From WAVE 2025: The next chapter of meaningful customer relationships

“Meaningful relationships are easy to build with people we know. Replicating that feeling between companies and customers… that’s the challenge artificial intelligence must solve,” Parloa’s CEO and co-founder, Malte Kosub, told a room full of CX leaders, innovators, and partners at WAVE 2025 in Berlin.

And he was spot on. For decades, customer service has been defined by process and structure, i.e., queues, tickets, and dashboards that measure resolution time instead of connection. It worked well enough when efficiency was the sole goal. But as the digital world matured, customers began expecting something deeper: to be remembered, not managed.

WAVE 2025 delivered a manifesto for the future of enterprise-customer relationships. The central premise was bold: meaningful relationships will decide which companies win. And those relationships won’t be powered by humans alone, but by a new class of personal AI agents that are proactive, multimodal, and seamlessly integrated into every customer journey.

The rise of the personal AI agent

Malte opened the keynote with a simple but radical idea: every customer deserves their own AI agent.  One that understands context, remembers every interaction, and can anticipate what the customer needs next.

“If you have a hundred million customers,” he said, “you’ll have a hundred million personal AI agents.” 

And that flips the old customer-service model on its head. Instead of routing people through departments, the experience follows the person wherever they go: across calls, chat, apps, and devices. What does this unlock?

• Retention and loyalty: When an agent “remembers” your last interaction, your favorite product, or your frustration from a past issue, you don’t feel like a ticket in a queue. You feel seen.

• Revenue impact: Every conversation, from a product recommendation to a proactive notification, is a conversion opportunity.

• Operational efficiency: Scale becomes possible without compromising experience, because every interaction is powered by agents that learn and adapt.

When someone remembers what you like, what frustrates you, or what you asked for last time—that’s what makes a relationship feel personal. And until now, replicating that feeling between companies and millions of customers was impossible.

A platform designed for seamless experiences

Our live demo of our AI agent Nora—part playful, part revolutionary—revealed what happens when AI becomes the default UI. Instead of clicking through menus, a customer receives a proactive notification from their AI agent, nudging them about a trip, a refund, or a new offer. 

The interaction flows across channels with the user in control at every step. In essence, WAVE attendees saw a next-generation multimodal AI agent platform that brings together voice, chat, video, rich media, and interactive widgets into a single, more natural conversation.

We demonstrated some of our new noteworthy product capabilities, including:

• Adaptive voice guidance: The agent responds to what’s on screen, aligning contextually without overwhelming the user.

• Barge-in functionality: Customers can interrupt or redirect at any point, and the agent pivots seamlessly.

• Live API calls: Information isn’t static; the agent pulls real-time flight data, hotel availability, or claim status.

• Background task handling: Agents don’t just chat — they act, sending emails, booking reservations, and closing loops.

This multimodal platform makes a profound statement: the interface of the future is not buttons or forms, it’s relationships expressed through conversation.

Democratizing AI agent management

For AI to truly change how companies build relationships, it can’t live in the hands of a few experts. It has to live across the business.

That’s the shift Csaba Tamas, our Chief Product Officer, talked about on stage at WAVE 2025: AI agents can’t stay trapped in IT projects and technical silos. Every team, from marketing to operations, should be able to build, manage, and improve agents on their own. Because when that happens, AI stops being a project. It becomes part of how the business runs.

Without democratization, AI remains slow and fragmented: just a flashy tool disconnected from the work that matters. With it, agents become part of the hybrid workforce: accessible, coachable, and as easy to onboard as a new colleague.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

• Prompt assist: Instead of writing prompts from scratch, you brief an agent the way you’d brief a new hire. Define their role, goals, and boundaries—and the system turns it into a ready-to-run configuration.

• MCP integrations: Pre-built connectors let agents plug into your existing systems (CRM, ERP, CMS) without waiting on long IT projects.

• Multi-agent orchestration: Multiple agents can collaborate in one conversation, each handling specialized tasks while maintaining one consistent voice.

• Continuous evaluations and A/B testing: Like any good team, agents need coaching. We make it possible to evaluate real conversations, test improvements, and track performance continuously.

• Agent composition: Update an agent once, and the changes flow everywhere — across channels, markets, and languages.

Together, these shifts move companies from isolated pilots to organization-wide AI workforces that can be managed, scaled, and optimized as naturally as human teams.

Reimagining enterprise infrastructure

For years, enterprises have been trapped between two extremes: build their own AI systems from scratch—slow, risky, expensive—or buy closed products that never quite fit. Both routes stifle innovation. Our alternative is composability: a system flexible enough to let companies choose the pieces they need and integrate them into their existing stack.

Malte tackled the industry’s long-standing build vs. buy dilemma. Off-the-shelf solutions are too rigid. Building in-house is too risky and slow. That’s why we now have an alternative: agent composition. 

Essentially, it means enterprises can build on their own terms. 

• Take what you need—orchestration, evaluation, testing—and plug it into what already works. You don’t have to worry about heavy rebuilds or all-or-nothing commitments.

• AI agents are flexible enough to fit your preferred models, workflows, and systems, yet strong enough to handle enterprise-scale reliability.

• You have the connective layer that ties your customer experience together—as essential as your ERP or CRM, only built for relationships.

That’s what composability gives you: the freedom to operationalize agentic AI in the way that fits your business best, right from day one.

Why agentic AI is the backbone of the next era in CX

The future of customer experience won’t be built on more tools, dashboards, or automations. It will be built on memory—on technology that actually remembers who your customers are and what matters to them.

That’s what agentic AI makes possible. It connects what’s been disconnected: the conversations, the context, the intent behind every interaction. Instead of treating relationships like tickets in a queue, it creates continuity—a single, evolving understanding of each customer that spans every channel.

This isn’t another layer of tech. It’s the new foundation. A backbone for enterprises that want to turn efficiency into empathy and scale into trust.

As Malte said at WAVE 2025, the companies that build the most meaningful relationships will be the ones that win. Agentic AI is how they’ll get there—not as a digital innovation experiment, but as the core system that holds the customer relationship together.