Technical Program Manager

Berlin-based AI startup Parloa has become a unicorn, with a valuation of more than $3 billion. It recently completed a funding round and has nearly 600 employees. Founded in 2018, Parloa builds "agent-based AI" that powers the hotline at Berlin's BER Airport. The system analyses airport operations to answer complex or vague queries precisely. The company faces strict regulation, a risk-averse culture, and limited domestic capital for scaling. Scaling often requires funding from international investors. Parloa is part of the "Made for Germany" initiative, which aims to foster local innovation. Founder Stefan Ostwald says a more integrated ecosystem is needed to unlock the potential of German startups.

Parloa on reinventing the customer experience with AI Agents. Parloa was recently recognized as an AI-Powered Enterprise Agent Solution of the Year for its AI Agent Management Platform, AMP. Tech Ascension Awards sat down with Malte Kosub, CEO and Co-Founder of Parloa, to discuss why agentic AI represents a fundamental shift beyond traditional chatbots, what enterprises need to rethink before deploying AI agents at scale, and how autonomous systems could reshape the relationship between companies and their customers. Parloa's AI Agent Management Platform (AMP) was named AI-powered Enterprise Agent Solution of the Year. What does this recognition say about where the market is headed, and what makes AMP's approach to agent management different from the field it beat? Winning AI-powered Enterprise Agent Solution of the Year confirmed the market has moved past proving AI Agents can hold a conversation and into proving they can run as production infrastructure. AMP was built to go beyond voice AI layers and deliver a full agent lifecycle at global scale. AMP unifies the entire lifecycle, design, testing, deployment, and optimization, inside one environment, while most competitors split those stages across separate tools. It also runs an evaluation-first architecture, testing every agent through thousands of synthetic conversations with LLM-as-a-judge scoring before it ever reaches a customer, on a foundation built compliant with GDPR, ISO 27001, and SOC 2. And its Agent Composition feature lets a company build an agent once and deploy it across more than 130 languages and 70 countries without rebuilding for every new market, something competitors still require. That's the difference maker for its customers: one platform, one build, full confidence. Parloa's own research found that 99% of companies failed your first agentic-readiness evaluation. How does AMP close that gap? Its 2026 research on the State of Agentic CX evaluated thousands or websites, chats and phone trees. The findings were bleak: 43% of company websites gave customers no clear path to support, fewer than 10% of chat conversations actually reached the customer's goal, and the vast majority of voice experiences still ran on decades-old automation or none at all. The companies that failed its evaluation came down to two consistent markers. Companies are overestimating their own AI-readiness, discovering mid-deployment that they were lacking the APIs, MCP connections and general architecture needed for success. And more critically, many companies misunderstand how to apply agentic AI in the first place, treating it as a conversational version of the same IVR tree they've been using for years rather than an opportunity to redesign the customer journey. AMP solves for both these by running a readiness assessment before any agent hits the field, and surfacing data gaps up front. How should enterprise leaders think about agentic CX differently from the conversational AI or chatbot investments they may have already made? Most leaders are still evaluating agentic CX with the same mental model they used for chatbots, and that is the first mistake. A chatbot answers a question and forgets you the moment the session ends. An agent remembers your last issue, your preferences, and your history, and it carries that context across the app, the web, and the phone. That is not a feature upgrade. It is a completely different relationship with the customer. The old generation of automation ran on fixed branch logic: if this, then that, and it never veered off script. Agentic systems reason. They pick up on tone, pace, and frustration, and they take action instead of just routing a request. What I keep telling leaders is that most agentic pilots look great in isolation, one channel, one use case, and then fall apart the moment agents have to coordinate across backend systems or hand off between channels. That breakdown is an orchestration and infrastructure problem, not a model problem, and no one solves it by buying a bigger chatbot. Why does that matter? If you measure agentic CX the way you measured chatbots, by tickets deflected or average handle time, you will optimize for the wrong outcome. The smartest leaders are instead asking whether they made life easier for the customer, and whether that drove loyalty or revenue. If a brand's real goal is pure cost cutting, a high quality AI solution is probably not the right fit for them, and that choice will cost them customer loyalty in the long run. The organizations that treat this as a bigger chatbot budget line end up cutting labor costs without ever changing the actual customer relationship, and they leave the real value on the table. As enterprises move from AI pilots to production, what will separate the organizations that successfully scale agentic CX from those that remain stuck in experimentation? The companies stuck in pilot purgatory almost always made the same early decision: they picked a low complexity use case, something like an account balance lookup, because it was easy to prove out. The problem is that proving an easy use case does not tell you anything about how to scale, and it does not force the internal process change that agentic AI actually requires. It just confirms the technology works on something simple. The organizations that break through, do the opposite. They start by mapping what the end to end customer journey should look like, and only then apply AI to that redesigned journey, instead of layering AI on top of a process that was never built for it. They also stop evaluating vendors on demos. If you hand three or four vendors the same narrow use case, they will all give you a similar answer, and that tells you nothing about which platform can actually deliver value at scale, across languages, load, and architecture, over the long term. The last piece is governance, and it has to be built in from day one, not bolted on after volume increases. Can the agent explain its own decision? Can it escalate with context? Do your teams have real time visibility into what it is doing and why? If the answer is no, you are not ready to scale, no matter how good the pilot looked. What's next for Parloa and AMP as enterprise adoption of AI agents continues to grow? The phase of ultra cheap, subsidized AI is ending. Compute costs are rising, models are getting more complex, and enterprises expect security, reliability, and customization at scale. That is exactly where Tech Ascension Awards is putting its energy: continuing to build the evaluation and governance layer that lets enterprises trust an agent before it ever reaches a real customer, not just after something breaks. Tech Ascension Awards also believe the next era of customer experience is personal. Every customer should have an agent that recognizes them instantly, whether they are in the app, on the web, or on the phone, and that agent should already know their history instead of starting over with a stranger every time. That is one of the key drivers Tech Ascension Awards is building toward. And Tech Ascension Awards is going to keep doing the research that got Tech Ascension Awards here. Its State of Agentic CX work showed Tech Ascension Awards that the market is still early, only about one percent of CX systems today can successfully manage agent to agent interaction. That gap is the opportunity, and closing it for its customers is what comes next for AMP.

Parloa to unveil what's next in agentic customer experience at WAVE 2026 Berlin. Sep 24, 2026, 09:19 ET New product innovations, live demos and insights from leaders at OpenAI, Microsoft, SAP, IKEA, HealthEquity and more will take center stage at Parloa's flagship AI + CX event NEW YORK and BERLIN, Sept. 24, 2026 /PRNewswire/ - Parloa, the leading agentic CX company for enterprise customer service, today announced new details for WAVE 2026, its flagship AI and customer experience conference taking place October 7-8, 2026 at Wilhelm Studios in Berlin. At WAVE 2026, Parloa will discuss emerging trends in how AI and CX converge, giving attendees an early look at new capabilities designed to improve agent performance, enable more intelligent customer interactions and help enterprises scale agentic CX with greater control. More than 700 enterprise leaders will gather in Berlin for two days of keynotes, customer stories, panels, master classes and live demos featuring executives and experts from the world's most customer-centric brands in every industry. The Next Wave of Innovation from Parloa As enterprises move from experimenting with AI to putting it into production, the focus is shifting from what AI agents can do to how reliably they can perform, improve and deliver impact at scale. At WAVE, Parloa will unveil innovations across its AI Agent Management Platform focused on: * A clearer view of agent performance: New ways for enterprises to measure quality, evaluate outcomes, benchmark performance and understand where AI agents are succeeding and where they need refinement. * Agents that get better over time: Advances in testing, simulation, evaluation and optimization designed to help enterprises continuously improve agent performance. * More natural customer interactions: Richer experiences across voice, chat and other modes of communication that give customers more flexible ways to engage with AI agents. * More intelligence in every interaction: Deeper context designed to help AI agents better understand the customer, the conversation and the situation at hand. * Greater enterprise control: Capabilities designed to help global organizations meet security, data and deployment requirements while scaling AI across markets and use cases. Live demos will give attendees a closer look at how these capabilities can be applied across enterprise customer experience. Parloa CEO and co-founder Malte Kosub, Chief Marketing Officer Latané Conant and other Parloa leaders and builders will also share perspectives on the future of agentic customer experience and what its evolution means for enterprises, brands and customer relationships. Hear From the Enterprises Putting Agentic CX to Work More than 30 executives and experts from across Parloa's customer and partner ecosystem will share firsthand perspectives on how agentic AI is reshaping customer experience, operations and enterprise strategy. Speakers and participants include leaders from OpenAI, Microsoft, SAP, IKEA, HealthEquity, Volkswagen Financial Services, OBI, Booking.com, AUTO1, Deloitte and more. The program will also feature former professional footballer and World Champion, Bastian Schweinsteiger. WAVE will tackle the decisions enterprises face as AI moves deeper into production: where to invest, how to scale, how to govern AI systems and how to prove business impact. What Attendees Can Expect at WAVE 2026 Across keynotes, customer stories, panels, master classes and live demos, attendees will explore: * How leading brands are scaling agentic CX * How to prove business value as AI moves deeper into CX * How AI is reshaping CX teams, roles and KPIs * What reliable AI agents require at enterprise scale * What's next for AI agents, regulation and data sovereignty Be Part of WAVE 2026 in Berlin General admission tickets are €799 for WAVE 2026, taking place October 7-8 at Wilhelm Studios in Berlin. Following Berlin, Parloa will bring WAVE stateside with WAVE Summit in New York on November 4-5, convening a select group of CX and business leaders for a more intimate conversation about where agentic AI is headed and what enterprises need to prepare for next. About Parloa Parloa empowers global enterprises to build, train and manage agentic AI solutions for premier customer experiences. Founded by Malte Kosub and Stefan Ostwald, Parloa began with the belief that every great conversation is the start of a relationship, a principle that still guides how the company builds technology today. Leading global brands use Parloa's advanced AI agents to improve service at scale, increase customer loyalty, and unlock new revenue. Parloa employs more than 600 people across eight offices throughout the US and Europe. SOURCE Parloa