Today’s episode of the Punk CX podcast is with Malte Kosub, the co-founder and CEO of Parloa, a provider of an enterprise-grade AI agent management platform for customer service. Malte joins me today to talk about standing out in an increasingly crowded field, his vision for how customer support will evolve over the coming five years, and what successful companies are doing to allow them to tap into the potential of this new technological wave.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Transforming CX with predictable AI and workflow automation – Interview with Rebecca Miller of Pega – and is number 551 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here are the highlights of my chat with Malte:

• Parloa focuses on serving the largest enterprises, building their entire platform to meet the distinct needs of these big companies, unlike those targeting small and medium-sized businesses.
• They prioritize voice and phone as the most relevant channels for large enterprises due to high volume and costs, outperforming competitors who often started with chat.
• Being a European company, Parloa developed a strong multi-language capability from the outset, essential for global enterprises, addressing challenges like phone infrastructure integration, diverse regulations, and fine-tuning speech-to-text models for various languages.
• Malte’s vision for customer experience includes a future where every touchpoint becomes conversational, even apps and homepages, with a UI driven by conversation.
• A key future trend that Malte foresees is a “personal AI agent” for each customer, offering a personalized, one-to-one relationship with companies (for example, imagine an airline having 150 million personal AI agents for 150 million customers).
• Conversational AI interfaces will ideally combine conversational interaction with visual elements (swiping, clicking) to ensure efficiency and ease of use, avoiding the “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” pitfall of solely text-based interactions.
• Enterprises are increasingly adopting AI swiftly, driven by expectations from public markets to show efficiency and innovation with generative AI, challenging the notion that they move slower than mid-market companies.
• Successful AI implementations, particularly in customer service, require an “agentic first” approach and a readiness to integrate with backend systems to handle end-to-end use cases, not just FAQs.
• The role of human agents will evolve, focusing on complex tasks, supervision, coaching AI agents, and training them for new use cases, addressing the existing labor shortage in customer support.
• Malte referenced a TEDx talk by Eric Schmidt entitled The AI revolution is underhyped.
• Malte’s best advice: Start thinking about easy use cases you can implement within two, three, four months and then make a decision to move on, implement it and start learning from that experience.
• Malte’s Punk CX brand: Booking.com

About Malte

Malte Kosub is co-founder and CEO of Parloa, the platform behind enterprise-grade artificial intelligence (AI) agents for customer service. He’s spent his career building solutions that make AI feel more human. Before Parloa, he co-founded one of Europe’s first and widely popular conversational AI agencies and sold his ecommerce startup, Wandnotiz.

Malte studied at the University of Hamburg, Harvard, and MIT, and teaches at Futur/io. He splits his time between Berlin and New York.

Find out more about Parloa, say Hi to them on X (Twitter) @parloa_ai and feel free to connect with Malte on LinkedIn here.

Credit: Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash