The CDI Foundation Conversational AI Leaders List

Recognised for
Helping reinvent businesses responsibly with Data & AI

I am a change maker; helping companies build on the power of technology and human ingenuity ethically. I am leading Accenture’s Data & AI business in Europe and the conversational AI domain globally. With 25 years experience in consulting, operating at all levels including C-Suite for Fortune's companies, I am commercially aware with a proven track record of delivering value for my clients. I am able to communicate well across business and technology, and have good understanding of differing business cultures in Europe and globally. I had a progressive cross industry career and specialised in the last decade on Digital transformation, Human centered innovation, Data led reinvention and AI. I am currently leading around 8.000+ staff and multi billions portfolio of projects. I also serve on the Board of Directors of Oasis Open Europe Foundation, and a reserve member of the Artificial Intelligence High Level Group at the European Commission.

Recognised for
Co-authorship of "Conversation with Things: UX Design for Chat and Voice"

Rebecca Evanhoe has 13 years of experience in imagining, designing, planning, analyzing, and advocating for engaging conversational experiences. She co-authored Conversation with Things: UX Design for Chat and Voice, a book used around the world by people who design for conversational AI. She teaches conversational UX design and UX writing as a visiting assistant professor at Pratt Institute. Outside of Pratt, Rebecca trains and mentors conversation designers through workshops and webinars. With degrees in chemistry and fiction writing, she's passionate about how interdisciplinary thinking can combine arts, humanities, sciences, and tech.

Recognised for
Making conversations believable, realistic and creating compelling simulations of real life

My original roles bridge technology and media companies, from being the first Head of Digital for Penguin Books UK through leading digital transformation projects for major international cable and satellite networks. In 2015, we started experimenting with early AI-powered conversational design systems to bring characters from TV and film to life in interactive experiences. This lead to projects with Warner Bros, Dreamworks, SkyTV, the BBC and others. We built Charisma.ai in 2017, winning Digital Catapult's Ethical and Responsible Tech Pioneer in 2020, and pioneering Emotion, Memories, Storytelling, Multi-Character Conversations and AI Voice performances as a part of conversational design. Charisma.ai has been used for over 50,000 projects across corporate training, compliance, defence, entertainment and wellbeing, and fully cross-platform accessibility for web, mobile, VR, 3D games engines and AR solutions. We have advised international organisations on conversational AI technology and psychology, recently being accepted into the UK's NHS immersive technology programme, Comcast NBCU's startup accelerator programme, and a three year EU project to assess and minimise carbon footprints in our industry.

Recognised for
Conversational AI Strategy, Design and Build expertise

Darren Ford is Founder and Director at The CAI Company that helps enterprises deploy exceptional Conversational AI solutions.  Darren began his career at Oracle and ever since worked with global enterprises delivering customer experience solutions. Prior to The CAI Company he spent 5 years as Vice President of Global Services at Artificial Solutions, working in a range of verticals providing strategic advice, program management and multi-discipline team leadership for building advanced Conversational AI applications.  This included customer service virtual assistants, Home Automation assistants, fast food drive-through automation and intelligent IVR solutions. Darren is passionate about the need of a coherent business case  – if you can’t articulate what you want to achieve, don’t start!.  He builds longstanding relationships based on trust, experience, equality, and is motivated by sharing success with others – particularly when combined with good food and a little live music.

Recognised for
Championing the Agentic AI concept for customer service

Philipp Heltewig is the CEO and Co-founder of Cognigy, a market-leading Conversational AI company that he built from scratch together with his co-founders Sascha Poggemann and Benjamin Mayr. Since founding Cognigy in 2016, the team has grown the company into a global category leader in AI-powered customer service automation. Under Philipp's leadership, Cognigy secured Europe's largest funding round in the Conversational AI sector – a record-setting $100 million Series C – to accelerate product innovation and global growth. His focus on tangible business value has helped Cognigy outperform major competitors like Salesforce and Microsoft in terms of technological capabilities and customer satisfaction. The company is recognized as a Leader in both the Gartner Magic Quadrant and the Forrester Wave for Conversational AI. As CEO, Philipp is now driving the future of "Agentic AI," pioneering the development of autonomous, intelligent AI agents that are redefining enterprise service delivery.

Recognised for
Inventing the future using past experiences - speech recognition, voice biometrics, autonomous vehicles, mixed reality, conversational AI

Karen Kaushansky is a Conversational AI Design Lead at Google DeepMind with more than three decades of experience in shaping how humans interact with AI. Known for her work on cutting-edge technologies including voice and conversational interfaces, voice biometrics, and multimodal interactions, Kaushansky's work spans designing hardware interfaces, enterprise chatbots, smart clothing, mixed reality, conversational interfaces and an autonomous vehicle experience. She worked for Microsoft, Zoox, Jawbone and Nuance and has consulted for companies pushing technology boundaries such as Magic Leap and LEGO. Currently at Google DeepMind she is a Design Lead for Gemini Live, enabling more natural, free-flowing, and conversational interactions with Google's AI.

Recognised for
Developing career frameworks for CAI practitioners, including founding FAIRS

I've worked in the conversational AI field for 20 years. My early academic research led to a PhD on the innovative use of conversational agents in education, long before there was mainstream adoption of the technology. I'm still delighted by this intersection of people and technology! I am Co-Founder of The CAI Company and wear many hats, including leading our consultant team and still enjoying time supporting client projects. I have designed and developed conversational systems for major global organisations in diverse domains including IT hardware, online gaming, insurance and recipe box subscriptions. I also feel fortunate to have provided pro bono advisory work for projects in education, mental health, and wellbeing. One of my main interests is fostering the growth of the next generation of CAI professionals through training, mentoring, and developing career progression frameworks. I'm a believer in lifelong learning, and the pace of change in AI keeps providing opportunities! After two decades in the field, I now enjoy the privilege of being able to call out the hype and magical thinking where I see it. The opportunities are fantastic, but I work to ensure my practice remains grounded in ethical technology use and tangible benefits in application.

Recognised for
Best practices for content input in retrieval-augmented generation

Conversation design as a profession wasn't on my radar until surprisingly recently. But looking back on what I've done in my schooling and career, it almost looks like I had this trajectory planned out. I studied architecture and French in college before discovering linguistics. My PhD is in linguistics with a doctoral minor in cognitive science, specializing in the structural and communicative features of human language as compared to other animal communication systems. For a while I taught linguistics at local colleges and universities (with some side work as an on-air radio host) before redirecting my skills to UX research and design. From there, conversation design was a natural next step. What I love about conversation design is that it lets me pull from all of these interests and skills. It uses my linguistics expertise, of course, but it also lets me analyze and solve problems, ask "why?" a lot, and design systems that let people get things done.

Recognised for
Creation of CALM approach to conversational AI

Alan Nichol is co-founder of Rasa. Rasa supplies the standard infrastructure for conversational AI, providing the tools required to build better, more resilient contextual assistants. With more than 50 million downloads since launch, Rasa is loved by developers worldwide, and supported by our friendly, fast-growing community working together and learning from each other to make better text- and voice-based AI assistants.
Rasa runs in production everywhere from startups to Fortune 500s and provides the data privacy and security needed by enterprises of every size.
Rasa is privately held with funding from Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Basis Set Ventures, and others.  Alan was an early advocate for getting rid of intents, one of the creators of the DIET architecture for NLU and one of the creators of CALM. 

Recognised for
Author of "Designing Voice User Interfaces"

Cathy Pearl is Head of UX at a stealth startup called Q. Previously, she was at Google for seven years: five years on Google Assistant, and two years on Bard/Gemini (where she was one of the very first UXers). She's also the author of the O'Reilly book "Designing Voice User Interfaces". She's been designing and creating Conversational User Interfaces (CUIs) for over 20 years, and is passionate about making the best (and most accessible) conversational experiences possible. Cathy was formerly the VP of User Experience at Sensely, whose virtual nurse avatar helps people stay healthy. She has worked on everything from programming NASA helicopter pilot simulators to designing a conversational iPad app in which Esquire magazine's style columnist tells users what they should wear on a first date. She has an MS in Computer Science from Indiana University and a BS in Cognitive Science from UC San Diego.

Recognised for
Creating the Voiceflow platform 

Founder of Voiceflow, the leading conversation design and AI Agent development platform used by hundreds of thousands of users worldwide. We started building AI agents in 2018 and quickly grew frustrated with the tools to build chatbots. We were stuck choosing between legacy conversational AI platforms, or overly simple customer support chatbot solutions. We believed AI agents could be more than just a means to an end for support automation. AI agents could be a platform for customer interaction at scale the same as websites or mobile apps. We built Voiceflow to provide the best user experience when building advanced AI agents, powered by a flexible developer platform.

Recognised for
Creating intuitive and emotionally engaging user experiences in AI

Shyamala Prayaga is a User Experience Evangelist and Voice AI Leader, currently a Senior Software Product Manager at NVIDIA focusing on deep learning. With over 20 years of experience in UX design across mobile, web, desktop, and voice-based applications, she is a self-driven advocate for user-centered design. Shyamala is the author of the bestseller "Emotionally Engaged Digital Assistant: Humanizing Design and Technology" and "Close Calls: My Life of Unseen Miracles", with a forthcoming book "Humanizing Privacy". Her expertise spans conversational AI, generative AI, and deep learning, with a strong focus on humanizing AI and addressing privacy concerns in voice technology. Shyamala previously led the autonomous digital assistant vision at Ford Motor Company. Recognized as a top AI influencer and a leader in the field, Shyamala is also the founder of the Digital Assistant Academy, providing training in conversation design. Additionally, she serves as an Adjunct Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, teaching Human-Computer Interaction & User Experience Design for Managers. 

Recognised for
Empowering organizations, especially to deploy AI solutions that are safe, effective

Lisa is the Head of AI Productivity and Sovereign AI, Public Sector @IBM, where she helps public sector clients apply AI in meaningful and trustworthy ways—always with full sovereignty over their data. With a background in psychology—spanning industrial and organizational psychology, human-machine interaction, and complex technological systems—Lisa has spent her career at the intersection of people and AI. At Siemens AG and Airbus Group Innovations, she explored user interface design and researched cutting-edge topics like Adaptive Task Allocation in Complex Human-Machine Systems. This laid the foundation for her dissertation at BMW Group, where she analyzed cognitive distraction using the world's largest naturalistic driving data set, SHRP2. Her research informed best practices for in-vehicle user interface design. After completing her dissertation, Lisa became the Lead VUI Designer for the BMW Intelligent Personal Assistant, shaping voice control experiences across the entire BMW fleet using her deep understanding of user psychology and driver behavior. Today at IBM, she applies this rich experience to empowering organizations, especially in the public sector, to deploy AI solutions that are safe, effective, and fully under their control.

Recognised for
Making insights from conversation analysis research accessible and actionable in conversational products and technologies

Elizabeth Stokoe conducts conversation analytic research to understand how talk works - from first dates to medical communication and from sales encounters to crisis negotiation. She has worked as an industry fellow at technology companies Typeform and Deployed. She is passionate about science communication, and has given talks at TED, Google, Microsoft, and The Royal Institution, and performed at Latitude and Cheltenham Science Festivals. Her books include Talk: The Science of Conversation (Little, Brown, 2018), Crisis Talk (Routledge, 2022, co-authored with Rein Ove Sikveland and Heidi Kevoe-Feldman), and Categories in Social Interaction (Routledge, 2025, co-authored with Kevin Whitehead and Geoffrey Raymond). Her research and biography were featured on BBC Radio 4's The Life Scientific. During the Covid-19 pandemic she participated in a behavioural science sub-group of the UK Government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) and is a member of Independent SAGE behaviour group. She is a Wired Innovation Fellow and an Honorary Fellow of the British Psychological Society.

Recognised for
Running the AI Bot Heroes network in Denmark

Linea is a conversational AI leader with a background in communication, digital media, and a talent for crafting human-centered AI experiences. With over 15 years of experience – starting in social media and evolving into Conversational AI, she brings a unique blend of customer insight, branding and technical expertise to the field. Her entry into Conversational AI began with building chatbots to handle social media queries – probably also before the technology was actually mature enough. Since then, she has led the design and implementation of Conversational AI solutions in sectors like insurance, telecom, and the public sector. Whether it's creating frameworks for scalable conversation design or training AI Trainers and Designers from within customer service teams, Linea makes sure it connects. In addition to her work on implementing and improving conversational AI solutions, Linea is also leading the only Danish Conversational AI network, fostering collaboration and knowledge-sharing within the local community. Linea regularly shares her insights on conversational design, AI adoption, and the messy (but exciting) intersection of people, language, and technology to make AI feel less artificial and a lot more conversational.