A pulse check on conversational AI in 2026
Shownotes
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. What unfolds is a chain of questions and answers 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 actually 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.
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
Find out more about The European Chatbot & Conversational AI Summit: https://theeuropeanchatbot.com
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