Most companies sit on a goldmine of customer insight and do almost nothing with it. Every conversation holds signals about frustration, churn risk, and broken experiences, yet extracting that value can be a slow and manual effort.

In this episode, Shane Lynn, CEO and Co-Founder of EdgeTier, unpacks how conversational intelligence is evolving in the age of large language models and what it means for contact centres.

Shane explains how EdgeTier can now model metrics such as resolution rate and customer satisfaction across every interaction, rather than relying on the 10–15% survey response rate most contact centres achieve.

We also get into the organisational challenge that underpins all of this: contact centres often hold the richest customer insights in the business, but lack the tools or organisational standing to act on them. Shane argues that data-driven contact centres can shift from being reactive cost centres to genuine strategic assets, influencing product, policy and process decisions across the wider business.

Finally, we touch on the growing challenge of monitoring AI agent conversations and why automated analysis of those transcripts may actually matter more than it does for human-handled interactions.

Discover more about EdgeTier: http://edgetier.com/

Follow Shane on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shanealynn

Follow Kane on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms

Take our updated AI Maturity Assessment: https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/a26bf9Rr?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio

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How do you test something that can behave differently every single time?

In this episode, we speak with Amitha Pulijala, Chief Product Officer, and Christoph Börner, VP of Engineering, both at Cyara, about one of the most pressing challenges in conversational AI today. The shift from deterministic, scripted IVRs to generative AI agents is changing how conversational systems are built and tested.

The episode covers how Cyara approaches testing in a non-deterministic world, including using AI agents to test AI agents, and why traditional ideas like test coverage no longer apply in the same way.

Christoph and Amitha share what they are seeing across Cyara’s clients and the wider industry. The discussion unpacks what AI trust means in practice. We talk about hallucinations, model drift, factual accuracy, bias and regulatory compliance.

We explore the economics of generative AI. The cost of running it at scale in production and in testing, and how organisations are rethinking where large language models are necessary versus where smaller, domain-specific models are more effective.

The discussion also highlights how failure can scale in AI systems, where a single bad response can affect thousands of customers.

Get a free pass to Cyara’s Xchange 2026 in Dallas, TX, using code VUX: https://cyara.com/event/xchange-2026

Find out more about Cyara: https://cyara.com

Follow Amitha on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amitha

Follow Christoph on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christoph-b%C3%B6rner-7721ab147

Follow Kane on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms

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Subscribe to The AI Ultimatum Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/kanesimms

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Generative AI is changing how customer support chatbots are built, deployed and measured.

In this episode, we sit down with Alia Azim, Product Lead for Chatbots at Citation Group, to discuss the company’s shift from traditional NLU chatbots to generative AI conversational agents.

Alia brings a wealth of experience in conversational AI, including time spent at Lloyds Banking Group, and she gives us an honest account of what it actually looks like to move from NLU-based chatbots to generative AI in a real business environment.

Citation Group provides HR, compliance and business services for thousands of small and medium businesses. Supporting those customers means handling everything from platform troubleshooting to account access issues. Alia explains how their team rebuilt the chatbot strategy around generative AI, focusing on specific use cases, improved knowledge management, and outcomes that actually resolve customer problems.

We explore the limitations of traditional intent-based bots, why generative AI dramatically changes how conversational systems are designed and why success metrics like containment are being replaced by resolution rate.

We also get into the debate around whether conversation design is dead. Designers and engineers still play a critical role, but the work now focuses less on building rigid flows and more on shaping AI behaviour through guidance, knowledge design and customer journey thinking.

Follow Alia on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aliaazim/

Follow Kane Simms on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms

Download our exclusive report on how AI agents keep CX stable when volume explodes: https://vux.la/scale

Take our updated AI Maturity Assessment: https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/a26bf9Rr?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio&utm_campaign=vuxconsulting25

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