A pulse check on conversational AI in 2026

We hit the floor at the European Chatbot and Conversational AI Summit in Edinburgh with a mic and a simple rule: answer a question, then leave one for the next person.

Over the course of the conversation, a chain of questions and answers emerges from practitioners at Lebara, Lloyds Banking Group, Uber, ElevenLabs, Carrefour, Virgin Money, Tesco, Jaja Finance and more. The result is an organic, unscripted snapshot of what the conversational AI community is thinking about right now.

Topics spiral from enterprise AI adoption and the talent crunch, through agentic banking and agent metrics, to some surprisingly personal territory, including AI for mental health support, cardiac research and simplifying the mundane parts of everyday life.

Chapters

• 00:00 Intro
• 02:24 Chris Miles, Group Product Lead – Chatbots & AI at Lebara
• 03:12 Kellin Sjoerds, AI Engineer at Essent & Willeke van de Wetering, AI Engineer at Essent
• 04:39 Andrew Lavis, Chatbot Analyst at Virgin Money
• 05:08 Mathias Fanschek, Head Retail Strategy & Digital Transformation at Raiffeisen Bank International AG
• 06:12 Andrei Spiridon, Head Retail Strategy & Business Transformation at Raiffeisen Conversational AI Lab
• 08:20 Alan Nichol, CTO at RASA
• 09:44 Adrian Matei, AI Product Manager at Jaja Finance
• 11:00 Nikoletta Ventoura, Senior AI Conversation Designer at Tesco
• 11:37 Maria Guermonprez, CX and Product Manager at Spix Industry
• 12:19 Damien Bird, Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft
• 13:12 Gabriele Iuculano, Senior Test Platform Engineer, Schindler Group & Salvatore Raieli, Senior Data Scientist at Oncodesign
• 14:53 Jared Browne, Group Head of AI Governance & Privacy at Fexco
• 15:32 Laura Brady, GTM at ElevenLabs
• 16:20 Laura Ball, Global AI CX GTM and Sales Lead at Zoom
• 16:50 Sabrina Brunner, Technical Lead at Allianz Direct
• 18:10 Lorraine Burrell, Conversation Design Lead at Lloyds Banking Group
• 19:00 Jana Richter, Executive VP AI and Innovation at NFON AG
• 19:44 Daniel Orenes Ferrandez, Senior Manager – Customer Experience at Uber
• 21:06 Guillaume Blaquiere, Group Data Architect at Carrefour
• 21:42 Laura Macleod, Business Applications, Centre of Excellence Lead at Virgin Money
• 21:57 Kane’s closing thoughts

Show note

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