The two things contact centres have been missing until now

Automation Anywhere has agreed to acquire boost.ai. What could that mean for customer experience, personal AI agents and the autonomous enterprise?In this exclusive interview, Kane Simms speaks with Jerry Haywood, CEO of boost.ai, and Ankur Kothari, co-founder and COO of Automation Anywhere, about the proposed combination. They discuss how conversational and voice AI could connect to work across enterprise systems, where people remain involved and what customers need to prepare for.The conversation covers the rationale behind the deal, customer and employee operations, the changing relationship between CX and IT, personal agents, agent-to-agent interactions and the foundations of successful AI adoption. Kane closes with his view on why the combination matters.Acquisition status: the companies announced a definitive agreement on 7 October 2026. Completion is expected in Q4 2026, subject to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions. Show notes Follow Kane on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/kanesimms Find out more about VUX: https://vux.ai Subscribe to The AI Ultimatum Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/kanesimms

Reliable voice AI comes from rigorous testing and evals, and Rohan Vasishth from Bluejay sees trust as the fundamental bottleneck holding back enterprise deployment. Rohan is Co-founder and CEO of Bluejay, which tests and monitors voice and chat AI agents for companies including Google and DoorDash. We work through what to test, when to test it and what each approach costs. We discuss why testing voice AI introduces a whole new layer of complexity, from accents and background noise to interruptions and speech recognition errors. Rohan also shares how customers can stress-test agents, why starting with text-based evaluations can save time and money, and how businesses can identify and reduce the latency customers actually experience. Rohan closes by exploring the widening gap between rapidly advancing AI capabilities and slower enterprise deployment, and why evaluation is essential to building the trust needed to close it.

Stacey Kyler and Guy Tonye of Zammo return to the show for the first time since 2021. Back then they were building for Google Assistant, Alexa and Cortana. ChatGPT arrived soon after and reshaped what customers expected. They cover the move from NLU and diagram flows to agentic systems, why customers now want both the freedom of Gen AI and firm control, how Zammo enforces determinism at the code level while Gen AI handles the conversation, and why evals are the thing Guy would add to any conversation design course today.

Voice AI is the channel everyone is talking about in 2026. One of the biggest things slowing it down is often already sitting inside your stack. In this episode, I’m joined by Endre Davids from Seamly to explore what really happens when businesses take an existing chatbot and move it into the voice channel. We discuss why latency often starts deeper in the conversational platform than teams expect. Endre explains how companies can spend time optimising speech recognition and text-to-speech while the chatbot itself is responsible for much bigger delays. The conversation gets into why voice needs a different interaction model, because people speak differently from how they type. That puts far more pressure on getting the conversation design right. We also cover how to manage perceived latency, when it makes sense to reuse existing chatbot infrastructure and how sentiment, multimodality and customer context could shape richer voice experiences. Endre and I keep landing on the same point. The success of voice AI depends heavily on conversation design, and voice punishes the shortcuts that chat lets you get away with.

I'm joined by Cobus Greyling, AI evangelist at Kore.ai, for a wide-ranging conversation on where enterprise AI actually stands today. We explore why many of the ideas now being presented as breakthroughs, from graph engineering and orchestration to intent detection and state management, have deep roots in conversational AI. We also get into one of the biggest barriers to enterprise AI adoption: data. We highlight why customer experience could become the entry point for much wider organisational transformation. We touch on how forward-deployed engineers could help businesses navigate that change and why security will become increasingly important as AI agents gain access to more systems and information. I close with a buzzword bingo round for Cobus covering fleet engineering, agent swarms, orchestration and universal agents, and Cobus explains why he thinks Open Claw was the biggest red herring of the year.