Thursday, January 15, 2026
For the latest edition of the Contact Center Technology Insights – Top Voice series, Intent Amplify’s Head of Global Marketing sits down with Michelle Schroeder, Chief Marketing Officer at PolyAI, to discuss how agentic AI is redefining the architecture of modern customer service operations.
Why did we feature PolyAI in our latest Top Voice spotlight?
Enterprise contact centers are operating under unprecedented pressure. Customers now expect to be understood instantly and consistently - across every channel, every language, every intent, and every level of complexity. Delivering that experience at scale has traditionally been one of the greatest barriers in customer service. Today, breakthroughs in agentic AI are expanding the limits of what automated customer interaction systems can achieve, and PolyAI stands at the forefront of that transformation.
Built on an audacious yet rapidly validated premise - replicating the performance of an enterprise’s best human agent and delivering it at infinite scale - PolyAI focuses on making every customer conversation seamless, brand-faithful, and contextually precise. In a market where “there is nothing more powerful than a conversation,” PolyAI is engineering the next generation of customer engagement.
Michelle brings nearly two decades of experience across customer experience, enterprise marketing, and data intelligence - including firsthand experience managing a contact center. Her perspective reflects a broader industry shift: AI is no longer an experimental enhancement. It is becoming the foundational operating layer of modern service organizations.
At the core of this evolution is PolyAI’s Agent Studio platform, powering fully autonomous AI agents for both routine and highly complex customer interactions. Global leaders such as FedEx, Marriott, PG&E, UniCredit, and Caesars already trust PolyAI to manage high-stakes customer conversations at scale. Supported by proprietary technologies - including the Raven LLM and Owl ASR - the platform prioritizes reliability, interpretability, compliance, and conversational fidelity in environments where accuracy determines business outcomes.
In this conversation, Michelle offers a grounded look at the capabilities and realities shaping the future of customer experience - including:
This interview provides an in-depth view of the technologies, operating models, and enterprise imperatives driving the rise of autonomous AI agents - and what they mean for the future of the contact center.
Michelle: My job is to build a team that elevates PolyAI’s brand, drives demand, and ensures our AI offerings meet our customers’ needs. I joined from the customer experience and data space, as well as because a decade ago, I found myself running a contact center. I was attracted to PolyAI because the technology is mindblowingly good — and because we’re now leading the charge to transform businesses around AI agents. We see the “agentic enterprise” as the model for successful businesses going forward: where AI underpins a living, learning system that helps customers, employees, and AI agents succeed.
Michelle: PolyAI helps enterprises show up as the best versions of themselves in every conversation. We build the world’s most impactful AI agents for customer experience, performing the work of more than 1,000 full-time employees at multiple enterprises. Our Agent Studio platform is trusted by global leaders including FedEx, Marriott, PG&E, and UniCredit to handle their most complex customer interactions.
Michelle: Agent Studio helps enterprises move away from traditional, reactive call centers and toward running proactive, customer-focused command centers. Our AI agents handle both routine tasks, like FAQs and appointment scheduling, and complex tasks, including guiding people to mental health resources and helping them resolve financial questions during life’s most sensitive moments. By connecting our AI agents and intelligence with broader systems for enterprise-wide decision-making, Agent Studio is able to do more than improve conversations for customers. It delivers incredible outcomes for the broader enterprise.
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Michelle: In 2025, we launched new agent roles that complement our already-renowned customer-facing AI agents. By taking on specialized functions, these new QA Agents, Analyst Agents, and Builder Agents expand our platform beyond front-line automation to create an always-on, autonomously improving team for customer experience. They close critical gaps in today’s enterprises: the lack of scalable, consistent data on agent performance in customer interactions, as well as the ability to improve elsewhere (e.g. in brand and business policy decisions) based on what you’ve learned about your customer.
We also continue to upgrade our proprietary LLM, Raven, and our proprietary ASR model, Owl. While I can’t give too much away about our plans for 2026, you can expect our work to focus on the agentic enterprise, where AI systems detect and respond to problems and opportunities before humans even know they’re happening.
Michelle: We serve enterprises globally, including high‑volume and massively complex customers like FedEx, Marriott, Caesars, and many more. When it comes to adapting to customer behavior, we see traditional automation focused on containment and deflection becoming a relic of the past. Customers will increasingly want to speak to AI if it can truly understand them, help them, and take action on their behalf.
Michelle: Pipeline generation for us has always been an outcome of strong enterprise awareness. The way we position our time-to-value, conversational quality, and platform control, combined with our customer proof, helps prospective buyers make the decision to use us for enterprise conversational AI. Our demand team’s job is to make sure that there’s every opportunity (events, outbound, partner marketing, and more ) to discover us and understand what we offer. Relying on a top-down strategy that starts with great product positioning makes pipeline production more efficient. We see our pipeline converting at higher rates and moving down-funnel faster and more efficiently than ever before, and that’s in an environment with aggressive and ever-increasing growth targets.
Michelle: Our martech stack reflects our curiosity about our buyers and our desire to meet them in as many ways as possible. We’re learning about our buyers not only from their behavior on our site and how they engage with our content, but also from what they do within our product. We use tools to aggregate this data and look at patterns across the buyer journey to decide where to invest more and what to test next. For core martech, our CRM is the source of truth, and we then look at aggregate reporting that pulls in our other tools to help us paint the most robust picture of our efforts.
Michelle: The marketing team’s goals are tied to qualified sales meetings, opportunities, and ARR. Each marketing campaign aligns to these goals and is tracked in Salesforce. This makes it very easy to connect all of our marketing activity to actual sales outcomes. I often question if you can be too pipeline-driven in marketing activities. Some of what’s considered “vanity metrics” matter in their own way but are difficult to directly track. When a post your CEO makes goes viral on Twitter, does it always add up to revenue, or can it be tracked to VC excitement about your business? Experimentation, creativity, and inspiration need to be behind every move your team makes, but that can be difficult to balance in a pipeline-obsessed vortex. While it can feel like a seesaw, we do our absolute best to balance it.
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Michelle: Marketing will increasingly rely on AI for real-time personalization, predictive analytics, and automated workflows. At the same time, concerns about AI and privacy will require marketers to figure out how to balance data-driven strategies with transparency and consent. Marketing teams that can do both, that is (A) use AI for better decision-making and (B) maintain a natural, human sense of oversight and engagement, will set the standard for marketers everywhere.
Michelle: Jeff Wilser
Thank you, Michelle! We look forward to having you again at our Top Voice programs.
To participate in our interviews, please write to our Contact Center Tech Media Room at info@intentamplify.com
Michelle Schroeder is the Chief Marketing Officer at PolyAI, where she leads global marketing strategy and helps enterprises unlock measurable business outcomes from conversational and agentic AI. With nearly 20 years of experience across customer experience, AI technology, and enterprise marketing, Michelle has built and scaled high-performance marketing organizations at leading CX and CRM companies. Her background includes hands-on leadership in data-driven marketing and direct experience managing a contact center - giving her a uniquely practical perspective on the opportunities and realities of AI-powered customer service transformation.
PolyAI is a global leader in enterprise conversational and agentic AI, building autonomous AI agents capable of replicating the performance of an organization’s best human agents — and delivering it at infinite scale. Powered by proprietary technologies including the Raven LLM and Owl ASR, PolyAI’s Agent Studio platform handles both routine and highly complex customer interactions while ensuring brand alignment, accuracy, and compliance across every conversation. Trusted by industry leaders such as FedEx, Marriott, PG&E, UniCredit, and Caesars, PolyAI enables enterprises to move beyond traditional call centers and toward proactive, AI-enabled command centers where conversations become a driver of continuous business improvement.
