--- title: "SurrealDB Stream #34 - PolyAI × SurrealDB: Context-Aware AI Agents for Customer Support | Livestream | SurrealDB" description: "Customer support AI can feel slow or inconsistent when agents lack context - or when knowledge lives in the wrong place.\n\nOn 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.\n\n🔎 Focus areas:\n\n- Challenges today in Customer Support AI\n- How PolyAI’s voice-first, omnichannel Agent Studio budgets latency, manages confidence, and handles clean human hand-offs.\n- How an additional knowledge base layer with SurrealDB can sit on top of a traditional knowledge base to make it omnichannel-ready.\n- Exploring hybrid retrieval for richer, policy-aware context in AI agents.\n- From pattern to practice: the PolyAI × SurrealDB integration that keeps knowledge external without a UX penalty.\n\n🔗 Links: \nAgent Studio meets SurrealDB blog: https://surrealdb.com/blog/bring-your-own-knowledge-base-agent-studio-meets-surrealdb\n\nAbout the speakers:\n\nShawn Wen\n\nTsung-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.\nHis research focuses on language generation and end-to-end dialogue modelling, specifically in learning to generate responses for task-oriented dialogue systems.\nHe 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.\nBefore 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.\n\nTobie Morgan Hitchcock\n\nTobie 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." url: https://surrealdb.com/events/hzwqrsj31QA --- Wednesday, December 10 at 4:57 PM GMT Livestream # 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. ``` Share ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"Event","name":"SurrealDB Stream #34 - PolyAI × SurrealDB: Context-Aware AI Agents for Customer Support","description":"Customer support AI can feel slow or inconsistent when agents lack context - or when knowledge lives in the wrong place.\n\nOn 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.\n\n🔎 Focus areas:\n\n- Challenges today in Customer Support AI\n- How PolyAI’s voice-first, omnichannel Agent Studio budgets latency, manages confidence, and handles clean human hand-offs.\n- How an additional knowledge base layer with SurrealDB can sit on top of a traditional knowledge base to make it omnichannel-ready.\n- Exploring hybrid retrieval for richer, policy-aware context in AI agents.\n- From pattern to practice: the PolyAI × SurrealDB integration that keeps knowledge external without a UX penalty.\n\n🔗 Links: \nAgent Studio meets SurrealDB blog: https://surrealdb.com/blog/bring-your-own-knowledge-base-agent-studio-meets-surrealdb\n\nAbout the speakers:\n\nShawn Wen\n\nTsung-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.\nHis research focuses on language generation and end-to-end dialogue modelling, specifically in learning to generate responses for task-oriented dialogue systems.\nHe 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.\nBefore 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.\n\nTobie Morgan Hitchcock\n\nTobie Morgan Hitchcock is CEO \u0026 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.","startDate":"2025-12-10T16:57:55.000Z","image":"https://i.ytimg.com/vi/hzwqrsj31QA/maxresdefault.jpg","url":"https://surrealdb.com/events/hzwqrsj31QA","eventStatus":"https://schema.org/EventScheduled","eventAttendanceMode":"https://schema.org/OnlineEventAttendanceMode","location":{"@type":"VirtualLocation","url":"https://surrealdb.com/events/hzwqrsj31QA"},"organizer":{"@type":"Organization","name":"SurrealDB","url":"https://surrealdb.com","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://surrealdb.com/assets/static/logo.BG7_TG2b.svg"}}} ``` ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://surrealdb.com"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Events","item":"https://surrealdb.com/events"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"SurrealDB Stream #34 - PolyAI × SurrealDB: Context-Aware AI Agents for Customer Support","item":"https://surrealdb.com/events/hzwqrsj31QA"}]} ``` ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"Organization","name":"SurrealDB","url":"https://surrealdb.com","logo":"https://surrealdb.com/assets/static/logo.BG7_TG2b.svg","description":"SurrealDB is the unified data layer for AI. A multi-model database for documents, graphs, vectors, and time-series.","foundingDate":"2022","legalName":"SurrealDB Ltd","identifier":{"@type":"PropertyValue","propertyID":"GB-COH","value":"13615201"},"address":{"@type":"PostalAddress","streetAddress":"3rd Floor, 1 Ashley Road","addressLocality":"Altrincham","addressRegion":"Cheshire","postalCode":"WA14 2DT","addressCountry":"GB"},"contactPoint":[{"@type":"ContactPoint","contactType":"customer support","email":"support@surrealdb.com","url":"https://surrealdb.com/contact","availableLanguage":"English"},{"@type":"ContactPoint","contactType":"sales","email":"info@surrealdb.com","url":"https://surrealdb.com/contact","availableLanguage":"English"},{"@type":"ContactPoint","contactType":"security","email":"security@surrealdb.com","url":"https://surrealdb.com/.well-known/security.txt","availableLanguage":"English"},{"@type":"ContactPoint","contactType":"legal","email":"legal@surrealdb.com","url":"https://surrealdb.com/legal","availableLanguage":"English"}],"hasCertification":[{"@type":"Certification","name":"SOC 2 Type 2"},{"@type":"Certification","name":"GDPR"},{"@type":"Certification","name":"Cyber Essentials Plus"},{"@type":"Certification","name":"ISO 27001"}],"owns":[{"@type":"SoftwareApplication","name":"SurrealDB","url":"https://surrealdb.com/surrealdb"},{"@type":"SoftwareApplication","name":"Agent Memory","url":"https://surrealdb.com/agent-memory"}],"knowsAbout":["multi-model databases","document databases","graph databases","vector search","time-series databases","SurrealQL","Agent Memory","real-time databases","embedded databases","context layer","graph ontology","distributed database","knowledge graphs","distributed transaction protocols","highly-scalable databases"],"sameAs":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q124316308","https://github.com/surrealdb/surrealdb","https://twitter.com/surrealdb","https://www.youtube.com/@surrealdb","https://www.linkedin.com/company/surrealdb","https://discord.gg/surrealdb","https://www.reddit.com/r/surrealdb","https://www.instagram.com/surrealdb","https://medium.com/surrealdb","https://dev.to/surrealdb"]} ```