PolyAI

Nikola Mrkšić studied Computer Science and Mathematics at Cambridge, earning an MSc and PhD in statistical spoken dialogue systems from the Cambridge Machine Intelligence Lab. He was the first technical hire at VocalIQ, a Cambridge-spinout dialogue company that Apple acquired in 2015, and subsequently spent two years at Apple working on Siri's conversational AI. He co-founded PolyAI in 2017 with Cambridge colleagues Tsung-Hsien Wen and Pei-Hao Su. PolyAI is now a leading provider of enterprise voice AI agents for customer service, deployed across hospitality, retail, and financial services.

Tsung-Hsien Wen (Shawn) holds a PhD from Cambridge's Dialogue Systems Group under Professor Steve Young, focusing on natural language generation for spoken dialogue. Before co-founding PolyAI he was a Research Scientist at Google Brain working on conversational AI, and a conversational AI consultant at IPSoft Amelia. He and Pei-Hao Su met Nikola Mrkšić at the Cambridge Machine Intelligence Lab and co-founded PolyAI in 2017 to commercialize research-grade dialogue capabilities for enterprise contact centers.

Pei-Hao Su holds a PhD in Statistical Spoken Dialogue Systems from the University of Cambridge, supervised by Professor Steve Young and Dr. Milica Gašić. He conducted research at Facebook AI Research with Dr. Yuandong Tian on deep-learning dialogue management before completing his doctorate. He co-founded PolyAI in 2017 alongside Nikola Mrkšić and Tsung-Hsien Wen, and now serves as SVP Engineering, overseeing the platform's dialogue and infrastructure stack that powers millions of live voice interactions for enterprise clients.