How personal AI agents are transforming customer service for every individual

Envisioning a Personal AI Agent for Every Customer – Interview with Malte Kosub of Parloa

Malte Kosub, co-founder and CEO of Parloa, shares insights on how AI is transforming customer service for large enterprises. Parloa offers an enterprise-grade AI agent management platform focused primarily on voice channels, a choice driven by the high volume and costs associated with phone support in big companies.

Unlike many providers targeting small and medium-sized businesses, Parloa’s platform is built to meet the unique demands of large enterprises. Being a European company, they prioritized multi-language capabilities early on, which is crucial for global companies facing diverse regulations and phone infrastructure challenges.

Key Takeaways from the Interview

• Focus on Voice and Phone: Parloa emphasizes phone support as the central channel for large enterprises, where high call volumes and costs make efficiency essential. This contrasts with many competitors who began with chat-based solutions.
• Multi-language Support: The platform supports multiple languages and fine-tunes speech-to-text models to handle various accents and dialects, addressing the needs of global customer bases.
• The Future of Customer Experience: Malte envisions a future where every interaction is conversational, including apps and websites. He predicts the rise of a “personal AI agent” for each customer — essentially a one-to-one AI relationship tailored to individual needs. For instance, an airline could have 150 million personal AI agents for its customers.
• Combining Conversation with Visual Elements: Effective conversational AI interfaces will blend speech or text with visual actions like swiping and clicking. This hybrid approach maintains efficiency and usability, avoiding the limitations of purely text-based systems.
• Enterprise Adoption of AI: Large organizations are adopting AI faster than expected, driven by market pressures to improve efficiency and innovation through generative AI technologies.
• Agentic-First Approach: Successful AI implementations require prioritizing AI agents that integrate deeply with backend systems to manage end-to-end customer service use cases, moving beyond simple FAQ handling.
• The Evolving Role of Human Agents: As AI takes over routine tasks, human agents will shift focus toward complex problem-solving, supervising AI, coaching, and training agents for new scenarios. This shift also helps address the ongoing labor shortage in customer support.
• Practical Advice: Malte recommends starting with straightforward AI use cases that can be implemented within a few months. This approach encourages learning and iterative improvement rather than waiting for perfect solutions.

About Malte Kosub

Malte Kosub leads Parloa, a platform that delivers enterprise-grade AI agents designed for customer service. His background includes co-founding one of Europe’s earliest conversational AI agencies and founding an ecommerce startup. Malte studied at the University of Hamburg, Harvard, and MIT, and teaches at Futur/io. He divides his time between Berlin and New York.

Learn more about Parloa on X (Twitter) @parloa_ai and connect with Malte on LinkedIn.

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