Image: ChatGPT/AI

In just one year, a company with 50 million customers could employ just as many personal AI agents. And the quality of conversations will be so high that customers will no longer be able to distinguish between human agents and AI agents. This is according to Malte Kosub, founder and CEO of the German AI unicorn Parloa, in a recent interview with the German marketing magazine HORIZONT.

Besides Cognigy, which was acquired by NiCE last month for nearly a billion dollars, Germany has another "unicorn" in the AI ​​field. Parloa also regularly features in the (industry) news. The startup was founded in Germany in 2018 and counts brands such as Decathlon, Booking.com, Generali, TUI and Swiss Life among its customers.

CEO Malte Kosub argues that conversational AI is an intermediate phase: he wants to conquer customer service with agentic AI solutions that can understand and manage conversations. He has high expectations for agentic AI. "It's about structuring customer service conversations so that customers feel like they're talking to a confidante, a friend, or a highly knowledgeable employee." Kosub expects that (currently still often necessary) escalation to a human agent will also be an intermediate phase. "That will become increasingly rare."

In the queue

Kosub envisions a future where a company with 50 million customers will have 50 million personal AI agents. “Today, if you call an airline, you’ll likely be on hold for 20 minutes, and each time you’ll speak to a different human agent. In the future, a personal AI agent will answer the call, greet you by name (…). When you call again later, the same voice and the same AI agent will respond within a second, with all the relevant context at their fingertips. This means we have a one-to-one relationship.”

When asked for examples, Kosub says companies are still in the early stages. "But many are already preparing for their customers to be able to interact with personal AI agents in the future." He hopes to see this in Europe within the next twelve months.

Intermediate layer

Parloa believes that in the future, AI agents will be active across various touchpoints and channels: on phones, homepages, in apps, or in messaging apps. "There, they'll interact with customers, but also with the backend and business processes. There needs to be an intermediate layer—and we want to be that layer," says Kosub.

Kosub considers Parloa a global market leader in agentic AI for large enterprises in the telephony channel. Both the German and US markets (Parloa has an office in New York) are growing rapidly. The company raised new capital in May of this year and was subsequently valued at $1 billion. Kosub sees the recent acquisition of Cognigy as proof of the enormous potential of the market.horizon)

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