VUX World

Hosted by Kane Simms

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386

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Aug 2026

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About the show

Interviews with the best brains in AI, sharing how to improve customer experience and business operations using emerging AI technologies such as voice AI, conversational AI, NLP, Large Language Models (LLMs), generative AI and more. We educate business leaders and teams on why and how AI technologies are revolutionising the way consumers engage with businesses and the internet, why that matters and how to implement it properly. “One of the most consistently insightful and deeply respected podcasts in the industry” Bradley Metrock, Score Publishing Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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August 13, 20261 hr 14 min

Cobus Greyling: why intents, graphs and conversation design have come full circle

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.Show notes Follow Cobus on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cobusgreylingCobus's website: https://cobusgreyling.meFollow Cobus on Substack: https://cobusgreyling.substack.com/Discover more about Kore.aiArticle - The Untrainable by Sarah Guo: https://saranormous.substack.com/p/the-untrainableVideo - Andrej Karpathy: Software Is Changing (Again): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCEmiRjPEtQFollow Kane on LinkedIn:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Find out more about VUX:⁠⁠https://vux.ai⁠⁠Subscribe to VUX World: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/Qlo5aaeW?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Subscribe to The AI Ultimatum Substack: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://open.substack.com/pub/kanesimms⁠

August 7, 202655 min

From answers to actions: building better government AI

Plenty of AI assistants can answer the question in front of them. Fewer can work out what someone is actually trying to do and help them do it.In this episode, we're joined by Pete Kowalczyk, AI Conversation Designer at the Government Digital Service (GDS), to talk about designing AI experiences across the vast and complex landscape of UK government services.Pete explains how GDS is exploring knowledge graphs, persistent state and goal detection to move beyond basic RAG systems. The aim is to connect information with action and guide people through non-linear journeys, such as moving house or registering a birth. One of the key goals is to reduce the burden created by fragmented processes and legacy systems.We discuss why conversational systems need to track user goals, how small interaction loops can be built into rich experiences over time and why transitions between stages of a conversation carry so much weight for trust and usability.We also get into progressive disclosure, deciding when an AI should stay concise and when it should offer more, and how to judge whether a link belongs in a response at all. Pete points to a bank surfacing patterns in someone's spending as an example of how organisations can build proactive features from data they already hold, rather than only responding when asked.Pete shares how the designer role is evolving. Designers now need sufficient technical understanding to prototype and work directly with LLMs through practices like vibe coding, while maintaining the creative ability to understand experiences beyond incremental chatbot improvements. He closes with a warning against the industry's current resolution rut, where success gets defined too narrowly as fast ticket resolution rather than genuinely useful, proactive AI.Show notes Follow Pete on LinkedIn:⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/petekowalczykVideo of Pete's talk at the Conversational AI Meetup in London: ⁠https://youtu.be/001PeZv3N0k⁠Lead with Tempo 2026: https://www.leadwithtempo.com/2026scheduleLondon Design Festival: https://londondesignfestival.comFollow Kane on LinkedIn:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Find out more about VUX:⁠https://vux.ai⁠Subscribe to VUX World: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/Qlo5aaeW?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio⁠⁠⁠⁠Subscribe to The AI Ultimatum Substack: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://open.substack.com/pub/kanesimms⁠

July 24, 202654 min

How Simplyhealth scaled voice AI to resolve 30% of calls with Paul Atkins

Almost a third of Simplyhealth's incoming calls are now resolved by AI, and email handling time has fallen from 12 minutes to 2. The company is achieving those gains while maintaining the service standards that placed it 31st in KPMG UK's Customer Experience Excellence report.In this episode, we're joined by Paul Atkins, Head of Business Optimisation at Simplyhealth, the UK's member-owned health cash plan provider serving around 2.5 million customers. Paul explains how Simplyhealth introduced voice AI gradually, tested more than 1,000 real customer calls and built trust across a highly regulated organisation.We also get into how Simplyhealth measures resolution, quality and customer effort, why intensive human listening still matters during rollout, and the organisational call to define what "good enough" looks like rather than letting advisors over-engineer every reply. Paul talks through the role of business readiness teams in driving adoption and why knowledge management could become the next major challenge in making AI work at scale.Show notes Follow Paul on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-atkins-1nsightFollow Kane on LinkedIn:⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms⁠⁠⁠⁠Find out more about VUX:https://vux.aiSubscribe to VUX World: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/Qlo5aaeW?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio⁠⁠⁠Subscribe to The AI Ultimatum Substack: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://open.substack.com/pub/kanesimms⁠

July 17, 202651 min

Inside the platform enterprises use to build AI agents with Rasmus Hauch, CTO at boost.ai

Safe, reliable, production-ready AI agents don't come from the model. They come from everything built around it.Rasmus Hauch is CTO of Boost.ai, one of the enterprise platforms banks, insurers and public sector organisations use to build customer-facing AI agents. His work sits one layer below every deployment: the orchestration, the guardrails, the testing infrastructure and the model choices that decide whether an agent holds up in front of millions of customers.In this episode, Rasmus opens that layer, explaining why conversational AI is shifting away from traditional conversation flows towards orchestration, testing and continuous evaluation. He walks through how Boost approaches it in practice: persona-based simulation across thousands of digital and voice conversations, predefined test suites for jailbreaking attempts and financial advice, layered guardrails inside and outside the agent, and a trust loop that feeds production results back into the build.Rasmus is direct about the hard parts. We touch on why the big LLM providers can't yet deliver the consistent response times voice demands, which is why Boost runs fine-tuned smaller models on its own infrastructure for latency-critical voice work. Rasmus explains why he advises clients against plugging in their own models. We also discuss where liability sits under the EU AI Act when an agent gets it wrong, and why a volcano eruption in Iceland is a good example of what no model can be trained for.Towards the end, Rasmus shares what's exciting him right now, including adaptive voice, real-time language switching and where agent-to-agent protocols are heading.Show notes Discover more about boost.aiFollow Rasmus on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/rasmushauchFollow Kane on LinkedIn:⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms⁠⁠⁠Subscribe to VUX World: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/Qlo5aaeW?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio⁠⁠Subscribe to The AI Ultimatum Substack: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://open.substack.com/pub/kanesimms⁠

July 10, 202643 min

How ING is building the instant mortgage with agentic AI

A traditional mortgage can take weeks to process. Every application moves through rounds of document requests, condition checks, and broker queries before a decision is made. ING is using agentic AI to change that.In this episode, Bahadir Yilmaz, Chief Analytics Officer at ING, explains how one of Europe's largest mortgage lenders has implemented agentic AI in its mortgage process. The system is live in the Netherlands, rolling out to Germany. Applications now complete in days, a full day faster since AI was introduced. The goal: the instant mortgage, within the next couple of years. We cover why ING chose its highest-stakes product for its first agentic deployment, why the agent handles operational work while underwriting remains with traditional machine learning, and how the team built a golden dataset of 400 mortgage applications to test a system no one had tested before.Furthermore, Bahadir shares how ING scaled to 114 AI initiatives with 42,000 employees using AI. We discuss why risk management came before ambition, and why only 10 of his 600 experts were ready to build agentic systems.Show notes Follow Bahadir on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bahadir-yilmaz-21170479/Follow Kane on LinkedIn:⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms⁠⁠Take our AI Maturity Assessment: ⁠⁠⁠https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/a26bf9Rr?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio⁠Subscribe to VUX World: ⁠⁠⁠https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/Qlo5aaeW?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio⁠Subscribe to The AI Ultimatum Substack: ⁠⁠⁠https://open.substack.com/pub/kanesimms⁠

July 2, 20269 min

From TOBi to Super TOBi. Vodafone's AI Evolution with Jordan Anglin

In this episode, recorded at the CCW UK Summit, we’re joined by Jordan Anglin from Vodafone to explore the company's approach to customer experience and how AI supports faster, more seamless issue resolution across digital and human channels.Jordan explains how Vodafone combines its AI assistant, TOBi, asynchronous messaging, and dedicated resolution teams to reduce customer effort, eliminate repetitive conversations, and create genuine ownership from start to finish. Jordan also shares how AI is improving frontline performance through agent assistance, conversation summaries, quality assurance and real-time guidance, while offering a practical perspective on where large language models deliver real value and where they fall short.Jordan closes with his take on where AI attention in customer experience is currently misplaced, and where he sees low-hanging fruit that's easy to miss.Show notesDiscover the CCW Europe Summit in Amsterdam: ⁠https://europe.customercontactweekdigital.com/events-ccweurope/?utm_source=vux.world&utm_medium=Media%20Partner&utm_campaign=27400.010_VUX_Podcast%20episodes%20post%20event&utm_term=&utm_content=&disc=&extTreatId=7638147⁠Follow Jordan on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordan-anglin-a2672610b/⁠⁠⁠⁠Follow Kane on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms⁠⁠⁠Take our AI Maturity Assessment: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/a26bf9Rr?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio⁠⁠Subscribe to VUX World: ⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/Qlo5aaeW?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio ⁠⁠Subscribe to The AI Ultimatum Substack: ⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://open.substack.com/pub/kanesimms⁠

June 30, 202614 min

Turning AI hype into real customer value, with Simplyhealth and EdgeTier

We recorded this episode at the CCW UK Summit in May, capturing some of the key conversations shaping customer experience, service and AI.AI is everywhere in customer experience, yet few organisations are turning that excitement into measurable business outcomes.We're joined by Paul Cuglietta, Customer Services Director at Simplyhealth, and Paul Atkins, Head of Business Optimisation at Simplyhealth, alongside Shane Lynn, CEO and Founder of EdgeTier, to explore what successful AI adoption really looks like.We discuss how Simplyhealth scaled generative voice AI with PolyAI from 5% to 50% of interactions and how the company uses EdgeTier's conversational intelligence platform to turn everyday customer conversations into actionable business insights. We also cover why organisations should start with real business problems rather than chasing the latest AI trends.Simplyhealth funnels its conversational data through a prioritisation process to decide which customer journey improvements to make first. The team explains why progress comes from small measurable iterations and how they keep a human in the loop to handle the moments that automation should not touch.We also weigh in on where the AI narrative is overhyped, where its real value remains underutilised, and why the unglamorous work of digging through conversations to fix broken policies and processes is where genuine impact happens.Show notesDiscover the CCW Europe Summit in Amsterdam: https://europe.customercontactweekdigital.com/events-ccweurope/?utm_source=vux.world&utm_medium=Media%20Partner&utm_campaign=27400.010_VUX_Podcast%20episodes%20post%20event&utm_term=&utm_content=&disc=&extTreatId=7638147Follow Kane on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms⁠⁠Take our AI Maturity Assessment: ⁠⁠⁠https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/a26bf9Rr?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio⁠Subscribe to VUX World: ⁠⁠⁠ https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/Qlo5aaeW?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio ⁠Subscribe to The AI Ultimatum Substack: ⁠⁠⁠ https://open.substack.com/pub/kanesimms⁠

June 26, 202639 min

How the company behind Uswitch and Money.co.uk uses AI to resolve up to 70% of customer conversations with Anna Fedorchuk, RVU

When you switch off your call centre, AI has no safety net to fall back on. RVU did exactly that, building an AI-first customer operations function that serves millions of UK consumers.In this episode, we’re joined by Anna Fedorchuk, Customer Operations Manager at RVU, the company behind brands including Uswitch, Confused.com and Money.co.uk. Anna shares how her team transformed customer support from a traditional contact centre into an AI-first operation, achieving AI resolution rates of 65-70% while maintaining a strong customer experience.We discuss how RVU rolled out AI across chat, email and social media without relying on engineering teams, and why building the right knowledge base mattered far more than chasing the latest model. Anna walks us through how AI categorisation and carefully designed workflows lifted resolution rates across genuinely complex customer journeys, where similar keywords across energy, broadband and mobile made accurate routing a real challenge. Anna also describes how Claude and Intercom now work together to analyse conversations and surface operational insights in the team's own language.People are a big part of this conversation. Anna explains how involving her team early gave each agent their own vertical to run and a real sense of ownership, and how AI even softened the stress of handling difficult complaints. She closes on what's next: data connectors and more agentic customer experiences.Show notes Follow Anna on LinkedIn:⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/anna-fedorchuk-b84232102/⁠Follow Kane on LinkedIn:⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms⁠Take our AI Maturity Assessment: ⁠⁠https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/a26bf9Rr?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audioSubscribe to VUX World: ⁠⁠https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/Qlo5aaeW?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audioSubscribe to The AI Ultimatum Substack: ⁠⁠https://open.substack.com/pub/kanesimms⁠

June 19, 202646 min

Omotenashi: Japanese concept of hospitality and what CX teams can learn from it with Daniel Orenes Ferrández, Uber

Japan has one of the lowest average NPS scores in the world, and the reason is cultural: Japanese customers expect more.Daniel Orenes Ferrández, Senior Manager of Customer Experience at Uber, discusses Omotenashi, the Japanese philosophy of anticipating customer needs and apologising sincerely before resolving a problem.Daniel has lived and worked in Japan for over a decade, including five years leading conversational AI initiatives at Rakuten. He explains why the Japanese language has between ten and fifteen ways of saying sorry, why choosing the right level matters as much as solving the issue, and how generative AI prompts can now select an apology tone based on contact type and severity, something fixed NLU responses could never do.The conversation covers Aimai, the Japanese concept of ambiguity used to maintain conversational harmony. Japanese speakers rarely say no directly, and AI systems need specific prompting to catch these signals in sentiment analysis. We also discuss the escalation strategy, digital mascots, integration with the Japanese messaging app Line, and practical guidance for global brands deploying conversational AI in Japan.Show notes Read Daniel's Substack, Japan CX Insider: https://danielferrandez.substack.com/Follow Daniel on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielorenesferrandez/ Follow Kane on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms Take our AI Maturity Assessment: https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/a26bf9Rr?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio Subscribe to VUX World: https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/Qlo5aaeW?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio Subscribe to The AI Ultimatum Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/kanesimms

June 12, 202638 min

The trust layer banks need for an agentic future with Mathias Fanschek, Raiffeisen Bank International

What happens when customers stop opening banking apps and start managing their finances through AI assistants?In this episode, we sit down with Mathias Fanschek, Head of Digital Transformation and Retail Strategy at Raiffeisen Bank International, to explore how one of Europe's largest banking groups is preparing for a future of headless banking, agentic commerce and AI-powered customer experiences.With 18 million customers across 11 markets and managing over €200 billion in assets, Mathias shares what it really takes to move generative AI from experimentation to production. We had a good discussion about virtual mobile assistants, transforming legacy data infrastructure, and managing executive expectations in a rapidly changing, highly regulated landscape.You'll also hear Mathias' perspective on Revolut's new PRAGMA model, why context is the missing ingredient in today's AI experiences and how banks can remain trusted intermediaries as customers increasingly interact through AI-powered distribution channels.

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VUX World

About the show

Listen to episodes

Cobus Greyling: why intents, graphs and conversation design have come full circle

From answers to actions: building better government AI

How Simplyhealth scaled voice AI to resolve 30% of calls with Paul Atkins

Inside the platform enterprises use to build AI agents with Rasmus Hauch, CTO at boost.ai

How ING is building the instant mortgage with agentic AI

From TOBi to Super TOBi. Vodafone's AI Evolution with Jordan Anglin

Turning AI hype into real customer value, with Simplyhealth and EdgeTier

How the company behind Uswitch and Money.co.uk uses AI to resolve up to 70% of customer conversations with Anna Fedorchuk, RVU

Omotenashi: Japanese concept of hospitality and what CX teams can learn from it with Daniel Orenes Ferrández, Uber

The trust layer banks need for an agentic future with Mathias Fanschek, Raiffeisen Bank International

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