1 Aug 2026No Situational Awareness | Claude Hacks | Big Tech AI Spend at $1T
PolyAI's Dialogue Reason 1 Launch with Nikola Mrkšić
PolyAI CEO Nikola Mrkšić walks through the launch of Dialogue Reason 1, an audio LLM that reasons in under half a second — keeping the low latency of speech-to-speech while retaining the control of cascaded systems — with plans to open-source DialogueEval benchmarks and offer an API on AWS. He argues consumption-based platform pricing beats outcome-based solution pricing, says open-weight models like DeepSeek and Kimi are here to stay in a space-race-like rivalry, and describes how PolyAI's Ren coding agent now runs daily A/B improvements on the platform.
PolyAI: Autonomous Ops, Healthcare Boom & Incumbent Pressure
Nikola Mrkšić wraps the PolyAI segment by explaining the platform now autonomously A/B-tests and rolls out model improvements (even fixing bugs like relative-date errors), and argues voice AI is technically 'solved' — the remaining challenge is what happens on the other side of the call. Commercially, healthcare has become PolyAI's number one and fastest-growing vertical, financial services is strongest in Europe, and customers are replacing legacy voice IVRs, with nearly half of clients now using both voice and chat. The discussion closes on vendor consolidation pressure on incumbents, whose public stocks have fallen as buyers price in what AI will do to them.
20 May 2026Leopold’s 13F, Kled Founder Joins, Not Liable, Demis is an Angel, EQT €5B Fund, Disco Balls
Ivan (Daytona) on Sandboxes for AI Agents
Live from the Code with Claude event, Daytona's Ivan explains the company sells 'computers for agents' — sandboxes that spin up in 60 milliseconds and can fork into parallel machines to try multiple outcomes. Daytona was one of four partners for Anthropic's bring-your-own-sandbox launch (with Clay as a customer), and he discusses general-availability Windows sandboxes, staying six to nine months ahead of the market, agents outnumbering humans 'to the Nth power,' headless apps and the agent experience, and escaping the SaaS apocalypse via consumption-based pricing.
PolyAI's Nicola: Opening the Agentic Dialogue Platform
Nicola, back for a third appearance, explains PolyAI has opened its platform so anyone can build enterprise-ready dialogue agents conversationally, leveraging learnings from roughly 200 enterprise clients, with an agent development kit and what he calls the best LLM for customer service. He describes the internal "Reformation" codename, the Glot builder, usage at nearly a million phone calls a day for single customers, and upcoming UX work like access control. He also revisits the "SaaSpocalypse," arguing healthy systems of record will benefit while Salesforce's AI execution lags, and discusses uneven enterprise adoption, token maxing as corporate posturing, and Jevons paradox softening contact-center job losses.
20 Feb 2026Europe $1B Seed Round, Perplexity Kills Ads, Toyo's OpenClaw for Enterprise
Poly AI CEO Nikola Mrkšić: Gordon Ramsay Ad and the Death of SaaS
Poly AI co-founder and CEO Nikola Mrkšić returns for a second appearance and plays the company's Gordon Ramsay ad, which aired during the Super Bowl on connected TV and YouTube and has 3.5 million views; the relationship began with Gordon Ramsay Restaurants as a voice-AI client. He describes the one-click OpenTable integration that gives any restaurant a working voice agent, Poly AI's two scaling paths — SMB-style one-click deployments versus deep custom enterprise work — and over 500 million calls handled. On "SaaS is dead," he argues value is moving to the agentic layer, leaving incumbents like Salesforce — whose Agentforce he says has failed — and HubSpot penalized as utility infrastructure. Looking ahead, he says Poly AI will open its platform more widely, cites 10x healthcare growth in five quarters, uses coding tools like Claude Code to port legacy IVRs in hours, and notes under 2% of automatable phone calls have been automated.
Outro and Sign-Off
The hosts finish thanking Nikola, then close the show with a final Airwallex sponsorship read and apologize for the technical difficulties earlier in the stream before signing off until the next episode.
9 Jan 2026xAI $20B, Anthropic $10B, Year of The Bro-Caster
Meet Nikola of PolyAI: Voice AI for Enterprise Customer Service
Hosts welcome Nikola, who introduces PolyAI as a Series D conversational AI company building voice agents that automate customer service for large enterprises like Marriott, Caesars, PG&E, FedEx, Allstate and NatWest. He recounts his deep learning PhD at Cambridge, his previous company VocalIQ being acquired by Apple in 2015 to make Siri more conversational, and why voice beats chat for critical tasks like outages — noting one of their agents recently closed a $60,000 office supplies sale.
Why AI SDRs Like 11x Failed — and Where Voice AI Actually Works
Nikola blames hype over substance for the collapse of AI SDR startups like 11x, notes US telemarketing regulation makes cold AI calling a potential nine-figure liability, and cites a startup deleted from LinkedIn for spamming people via Sales Navigator. He contrasts the crowded, zombie-prone chatbot market (Monzo/Revolut-type buyers, Decagon, Zendesk, Intercom) with voice as mission-critical infrastructure, citing PolyAI's PG&E outage line that handled a million calls in a day during the California floods.
Moving Fast on Mission-Critical Enterprise AI
Asked how a startup balances speed against hypersensitive enterprise deployments, Nikola says results surprise you: PolyAI went live with FedEx in 30 days, while a pan-European UniCredit rollout followed a slower but dependable roadmap. He describes moving from Palantir-style forward-deployed builds to "SaaSified" vertical products — restaurants can now self-serve a booking line via the OpenTable marketplace — and argues that editing an LLM prompt is still programming, so the product must be packaged for non-technical contact center staff.
Vibe Coding: Cursor, Lovable, Manus and the Windsurf Saga
Nikola says vibe coding is here to stay and that every good developer now lives in Cursor, though he's unsure whether Lovable-style prototypes hold up for production systems. The group runs through Meta's acquisition of Manus, the OpenAI–Windsurf deal that fell apart and ended with Cognition hiring the team, and Replit, concluding that coding and customer service are the two AI markets with the biggest real-world impact.
From Cambridge PhD and VocalIQ (Acquired by Apple) to Founding PolyAI
Nikola tells how professor Steve Young talked him out of banking and into startup VocalIQ, where he did his PhD as deep learning took off and which was acquired by Apple to make Siri more conversational. Hooked on the "frontier mentality" of startups, he and two co-founders from the same research group started PolyAI — first doing Samsung Bixby work and odd pilots before committing to contact centers, since roughly 2% of the UK and US populations work in them.
Live Demo Call: "I Thought I Was Talking to a Robot"
Nikola plays a recorded call in which a caller booking an Italian restaurant table realizes mid-conversation she's speaking to an AI and apologizes, illustrating his goal of making people feel positively about voice agents. He describes the "connected enterprise" — spotting an impossible billing-call spike in Manchester and proactively issuing refunds — and OpenTable-partnered AI sales agents that upsell off-peak Mother's Day slots, driving restaurant revenue up about 13%, before the hosts wrap the interview.