SurrealDB Stream #34 - PolyAI × SurrealDB: Context-Aware AI Agents for Customer Support

Customer support AI can feel slow or inconsistent when agents lack context - or when knowledge lives in the wrong place.

On Dec 10, join Tobie Morgan Hitchcock (CEO, SurrealDB) and Shawn (Tsung-Hsien) Wen (CTO, PolyAI) to learn how PolyAI and SurrealDB power context-aware AI agents that are fast, accurate, and governed by you.

🔎 Focus areas:

- Challenges today in Customer Support AI
- How PolyAI’s voice-first, omnichannel Agent Studio budgets latency, manages confidence, and handles clean human hand-offs.
- How an additional knowledge base layer with SurrealDB can sit on top of a traditional knowledge base to make it omnichannel-ready.
- Exploring hybrid retrieval for richer, policy-aware context in AI agents.
- From pattern to practice: the PolyAI × SurrealDB integration that keeps knowledge external without a UX penalty.

🔗 Links: 
Agent Studio meets SurrealDB blog: https://surrealdb.com/blog/bring-your-own-knowledge-base-agent-studio-meets-surrealdb

About the speakers:

Shawn Wen

Tsung-Hsien (Shawn) Wen is a co-founder and CTO of PolyAI, a London-based startup looking to use the latest developments in NLP and ML to create a general platform for deploying spoken dialogue systems. He holds a PhD from the Dialogue Systems group, University of Cambridge, where he worked under the supervision of Professor Steve Young.
His research focuses on language generation and end-to-end dialogue modelling, specifically in learning to generate responses for task-oriented dialogue systems.
He was the tutor of the "Deep Learning and NLG" tutorial at INLG 2016 and has given invited seminars to research groups at Google, Apple, Xerox, and Baidu China.
Before PolyAI, He was the invited lecturer for Samsung's corporate training course in Warsaw, a research consultant at IPSoft Amelia team, and a research intern at Google Brain. He received best paper awards at EMNLP 2015 and SigDial 2015.

Tobie Morgan Hitchcock

Tobie Morgan Hitchcock is CEO & Co-Founder of SurrealDB. He is an experienced tech entrepreneur, developer, and software engineer, with 17 years’ experience in the software and cloud-computing industries. In 2021 he founded SurrealDB, with the aim of building the ultimate cloud database for tomorrow's applications. He has experience in a wide range of different software stacks and development languages, with a focus on distributed databases, and highly-available architectures.