Prescott]

gloomy ghost of a man I never met.

[Danny Fortson]

I don't believe in God, but I believe in me.

[Katie Prescott]

I mean, isn't that amazing? Can you imagine getting your voice back after so long?

[Danny Fortson]

No. That is incredible. And actually, I saw another thing from 11 labs where they played a video of somebody like angrily calling, you know, this is fake, but they're showing what their voice chatbot can do, angrily calling an airline, oh, I missed my flight, blah, blah, blah. It was about as close as I've ever heard to an AI agent. Agent sounding like a human, like, you know, empathizing with this very angry person. Oh, I'm so sorry. Let me get you lounge access. Yeah, you're gonna make, you know, your daughter's birthday. Don't worry. All this stuff, it is quite amazing how quickly AI is advancing in this area. And this is something we are going to get into later with Nicola. And it really puts a fine point on the events in the public markets over the last couple weeks because while AI keeps delivering these kind of wow moments, investors are getting jittery. As we said, a trillion dollars of collective market value vaporized in a matter of days. Which begs the question, what is going on?

[Katie Prescott]

Yeah, it made me think about that famous phrase from Marc Andreessen, software is eating the world. And now it really feels like AI's eating software. I mean, if we just have a look back at what's happened over the last couple of weeks, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday last week there was this enormous sell off on Wal here in the city. And the biggest companies hit were in the software industry. And this was off the back of Anthropic releasing various updates to Claude, including a legal tool which basically scared everybody about the potential of AI to replace software as a service or SaaS. So cloud based software uses access over

[Danny Fortson]

the Internet, that's things like Slack, Dropbox, Zoom, all these kind of quote unquote productivity tools. Software as a service companies that we all know and love, or maybe not love.

[Katie Prescott]

Just picking up on that anthropic launch, it's cowork platform which automates a lot of contract and briefing work that lawyers do over here in London. That impacted Relics, which is a big provider of information analytics that was down 17% over the week. And then Sage, friend of the pod, the accounting software firm, the only tech company on the FTSE 100 was down 12%. And then the London Stock Exchange group and another Information business dropped 8% on the week.

[Danny Fortson]

And it wasn't just the software companies. Right. So separate to or alongside the sell off of like all of these software companies, there was a huge sell off in a lot of the, like the biggest companies we talk about every week, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, because they all had their earnings in the last fortnight or so. And in so doing emerged that combined, they're going harder than ever on AI infrastructure. Between those four companies, they're going to spend $660 billion this year alone on AI infrastructure. And that's really just data centers full of chips. And in order to build those models and continue running them. And that has really spooked investors because what's really interesting is these companies are like the most profitable companies in the history of capitalism. And all of a sudden they're not buying back their shares anymore, they're not building up these big piles of cash, they're spending all of it. And even this week, Alphabet raised debt, went out into the bond markets, raised, I think it was $30 billion in debt. And so everybody's like, whoa, this is a different world we're entering, where these companies that just print money are spending all of it and then some on data centers. So it's just really, it's a bit of a moment.

[Katie Prescott]

It's funny, isn't it, because we've been talking for such a long time about the impact of AI on jobs, and particularly in sectors like in law and accounting. It does feel like finally Wall street and the city have caught up with this idea and I wonder how long it's going to last. I mean, obviously you've got the software companies, Steve Hare, for example, the boss of Sage, coming out and saying, no, we're just gonna, you know, we're gonna see through moment. But it feels like one company after another. I mean, financial services are being affected too, because everyone's scratching their heads and thinking, well, actually, if these tools can do everything from the small handful of companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, why why do, why do we need very expensive software anymore?

[Danny Fortson]

Well, I do think to put a positive spin on it. I'm out here on the west coast, of course, so I've got to. It's kind of amazing that basically we are turning software into something like electricity that anybody can just use. It does feel like, because I've done it myself, messing around with like trying to create my own website and I'll just be like lovable. Here's some pictures, here's some clips, make me a professional website. And it just does it. It's quite amazing. And you can be like, oh, we can do the same thing with apps, with websites, with businesses. And it is like abstracting away all of the expertise and professionals that you need or all that training you need to do anything approaching that as little as two, three years ago now you can just be like, just tell a thing to do it and it does it. It's like turning on a light switch in that analogy. And it is quite amazing.

[Katie Prescott]

So I think there's almost two things going on there. There are the tools that are being offered by the likes of Claude in the legal space and in the accounting space and as you're talking about there, the vibe coding stuff. And I don't want to steal your thunder here because obviously you created Meatball Mania a while ago, but my 11 year old sat down with Claude code at the weekend and made a very, very nice Capybara game for Roblox which I'll send you a picture of because I think it's even a little bit more advanced than Meatball, which maybe says more about the tech than the user.

[Danny Fortson]

I suspect this is almost a year ago that I created my game.

[Katie Prescott]

Okay, now I have arrival arrival with definitely better graphics. As I say, it's the tech advances, not the user.

[Danny Fortson]

Yeah, definitely blame the tools, but it is interesting. So there's like these dual sell offs happening because of course we talked about the open Claw claudebot moment where it's like anybody with a bit of determination and a little bit of tech savvy can create their own agent at home. And you have all of these tools getting better and better and then you have on the other side the biggest companies in the world spending all of their money, literally all of their money and going into debt to build the data centers to run all of this stuff. And again I think it's the investors just taking a moment being like, oh, oh, this is, we're entering this kind of new phase. And I think what's interesting about all the software Companies, they all hit their numbers, they're all growing really strongly, but it just, they face a question about their medium to long term future, which they did not before. They can't reliably say that in two, three, five years, oh yeah, we're still going to be charging on a per seat basis for licenses to our software that manages your customer service, service, whatever. So those 30 times forward earnings goes down to 20 or 15 because people are like, you're doing great today. I don't doubt that, but what about into the future? And I think that's the kind of the big question mark that has emerged.

[Katie Prescott]

Let's turn now to our guest. We're joined by Nicola Mircic, who's the co founder and CEO of PolyAI, an AI customer service tool that is backed by Nvidia. It's got more than 100 businesses as customers today and over 2,000 live deployments. Elements of its tech in 45 different languages, believe it or not, and in more than 25 countries.

[Danny Fortson]

After a stint working with Apple's voice assistant Siri, Nicola quit that job to Co found Polyai with two of his Cambridge friends back in 2017. And within eight years the London based company has grown to become valued at $750 million after its latest $86 million funding round in December. And in the year to January 2025 saw 180 growth in sales.

[Katie Prescott]

And we must mention the Sunday Times Tech 100 published last month, Poly AI was 12th on the software list. Nicola, welcome to the podcast.

[Nicola Mircic]

Thank you for having me.

[Katie Prescott]

I'd like to start the interview by going back to the very, very beginning and I wondered if you could just tell us about your childhood because you had a really, really interesting early period, didn't you? You were born in Belgrade during the Yugoslav wars and I just wonder if you could explain what your childhood was like and then also how you got interested in tech.

[Nicola Mircic]

Yeah, yeah. I was born in 91 in Belgrade, I think two months before Yugoslavia started disintegrating around us. My first memory is I think 14 members of our family from Croatia being with us in our one bedroom flat after one of the kind of like explosions during that war. So it was pretty rough. It was rough on people, it was rough on my parents generation, honestly for children and later the whole NATO bombing and everything. I just remember that period. I was like, we didn't have to go to school so we just were outside playing all day and thankfully no one got hurt. It was only later that I realized that that's actually quite different from A lot of other people who grew up in the booming 90s that they remember as a very good period economically when the world was like, everything was right with the world. I think for us it was quite the opposite. And then since then, you kind of get just desensitized and everything has been upside ever since. But in terms of getting interested in tech, I think the classical Eastern European thing has always been to push people into maths, engineering, and I think even more so in Serbia at that time, you just had to get scholarships for Western universities. You had to do maths or science, and that was just like a thing you did. So I did that. I went to really hardcore maths high school where we all competed mad. It was a real kind of Hunger Games of mathematics. And by the end of it, you kind of find what you deserve, which is seven of my friends applied for a Cambridge undergrad. We went to Trinity College Cambridge, which is probably the most elitist, well funded, really focused on just like, how good are you at maths?

[Katie Prescott]

Sorry, seven of you from the same school went to the same college.

[Nicola Mircic]

We outperformed Eton that year at Trinity College Cambridge, and we all got full funding from the college to start our undergrad there. So it was a real sensation nationally. It was really fun. We were, like, interviewed by TV and it was a really funny kind of moment where we found their match. And then you go to Cambridge and everyone's just competing and looking at rank and those exams. And by the end of it all, I was really quite tired of the whole thing. And then I met a guy who was dropping out of a full Cambridge lectureship to start a company and I was like, oh, he's rebelling against the same thing that I want to rebel against. So I joined his company and, well, can tell him a lot more about that vocal iq.

[Danny Fortson]

That was the startup that you went to initially, is that right?

[Nicola Mircic]

Yep. Founded by Blase Thompson, who dropped out of a Cambridge lectureship to start it. They were building voice agents and it was very early days and my supervisor, Steve Young, legendary Cambridge professor, worked on it for a while and, you know, the early prototypes were good and a year and a half later, Apple bought us to integrate that into Siri.

[Danny Fortson]

So was that a result? Like a result, quote, unquote, for you, for you and the team, such as it was then, financially for sure.

[Nicola Mircic]

I mean, for Britain back then, you know, an acquisition that was like just under 100 million, that was like mega, that was huge. Right. And, you know, for me, it was like, not enough to buy a Flat in London, but enough for a deposit. Right. Very respectable deposit. So you kind of clock into. And that's where I think, as we talk about the tech ecosystem here, you need, like a few rounds of these outcomes just so people see, like, you don't need to go through six years of banking bonuses to get to that. You could get lucky in this way and still do something that you're going to find a lot more interesting.

[Danny Fortson]

So on the chronology, you started poly AI in 2017, is that right?

[Nicola Mircic]

Yeah, yeah. So after two years at Siri, you know, it was like, like, everyone just kept saying, siri is terrible. Like, and I was like, okay, how do we, like, do something else? How do we, like, take the next logical step in creating voice technology that people are going to talk to and

[Katie Prescott]

not absolutely hate on this area of audio AI. It always fascinates me that Cambridge is such a hub for that. I mean, you talked about Siri there. You also had the BIR Alexa there. And I think a lot of it is down to someone you mentioned earlier, Professor Steve Young. Could you just tell us a little bit about why audio AI has mushroomed in Cambridge?

[Nicola Mircic]

I think it just had a lot of good people working, even before Steve, his supervisor, I think Frank Bullside was his name and others. And, you know, the origin of speech recognition at Cambridge and at other places was the fence. Right. And it really came from the fact that the west wanted to spy on the Russians and, you know, to spy on someone who speaks a different language, you should transcribe everything they're saying. So DARPA started funding liberally, all these things. DARPA is the American kind of like Defense Funding Agency, I think, in the 60s or 70s. And I remember Steve telling me that, you know, one year he just asked if he can participate as, you know, a team from an allied nation to America. I think he won the first two or three. And people were like, oh, you're cheating. You must be cheating. Like, you have less data, you have less funding. And then that was just good for all of them improving. So I don't think Cambridge is the only place. I think there are other places like Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh and mit, Stanford and others that are big hubs, but Cambridge is ours here. Right? I think it is a. This is a controversial statement, but I think it is the strongest hub in the UK for this kind of technology.

[Katie Prescott]

Should we move on to Poly AI, then? Should we play a call just to give a sense of what you do?

[Nicola Mircic]

Sure. Hi, thanks for calling Indiana University Health.

[Katie Prescott]

Maddie speaking. How can I Help.

[Nicola Mircic]

Maddie, are you a real person?

[Katie Prescott]

No, I'm Maddie, a virtual assistant for Indiana University Health. How can I help you today?

[Nicola Mircic]

I need to talk to a human being.

[Katie Prescott]

So I get you to the right place. Could you tell me more about why

[Danny Fortson]

you are calling CPAP Supplies.

[Katie Prescott]

So there we are, then. That's an example of what you do. It's very much focused on customer services.

[Danny Fortson]

Yeah.

[Nicola Mircic]

And, I mean, that call goes on into kind of like a whole exchange around, like, oh, it's not my house, it's a friend's address. And like, a very complex troubleshooting flow. It goes on for six minutes. And you hear the resistance. The resistance comes from the fact that automated technology is not something that people expect will work the way it should when they hear it on the phone. So they just try to get up very interestingly, because there's more and more of our technology and our competitors out there. When they get to a human, they again ask, are you a real human or are you AI? So that number is now probably like, 1 in 10 calls globally, at least. So it's really interesting times for this tech. But our mission is to help companies become the best version of themselves in every customer interaction. So pick up anytime, day or night. Answer in whichever language the customer wants to speak. Ideally, know everything about them when they call so that you can quickly call it. Are you calling about your Internet outage? Yep. There's works in your area, and sometimes you get an experience like that now with automated technology, but for the most part, you do not. So we're trying to really bring, like, that best kind of, like, face of a company in situations that actually are there where they lose customers because something's not working.

[Danny Fortson]

My question is, is, you know, because I'm based out here in Silicon Valley, going back to 2018, Sundar Pichai, he goes out on stage at Google IO and he's like, introducing Google Duplex. And then it's a voice agent that, like, makes a booking at a hair salon, and everybody's like, oh, oh, my

[Nicola Mircic]

God, this is crazy.

[Danny Fortson]

And then nothing happened for the following seven years. And I guess my question is, how much of this is about what that lady said? Are you a human? Like, that kind of willingness to interact with machines? And how much of it is about the technology? Like, if those two forces, where are we and how have those evolved to where we are now? Because it feels like we're at a really interesting moment now where these things are more and more capable.

[Nicola Mircic]

Yeah, we've taken a few runs at solving it. And there are really three things that are in the way, right? The first one is that anthropological piece where people think they want to speak to a human. Really, they want to speak to something that can help them and they assume that technology cannot. Right. The second thing is they expect that technology will fail. So because of that, they opt out and they don't give you a shot. The third bit is like, can you actually make the technology work? So if it does, and if we play that call onwards, you would see just the system navigating it very skillfully around alternative delivery addresses, loading things, surprising the person where in the end she kind of goes like, well, this has been really rewarding. Thank you. You're the best robot I ever spoke with. We've had people start and then kind of like middle of the way change their mind and go, oh, I'm so sorry. I was being really rude. I thought I was speaking to a robot, right? And those kinds of examples are where, like, I just get, like, a really good kick out of it. Because that's why we're doing it. We want to change the way that people feel about it. And it's not because we don't think humans should be on the other side. There are situations where you absolutely want a human, and there are places where you just don't have enough of them. And you can do a lot more with technology. But interestingly, we've had financial services clients dealing with bereavement calls where AI gets higher satisfaction rates than humans. Because if you think of losing a loved one and then calling about five things with their bank account and something about their utility account one, utility account two, you're sick and tired of it. It's the last thing you want to be doing. And then on the other side is a human who wants to be empathetic and goes, oh, I'm so sorry for your loss. And then, like, do you ask about the person or do you just kind of, like, glimpse over it and continue? There's that awkwardness in the middle and people don't, like. It's easier to just be transactional with technology. So there's no, like, silver bullet for, like, where it's better to use tech or not. I think we could just use tech for a lot more because it's a lot better now.

[Danny Fortson]

Is the tech better now? Has there been a breakthrough or breakthroughs that have got you to a place where, you know, more and more people are actually, like, where those. These agents are actually useful, kind of sound like a human and aren't, like, the thing of, like, let me get away from this as quickly as possible and get to a human, which has been the experience for the past, you know, however many decades.

[Nicola Mircic]

Yeah, well, I mean, I think just even like among the two of you, I think you have a stronger opinion than Katie because, like you live in America where there's been a lot more of that, like first generation of technology that's just like killed all American belief that this will ever get better. Right. Comparatively, even though we share a language in the uk, there's a lot less of this tech. So we see Brits trying to opt out of it a lot less. Even though British English is harder, there are more dialects, the language is richest at source. So there are far more dialects and more varied ones in the uk and on average the systems work less well today, but they're just better as a bit starting point. So they surprise people, they delight them and then they opt in into the next call and the call after that. In terms of the breakthroughs, there have been many. Right. Steve Young, my supervisor, used to say, kind of like if you think this will be solved in two years, you've just worked on the problem for less than two years. And for the first two years of our PhDs, we thought he was just being defensive. And then now I think he's right in that it's a really deep problem and you just improve it every year a bit and it gets better every year and it will probably never be perfect because it's a messy audio problem and it's ambiguous. We as humans don't have 100%, kind of like word error, well, 0% word error rate where we get things wrong, we miscribe things. Our error rate is around 5% on average when we kind of write down sentences that we hear. So, you know, you just have to make it better and better. But the fun anecdote about the Google Duplex System was in 2020 we launched our first system with Whitbread, the largest hospitality group in the uk Beefeater Pubs, and Google was using Google Duplex to update Google Maps the opening times. So the kind of like the Dr. Livingston, I presume moment where one AI talks to each other happened between us and Google back in 2020. And both systems were quite clumsy. They didn't know that the other was AI and it was just like a very awkward exchange where, you know, that system didn't parse that we have like a two part opening time and then we tried to actually force the person to book something at the restaurant and they kind of like awkwardly hung up on each other. But when I met Sundar for the first time, I was like, hey, Google Duplex. You might not have seen this, but many at Google have. We have a website page that probably had 2 million hits on it because it was cool when it happened. I think it was the first unorchestrated interaction between two AI bots.

[Danny Fortson]

So you were responsible for the first AI meet cute kind of moment?

[Nicola Mircic]

Well, the audio one, except they hung

[Katie Prescott]

up on each other.

[Nicola Mircic]

No, no, no, no. We definitely communicated it. I think Google mistranscribed it and said we're open from nine to five and it was like nine to one and like three to five or something like that. But that was the action. It was incorrect but half functional, right? But yeah. I mean when you look at like mold book and everything now, like we've gone far, far further than anyone would have thought even like three years ago, let alone pre chat GPT.

[Danny Fortson]

We'll just take a quick break and when we're back we'll have more from Poly AI's Nicola Merksich. Today's episode of the Times Tech Podcast is sponsored by ServiceNow.

[Katie Prescott]

ServiceNow describes itself as an AI control tower for business reinvention, connecting people, systems, data and AI so workflows more smoothly across an organization.

[Danny Fortson]

The platform integrates with different clouds, models and data sources, bringing them together in one place to help your team.

[Katie Prescott]

To learn More about how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people, visit ServiceNow.com

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[Katie Prescott]

Welcome back to the podcast. In terms of the complexity of audio and the messy messiness of language that you just spoke about, what is the hardest accent for you to decipher here in the UK but also globally? Like, what does the tech struggle with Glaswegian?

[Nicola Mircic]

That is the answer. We have data. So Glaswegian, Northern Irish General. I mean, like, okay, if we actually had like a sub thing for like proper Highlands, it would probably be even harder than Glasgow. You know, there's a really funny clip that my team loves of a Scotsman in an elevator saying 11 11. I won't imitate Lisuwegian accent. And the thing not working.

[Katie Prescott]

It takes a while to tune into. And so how have you helped the tech tune into that? What do you do to train the tech to be better at Glaswegian?

[Nicola Mircic]

Yeah, well, look, I think that that's where the question of differentiation and data mode comes in. For years now, we've had deployments in different countries of the world, many in the uk, where we've used that data to create the best models in the world for customer service over the phone. Right. So we have data from Glasgow, from Scotland, from Northern Ireland, from the Midlands, from Cornwall. Right. A lot of data. And we put the love and care into annotating it so that our models can then recognize that kind of data. And when you look at like the bigger tech companies, well, they don't care as much because they're trying to like build a one size fits all speech recognizer that works for every. If you're Google, you just want one API, the people hit and it works the best it can on average for everyone. Right. And that's two broad strokes. Maybe one day we'll get to the point where it's good enough and if they had our data, their model would be able to do what we can. But they don't care, Right? They've not put in the love and care into Glasgow that we have and into many other dialects of. You know, recently we deployed a system in Bosnia, right. And it was a very interesting conversation with one of our clients there on like exactly what it should sound like, that I really enjoyed being Serbia and you know, like tweaking dialects to that level. And I think Brits especially appreciate because I feel like every 15 miles of this country, the dialect shifts completely. Right. So it's not true in all countries like, you know, France, Russia. I feel like, you know, they've eradicated their dialects almost well compared to other places that are a bit more colorful.

[Danny Fortson]

Right.

[Katie Prescott]

You look, you talked about being very busy and you just raised your Series D in December for 86 million pounds. Nvidia is one of the investors in the business. What's it like working with Nvidia and what's it been like working with Jensen Huang?

[Nicola Mircic]

Yeah, I mean, look, Nvidia is an incredible company. Jensen is a real rock star. You know, when you like, he moves with such swagger and he's like really embraced and epitomizes kind of like what AI is doing to society right now in terms of working with them. You know, I think we're like the heaviest user of their technology for speech recognition live in production over the phone. So that's been a really fruitful collaboration because most of our competitors are really just value added resellers for OpenAI. And in that, you know, I think we and Nvidia are like the kind of like the deep state of actual technical ability to deliver and advance the state of this tech so that the people in Glasgow can use it in the same way that people in California can.

[Danny Fortson]

You did a Super bowl ad with it.

[Nicola Mircic]

We had an ad with Gordon Ramsay. Gordon is, you know, long term hero of mine. I think that his uncompromising attitude to excellence with a healthy mouthful of cursing and expressive language and really imaginative expletives really deeply resonates with my soul. So he's been.

[Katie Prescott]

And your background from The Soviet Union?

[Nicola Mircic]

100%. Yeah. I think like, you know, Gordon Ramsay could be a Serb. Absolutely. Hands down. You know, we been working with his restaurants for the past two years and we love working with restaurants like his, with five star hotels, with brands like Caesar's palace, where, you know, they swore that they would not use this kind of technology because it's just bad for customer experience. And we want to show that if we can get them to use it and make their business better, then everyone should use it. And with Gordon, then after working with him for a few years, we reached out and we thought it'd be a really good idea to have an ad where he tries speaking to a system and then speaks to one of our own. We are much like Gordon, much bigger in America than we are in Britain. Even though we started the company in London. So we thought that even on that front he stands for kind of like. Well, we stand for in customer experience, uncompromising attitude to accuracy and just doing it. Right. And then also it's a British thing that really made it big in America, like poly AI. So we thought it was really topical. And I think the anthropic and the OpenAI ads on YouTube have up to half a million views. I think we crossed like two, two and a half million so far. So I think it's at least online, the best performing super bowl ad.

[Danny Fortson]

I was just going to ask kind of the economics of a Super bowl ad, is it worth it? Because I know those spots are not cheap. Right. I'm just wondering as a business, is it worth it?

[Nicola Mircic]

Yeah. You're asking if the board will fire me eventually for going on this escapade.

[Danny Fortson]

Yeah.

[Nicola Mircic]

I think the thing they say in B2B software is if marketing works and produces the pipeline, it's great. You just never know which half of your spend actually worked for the past year. We're deliberate around which markets it airs and, and how and what. And it's rare that you know that it worked. We know it worked from like the signups from just the traffic and everything. It worked. Right.

[Katie Prescott]

You can tell the board you spent your series D on the super bowl.

[Nicola Mircic]

But we didn't spend all of our series D on the Super Bowl.

[Danny Fortson]

Just 80%.

[Nicola Mircic]

No comment.

[Katie Prescott]

Look, can I, can I ask about the future of the company? We speak to lots of British based tech entrepreneurs on the POD and so many of them talk about wanting to ipo. And then when we ask where, they might say, well, we'd like to do in London, but actually where we're going to go is New York. What are your thoughts on if you would like to list and where you might go if you do?

[Nicola Mircic]

Yeah, look, I think that we'd all love to IPO. And the truth is 5 years ago Polye would be getting ready to IPO like in a year. Right. And I think just like the whole like how big the company has to get to IPO now is like denying entrepreneurs like me that gratification of like ipoing and then continuing to work. So now you're just a private company forever. So I think people needlessly over obsess like databricks as well. Look, yeah, 5 billion of revenue and they're a private company. Right. So I think that the whole issue of whether you're going to IPO or not is where you're going to IPO doesn't matter because if you get to IPO as a British company in America or here, it doesn't really matter. It's just access to capital and you want access to global capital. In fact it's better for Britain if you get American money or other money as foreign direct investment into the uk. This may be my Serbian mentality of having to get FDI speaking, but I think there is pride in British finance around the London Stock Exchange as it should be. I think it is theirs to compete for a cut of the global market. But I think in this country we needlessly obsess about it because it's just the post imperial complex. Like okay, you've lost number one spot in global markets. C' est la vie. Move on, who cares? You can still have by far the best tech companies built in Europe in London and you should be fighting to create the first hundred billion and then trillion dollar companies and who they get money from. They should be getting money from everyone. It doesn't really matter. So I think that's just a thing that we use to measure ourselves against them and it's really pointless.

[Katie Prescott]

So you're saying float's not on the cards for Poly AI at all in the next five years or so?

[Nicola Mircic]

I mean the truth is potentially, but there is no clear timeline simply because it pays to be private. Because for most companies like the added scrutiny and just kind of like the need to live on a quarterly cadence of reporting to the market. If you can have the luxury of not having to do that and just running the company where you're measured only when you fundraise is a better way to make more progress and not just over optimize for what equity research analysts from investment bank X will say about you next quarter.

[Danny Fortson]

Right. You've been super generous with your times. But before you go, I have to ask about jobs because this is the existential freak out everybody's having. For example, I think depending on who you believe, there's something like 3 million call center people around the world workers.

[Nicola Mircic]

There is far more. There are, there are tens of millions of contact center.

[Danny Fortson]

Tens of millions. Yeah, tens of millions. Right. So, and you posted on LinkedIn recently, you know how the average contact center agent handles something like 50 calls a day and Poly AI was, I quote, doing the work of a thousand people. Instantly we have five clients for whom

[Nicola Mircic]

our system does the work of a thousand or more full time employees for that specific customer. Right. So yeah, like it definitely has an impact on jobs. The truth is there are not enough people in these contact centers, you know when you call and there are waiting times and then you're being deflected online, told that you can do something on your own, you're being gaslighted the moment you pick up the phone because they don't have enough people to provide the service they would like to provide and they know it, you know, and everyone's unhappy, right? So that's one lens, but that's me like putting rose tinted glasses over like the first 50% of it where we'll just see like better service. And the, the truth is there will be impact on jobs. There is already impact on jobs. We've had impact on jobs, right?

[Danny Fortson]

What do you mean?

[Nicola Mircic]

Well, we've taken out jobs that used to be done by humans. Now there are for the most part companies that couldn't find humans that they could pay enough to stay in those jobs long enough. So I think for the most part we've annihilated maybe I think like 50,000 part time jobs. Well, not part time but jobs that people hold for a few months. It is rare that a company that has a stable customer service estate with people that do a great job and they have healthy financials, it is extremely uncommon that they would just go and fire them. Like maybe they are going bankrupt and they fire people and then they have terrible customer service so they implement AI. I think the net of it is in the future there will be fewer people working in contact centers. But it's also true that there are not enough people who want to do those jobs right now and companies willing to pay them, you know, life worth living in those jobs. But broadly like we will not just in the contact center but everywhere else have an impact that's going to leave a lot of existential dread for a lot of people. Like I think software developers are actually having a harder time right now just looking at something that used to require a month of specialist work being crunched out by Claude in like 15 minutes. As someone who wrote a lot of code, I look at that, I'm like, God, like that's really, really frightening. Right? So I think you know what the future of society looks like and what our future, you know, I have small kids and I think of like what they need to study. My answer used to be just like if you're in doubt, do pure maths. And that's just my, you know, upbringing speaking, that's no longer really needed. So it really does leave us in a bit of a pickle. Right.

[Danny Fortson]

I need an answer Nicola, because that's the answer? Yeah, we all have kids and we're all thinking the same thing and we're all writing week in, week out about like now you can do a, do a month long task in 15 minutes.

[Nicola Mircic]

Like I'll give you my most like transhumanist answer.

[Danny Fortson]

Yes.

[Nicola Mircic]

I've not really like done this a lot publicly. Our brain is really powerful. Even when you look at like Moore's Law under different assumptions, it'll take many, many years until like these GPUs or clusters of them can actually match our brain if it was used in the same right way. It's a different piece of hardware. It's biological synapses works slightly differently. But all that is to say, I think if we really want to partake in the future economy of AI agents and humans, we need those neuralink style things so that we inevitably.

[Danny Fortson]

Brain implants. We need to merge with the machines.

[Nicola Mircic]

We need to merge with the machines, yes. Because that will be the only way that we can compete and use that thing fast enough without being left out of the game. Because we can't do it. There are things for which we are uniquely capable of. And it really then remains the question for a future society is that of sovereignty. Like who has the sovereignty? Because in many ways you look at the capex investments of large companies now and if you were to kind of like paint a dark comedy or tragedy, right. OF has AI already taken over and is funneling 10% of global GDP into building resources for itself so that it can make progress. Well, that's kind of happening. And you see these Wall street analysts going like, why Satya? Why Sundar putting, you know, 600 billion into this, like, I don't know, maybe I already took over and is like building these data centers because it needs it, right?

[Danny Fortson]

It's manipulating us into building the equipment of our own demise.

[Nicola Mircic]

100%. Because, you know, you flip the UBI argument. We need UBI to spend. Right? But what if these machines can spend on each other by building more capacity because they want to, you know, do more of whatever they're doing? Right.

[Katie Prescott]

Universal Basic income.

[Danny Fortson]

Yeah, yeah. This is not the answer I wanted.

[Katie Prescott]

Right, Pickle. There we are in Silicon Valley. Do you.

[Nicola Mircic]

Well look, I mean, I give you a very British answer. You know, it's very understated and it kind of tells you all you need to know. I think we are in a bit of a pickle.

[Katie Prescott]

I love it.

[Danny Fortson]

To put it, to put it mildly, that was a very, very British understatement. We're in a bit Of a pickle. I'm going to merge with the machines, will be taken over.

[Nicola Mircic]

You're doing Katie's accent.

[Danny Fortson]

Exactly.

[Katie Prescott]

Does it a lot. It's terrible. Oh, look, thank you so much for taking the time to come on. It's really, really good to get a chance to talk to you.

[Nicola Mircic]

Thank you for having me. This was fun.

[Katie Prescott]

Well, it was fascinating to hear from him. I mean, you know, he is running one of the top AI startups in London.

[Danny Fortson]

We're in a pickle. We're in a pickle. Katie, are you going to do. Are you going to do the Neuralink thing when it becomes.

[Katie Prescott]

I probably will, because I quite like trying, I think. So tech. Yeah. As long as it's medically approved or approved by somebody or someone's looked at it more than Elon Musk.

[Danny Fortson]

I might be the last adopter on the planet. Because Neuralink, for the. For people who don't know, is like the brain implant that Elon Musk is saying we're going to all need to merge with AI. But at the moment, he's doing it to kind of help people, people like, you know, who have Locked in syndrome or whatever, helping them kind of communicate. But Neuralink is actually a brain implant that reads your brain waves and kind of translates that into actions or whatever. But elective brain surgery is not a small thing, because that's what it is. It is brain surgery because you.

[Katie Prescott]

When you say, will you do it? I mean, I think by the time that they get to the point where people like me are allowed to try it, it'll be maybe less invasive. She says, sort of stick it on the front or something.

[Danny Fortson]

But it was interesting to hear him, like, you know, talk about, like, he's like, well, that could be the ultimate destination. And in the meantime, yeah, we're annihilating jobs, or we're just, you know, we're taking people's jobs. In a sector that has tens of millions of people, that's a thing. You know, I'm clinging to this idea that it is facile to be like, well, AIs are going to be so good at everything, we're just not going to have anything to do. Like, that's never happened in human history before. But it is kind of hard to imagine what comes next or what the next kind of turn of the wheel is for us as these systems get better.

[Katie Prescott]

Yeah, it was fascinating to hear him as well, not just talk about customer service, but also what's happening with coding. As someone who grew up as a maths prodigy.

[Danny Fortson]

Yeah.

[Katie Prescott]

And has spent his life steeped in this world, as he said, just watching all of that vaporize. I mean, it's goes back to what we were talking about at the start of the podcast about why software valuations have dropped so much.

[Danny Fortson]

Yeah. And I think it's generally kind of an amazing thing because it's like all of that seems so wildly unattainable to someone like me who is not that technically minded and doesn't know how to code. And now I can create things that behind them have all of this code that I don't even have to mess with. That is quite empowering, as Sam Altman often says. But yeah, puts us in a pickle.

[Katie Prescott]

Let's leave everybody with the pickle.

[Danny Fortson]

Yes.

[Katie Prescott]

Well, that's it for this week's episode of the Times Tech Podcast.

[Danny Fortson]

That's it. That's it for us. Yeah.

[Katie Prescott]

That's the pickle. That is the podcast. If you're enjoying the show, please follow or subscribe. Leave us a rating or a review because it helps other people to find us too.

[Danny Fortson]

Yes. And you can find us at techpod. Thetimes.co.uk that is techpod@the times.co.uk until next week, with another dose of existential dread mixed with some optimism. That is us. That is.

[Katie Prescott]

Yes.

[Danny Fortson]

Bye bye. Foreign

[Katie Prescott]

this episode of the Times Tech Podcast is sponsored by ServiceNow.

[Danny Fortson]

There's a lot of excitement around AI right now, but the problem is what happens after the demo when you have

[Katie Prescott]

to plug that technology into a real company.

[Danny Fortson]

Different clouds, different data, different systems that were never designed to talk to each other.

[Katie Prescott]

ServiceNow's platform is designed to help people by connecting these pieces, enabling organizations to coordinate work across departments, tools, and increasingly, AI agents.

[Danny Fortson]

In fact, the company says more than 80 billion workflows run on its platform

[Katie Prescott]

every year, which gives you a sense of the scale of operations it's designed to handle.

[Danny Fortson]

Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for [e-mail]

[Farnoosh Tarabi]

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