VUX World

Almost a third of Simplyhealth's incoming calls are now resolved by AI, and email handling time has fallen from 12 minutes to 2. The company is achieving those gains while maintaining the service standards that placed it 31st in KPMG UK's Customer Experience Excellence report.
In this episode, we're joined by Paul Atkins, Head of Business Optimisation at Simplyhealth, the UK's member-owned health cash plan provider serving around 2.5 million customers. Paul explains how Simplyhealth introduced voice AI gradually, tested more than 1,000 real customer calls and built trust across a highly regulated organisation.
We also get into how Simplyhealth measures resolution, quality and customer effort, why intensive human listening still matters during rollout, and the organisational call to define what "good enough" looks like rather than letting advisors over-engineer every reply. Paul talks through the role of business readiness teams in driving adoption and why knowledge management could become the next major challenge in making AI work at scale.

Show notes

Follow Paul on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-atkins-1nsight
Follow Kane on LinkedIn:
⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms⁠⁠⁠⁠

Find out more about VUX:
https://vux.ai
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Safe, reliable, production-ready AI agents don't come from the model. They come from everything built around it.
Rasmus Hauch is CTO of Boost.ai, one of the enterprise platforms banks, insurers and public sector organisations use to build customer-facing AI agents. His work sits one layer below every deployment: the orchestration, the guardrails, the testing infrastructure and the model choices that decide whether an agent holds up in front of millions of customers.
In this episode, Rasmus opens that layer, explaining why conversational AI is shifting away from traditional conversation flows towards orchestration, testing and continuous evaluation. He walks through how Boost approaches it in practice: persona-based simulation across thousands of digital and voice conversations, predefined test suites for jailbreaking attempts and financial advice, layered guardrails inside and outside the agent, and a trust loop that feeds production results back into the build.
Rasmus is direct about the hard parts. We touch on why the big LLM providers can't yet deliver the consistent response times voice demands, which is why Boost runs fine-tuned smaller models on its own infrastructure for latency-critical voice work. Rasmus explains why he advises clients against plugging in their own models.
We also discuss where liability sits under the EU AI Act when an agent gets it wrong, and why a volcano eruption in Iceland is a good example of what no model can be trained for.
Towards the end, Rasmus shares what's exciting him right now, including adaptive voice, real-time language switching and where agent-to-agent protocols are heading.

Show notes

Discover more about boost.ai
Follow Rasmus on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rasmushauch
Follow Kane on LinkedIn:
⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms⁠⁠⁠

Subscribe to VUX World: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/Qlo5aaeW?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio⁠⁠
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A traditional mortgage can take weeks to process. Every application moves through rounds of document requests, condition checks, and broker queries before a decision is made. ING is using agentic AI to change that.
In this episode, Bahadir Yilmaz, Chief Analytics Officer at ING, explains how one of Europe's largest mortgage lenders has implemented agentic AI in its mortgage process. The system is live in the Netherlands, rolling out to Germany. Applications now complete in days, a full day faster since AI was introduced. The goal: the instant mortgage, within the next couple of years.
We cover why ING chose its highest-stakes product for its first agentic deployment, why the agent handles operational work while underwriting remains with traditional machine learning, and how the team built a golden dataset of 400 mortgage applications to test a system no one had tested before.
Furthermore, Bahadir shares how ING scaled to 114 AI initiatives with 42,000 employees using AI. We discuss why risk management came before ambition, and why only 10 of his 600 experts were ready to build agentic systems.

Show notes

Follow Bahadir on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/bahadir-yilmaz-21170479/
Follow Kane on LinkedIn:
⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms⁠⁠

Take our AI Maturity Assessment: ⁠⁠⁠https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/a26bf9Rr?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio⁠
Subscribe to VUX World: ⁠⁠⁠https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/Qlo5aaeW?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio⁠
Subscribe to The AI Ultimatum Substack: ⁠⁠⁠https://open.substack.com/pub/kanesimms⁠

In this episode, recorded at the CCW UK Summit, we’re joined by Jordan Anglin from Vodafone to explore the company's approach to customer experience and how AI supports faster, more seamless issue resolution across digital and human channels.
Jordan explains how Vodafone combines its AI assistant, TOBi, asynchronous messaging, and dedicated resolution teams to reduce customer effort, eliminate repetitive conversations, and create genuine ownership from start to finish. Jordan also shares how AI is improving frontline performance through agent assistance, conversation summaries, quality assurance and real-time guidance, while offering a practical perspective on where large language models deliver real value and where they fall short.
Jordan closes with his take on where AI attention in customer experience is currently misplaced, and where he sees low-hanging fruit that's easy to miss.
Show notes
Discover the CCW Europe Summit in Amsterdam: ⁠https://europe.customercontactweekdigital.com/events-ccweurope/?utm_source=vux.world&utm_medium=Media%20Partner&utm_campaign=27400.010_VUX_Podcast%20episodes%20post%20event&utm_term=&utm_content=&disc=&extTreatId=7638147⁠

Follow Jordan on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordan-anglin-a2672610b/⁠⁠⁠⁠
Follow Kane on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms⁠⁠⁠

Take our AI Maturity Assessment: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/a26bf9Rr?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio⁠⁠
Subscribe to VUX World: ⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/Qlo5aaeW?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio ⁠⁠
Subscribe to The AI Ultimatum Substack: ⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://open.substack.com/pub/kanesimms⁠

We recorded this episode at the CCW UK Summit in May, capturing some of the key conversations shaping customer experience, service and AI.
AI is everywhere in customer experience, yet few organisations are turning that excitement into measurable business outcomes.
We're joined by Paul Cuglietta, Customer Services Director at Simplyhealth, and Paul Atkins, Head of Business Optimisation at Simplyhealth, alongside Shane Lynn, CEO and Founder of EdgeTier, to explore what successful AI adoption really looks like.
We discuss how Simplyhealth scaled generative voice AI with PolyAI from 5% to 50% of interactions and how the company uses EdgeTier's conversational intelligence platform to turn everyday customer conversations into actionable business insights. We also cover why organisations should start with real business problems rather than chasing the latest AI trends.
Simplyhealth funnels its conversational data through a prioritisation process to decide which customer journey improvements to make first. The team explains why progress comes from small measurable iterations and how they keep a human in the loop to handle the moments that automation should not touch.
We also weigh in on where the AI narrative is overhyped, where its real value remains underutilised, and why the unglamorous work of digging through conversations to fix broken policies and processes is where genuine impact happens.

Show notes
Discover the CCW Europe Summit in Amsterdam: https://europe.customercontactweekdigital.com/events-ccweurope/?utm_source=vux.world&utm_medium=Media%20Partner&utm_campaign=27400.010_VUX_Podcast%20episodes%20post%20event&utm_term=&utm_content=&disc=&extTreatId=7638147

Follow Kane on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanesimms⁠⁠

Take our AI Maturity Assessment: ⁠⁠⁠https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/a26bf9Rr?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio⁠
Subscribe to VUX World: ⁠⁠⁠ https://vuxworld.typeform.com/to/Qlo5aaeW?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio ⁠
Subscribe to The AI Ultimatum Substack: ⁠⁠⁠ https://open.substack.com/pub/kanesimms⁠