Nikola Mrkšić, Co-Founder & CEO at PolyAI on Building One of the World’s Leading Voice AI Companies

About this episode

Nikola Mrkšić discusses the advancements and challenges in voice AI and customer service automation.

Nikola Mrkšić is the Co-Founder and CEO of PolyAI, one of the world’s leading voice AI companies, helping enterprises automate customer service through conversational AI at massive scale. Before PolyAI, Nikola was a machine learning researcher and part of the team behind Siri. In this episode, he joins James to unpack what the world is only now starting to understand about voice AI, why most automation still misses the point, and how PolyAI has built a full stack enterprise product that goes ...

People in this episode

Host: James

Guest: Nikola Mrkšić

Topics covered

• voice AI
• customer service automation
• conversational AI
• machine learning
• entrepreneurship

Keywords

• voice AI
• PolyAI
• customer service
• automation
• machine learning
• Siri

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: PolyAI

Products: Siri

More episodes of Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship | Technology

• The Future of Finance is AI-Native: Jonathan Sanders, CEO of Light, on Organic Software, AI Agents, and Rebuilding Business Finance · June 10, 2026 · 29 min
• Steve Domin, Founder & CEO @ Duffel – Rebuilding Travel Infrastructure, Surviving COVID, and the Future of API-First Companies · May 20, 2026 · 26 min
• Building the backbone of AI with Mahdi Yahya, Co-Founder @ Radiant on Compute, Power and the Future of Infrastructure · May 13, 2026 · 27 min
• Charlotte Palmer, VP of Venture Capital at Integra Global Advisors on Backing Emerging Managers, Access, and Venture Fundraising · May 6, 2026 · 30 min
• Inside Fuse Energy: Alan Chang on Building a $5B Energy Giant and Chasing £1B ARR · April 29, 2026 · 21 min
• What Makes a Top VC Fund Today? Dave Neumann at Schroders Capital on LP Thinking, DPI and Venture Returns · April 22, 2026 · 28 min