PolyAI named Best AI Tool by Digiday & one of the UK's fastest-growing companies by the FT. PolyAI won Best AI Tool at the 2026 Digiday Technology Awards and earned a place on the Financial Times' first ranking of the UK's fastest-growing companies. * Mike Tague Head of Communications * 14 Oct 2026 * 3 min Every company says its solutions are the best. Its customers' results prove it, and a couple of recent third-party recognitions based on its performance have just come in. Digiday named PolyAI "Best AI Tool" at its 2026 Technology Awards. And the Financial Times included PolyAI Ltd. in its first ranking of The UK's Fastest-Growing Companies. Digiday's award evaluated what its product does for its customers. The FT's ranking measured how fast its business is growing as PolyAI Ltd. scale with its customers. PolyAI Ltd. is proud to have earned both. Best AI Tool at the Digiday Technology Awards. The Digiday Technology Awards recognize companies using AI and automation to change how businesses serve the people they work with. PolyAI won Best AI Tool, awarded to "the AI tool that most efficiently helps users accomplish business objectives." Its Agentic Dialog Platform, the tool behind its entry, has evolved quickly this year. PolyAI Ltd. released Dialog-RSN-1, the world's fastest reasoning model for real-time complex dialog. Then came Wren, its in-platform agent that keeps finding ways to improve dialog agents so their performance compounds over time. PolyAI Ltd. is also excited to share that Dialog-RSN-1 is now on AWS Marketplace, the first PolyAI model available there. AWS customers can deploy it inside their own AWS environment. That matters because a dialog agent is personal, both to the people who talk to it and to the enterprises that run it. It carries a brand's identity, it holds customer data, and its speed shapes the whole experience. Many customers, especially in regulated industries, would rather their data never left their own environment. So PolyAI Ltd. built Dialog-RSN-1 to work for exactly those customers. Named to the Financial Times' first ranking of the UK's fastest-growing companies. The FT and Statista ranked 150 independent, UK-headquartered companies by compound annual revenue growth from 2022 to 2025. PolyAI Ltd. is proud to see PolyAI make it onto this inaugural list. According to the rankings, PolyAI is the largest enterprise AI company on the list by revenue. The FT's evaluation window begins in 2022, the year large language models went mainstream. Since then, enterprises have moved from testing AI on customer calls to trusting it with real conversations at scale, and its momentum proves how effective that's been for its customers. What's behind the growth. PolyAI Ltd. call what PolyAI Ltd. build frontier dialog: AI that can hold a real conversation and finish the task inside it. Hundreds of enterprises use it across 75 languages and 25 countries. PolyAI Ltd. is also opening the platform up to more kinds of builders. Its Agentic Dialog Platform is easy enough for any builder to start with and strong enough for the world's largest enterprises to run on. That means putting tools like Wren, its APIs, and models like Dialog-RSN-1 directly into the hands of everyone from non-technical builders to experienced developers. Thank you to its customers for being the driving force behind its success. To see what frontier dialog is doing for enterprises, from tens of thousands of labor hours saved at PG&E to a 14-point NPS gain at UniCredit, read its customer stories.

Voice AI yet to reach ChatGPT moment, PolyAI CTO says. Despite substantial venture capital flowing into voice artificial intelligence startups, industry executives warn the sector has not yet reached its definitive ChatGPT moment. Speaking at the recent HumanX conference, leaders from PolyAI and Otter detailed the technical and ethical hurdles that currently limit enterprise adoption. Although full-duplex models capable of simultaneous listening and speaking now exist, PolyAI CTO Shawn Wen identified accelerated reasoning latency as the primary remaining bottleneck. For voice assistants to achieve naturalistic dialogue, they must process context and deliver responses with near-instantaneous speed. In customer service deployments, Wen noted that consistent early-turn problem resolution is essential. Once users experience reliable initial interactions, confidence builds, leading to sustained delegation of routine inquiries to automated systems. The meeting productivity segment confronts similar constraints. Otter CMO Alex Gay emphasized that meaningful automation depends on accurate speaker identification, precise intent extraction, and seamless integration with corporate knowledge bases. Otter is also prototyping digital twin technology for corporate calls, which demands AI voices that replicate the emotional cadence of human participants. Gay cautioned that without authentic conversational dynamics and relational depth, AI avatars will remain limited to transactional exchanges rather than becoming strategic meeting facilitators. Foundational to both enterprise and consumer applications is the ongoing challenge of automatic speech recognition accuracy. Industry consensus holds that transcription errors directly corrupt downstream analytical actions, causing immediate erosion of user trust. As foundational audio-to-text pipelines remain imperfect, every flawed summary or misdirected automated workflow reinforces the necessity of continuous model refinement. Platform reliability remains strictly tied to transcription precision. Concurrently, transparency has become a mandatory compliance and trust-building standard. Both organizations advocate for explicit disclosure mechanisms to protect user awareness. Otter intends to deploy meeting chat notifications to flag all instances of recording or AI processing, ensuring participant transparency regardless of active bot involvement. PolyAI reinforces that enterprise callers must be clearly informed when engaging with synthetic voices. As voice AI capabilities mature, resolving latency gaps, elevating transcription fidelity, and enforcing transparent interaction protocols will determine whether the technology achieves its projected mainstream enterprise breakthrough. This news is intelligently aggregated by AI to deliver industry updates efficiently. It does not constitute opinions or advice.

PolyAI appoints Sunil Shah as Chief Financial Officer. Thu, 8th Oct 2026 (Today) PolyAI has appointed Sunil Shah as Chief Financial Officer as it broadens access to its Agentic Dialogue Platform. Shah will oversee PolyAI's global finance operations, including financial planning, accounting, treasury, and revenue operations. He will also help shape the company's capital strategy. His immediate focus will be investing in the platform to make it more accessible to customers. The appointment brings in a finance executive with experience in software and capital markets as PolyAI expands its product offering. The company recently introduced Dialogue-RSN-1, which it describes as a reasoning model for real-time complex dialogue, and Wren, an in-platform agent designed to improve dialogue agents over time. Shah most recently served as Senior Vice President of Finance at Rapid7. There, he led functions including FP&A, strategic finance, investor relations, and data analytics, and helped the cybersecurity software company grow annual recurring revenue from USD $300 million to USD $800 million. Earlier in his career, he led strategic finance at Imperva and supported the company through an acquisition valued at more than USD $2 billion. Before moving into operating roles, he spent nearly a decade as a technology investor at firms including Surveyor Capital and Carlson Capital. PolyAI sells software for building and managing dialogue-based AI agents for businesses. Its technology is used in more than a billion conversations and serves hundreds of enterprises across 25 countries and 75 languages, including Metro Bank, Marriott, PG&E, and UniCredit. Shah said the role reflects a broader shift in how companies handle customer interactions through AI systems. "With the advent of true dialog AI, every company needs to rethink how it engages with its customers," said Sunil Shah, Chief Financial Officer, PolyAI. "PolyAI's agentic platform is easy enough for any builder to start with, and now with Wren, is one of the most scalable dialog platforms for large enterprises to continually improve customer engagement and business outcomes." PolyAI Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder Nikola Mrkšić said the appointment supports the company's next phase of growth. "Enterprises want a dialog platform they can build on today and grow with for years," said Nikola Mrkšić, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, PolyAI. "Sunil has helped steer software companies through the kind of growth we're heading into, and he knows the business from both sides of the table as an investor and an operator. We're thrilled to welcome him to the leadership team." The appointment comes as businesses continue to explore AI systems that can manage more complex customer interactions. PolyAI's platform is designed to support conversations that require context, reasoning and responses in real time. Its focus on dialogue-based applications places the company in a market where enterprises are seeking alternatives to traditional automated customer service tools. The company has continued to expand the capabilities available through its platform as organisations look for ways to deploy and manage AI agents at scale. Dialogue-RSN-1 is intended to support more complex conversations by improving the reasoning capabilities of dialogue agents. Wren provides tools for teams to monitor and improve agents as they handle customer interactions. Together, the products form part of PolyAI's strategy to make its technology easier to develop and operate across large organisations. Shah's finance background is expected to support investment decisions as the company expands its platform and customer base. His experience across software companies and investment firms also gives him exposure to both operational and capital-market perspectives. PolyAI will now look to combine its technology development with continued investment in the infrastructure and resources needed to support enterprise customers.