Nikola Mrkšić
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 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.
9 Jan 2026xAI $20B Series-E, Anthropic Eyes $10B, PolyAI CEO, Year of the Bro-Caster, Hacker Hotels
Nikola Mrkšić, Co-founder & CEO of PolyAI
PolyAI co-founder and CEO Nikola Mrkšić introduces the Series D conversational AI company building voice agents for enterprise customer service, with clients including Marriott, Caesars, PG&E, FedEx, Allstate and NatWest. He recounts his 2014 Cambridge deep learning PhD, his previous startup VocalIQ being acquired by Apple in 2015 to make Siri more conversational, and why hype-driven AI voice startups like 11x struggled while PolyAI's live deployments endured. Segment continues in part 2.
9 Jan 2026xAI $20B, Anthropic $10B, Year of The Bro-Caster
Nikola Mrkšić, PolyAI CEO, Joins the Show
PolyAI co-founder and CEO Nikola Mrkšić joins the stream to trumpet fanfare as the next guest. He says he's good but busy — "every day a new adventure, a lot is happening" — and exchanges greetings with the hosts as the interview begins, continuing beyond this part of the episode.