Gradient Labs

AI support agent for financial services

[Gradient Labs @GradientLabsAI]

@neal_lathia here, live from @money2020 Europe. Earlier this week we shared our increased $26M Series A, and then I landed straight on the conference floor in Amsterdam. Two days in, this is what I keep hearing:

The build vs. buy question dominates every AI conversation in finance right now. My honest take is that it’s the wrong question to answer first, and possibly the wrong frame altogether.

Every team I’ve spoken to that has gone down the internal build route has ended up with something narrower than planned, shipped later than expected, and still needing to wrap around things they had not anticipated.

Whatever you build, you are building on top of something. Whatever you buy, you are building on top of that too. The conversations that go somewhere start differently: what are you actually solving for, and what does “good” look like for your business?

That sounds obvious, but it is genuinely rare, and the teams making real progress are the ones who can answer that question precisely. Once you know what you’re looking for, you can test internal models against agents out there and see which performs best for your needs.

Of course, I also stopped by the LHV Bank booth to say hi. Always good to see customers here in the wild.

#Money2020EU

[Gradient Labs @GradientLabsAI]

Who remembers these robot dogs from 2000? We got this one off eBay for our booth at #Money2020EU and had a laugh at the description in the manual:

[Gradient Labs @GradientLabsAI]

Read the case study here: https://t.co/PwqzTVTNKH

[Gradient Labs @GradientLabsAI]

Six months ago, Pockit came to us with two challenges:

1️⃣ Their legacy chatbot was deflecting tickets, but CSAT kept slipping. Customers didn't feel their problems were actually solved.

2️⃣ As Pockit scaled, support volume spiked in ways that were hard to plan for.

Today, more than 7 in 10 inbound queries are resolved end-to-end by Gradient Labs’ AI agent, and customer satisfaction is 80%. The team did it without adding headcount.

Michiel Smet, Head of Operations at Pockit, shared: "We truly think that if people have a problem and you solve it, that builds brand loyalty. That's why customer resolution is so important. With Gradient Labs, we have an AI agent that's actually resolving problems, boosting our CSAT rating, and absorbing growth.”

Read Pockit’s story in the thread.

[Gradient Labs @GradientLabsAI]

Our “good bot” team is live on the ground at @money2020 Europe. 🇳🇱 If you’re not on the conference floor with us, don’t worry: we’re about to bring it to you.

For the next two days, our CTO and co-founder @neal_lathia and our Head of Marketing Emma Martin will take over the Gradient Labs account to bring you real insights and observations gained on the go at Money20/20.

You can follow along here and on LinkedIn. And if you’re with us in Amsterdam, stop by our booth (5D58) to say hi and play with our retro robot dog. 🐕🤖

#Money2020EU

[Tech Funding News @TFNBreakingNews]

💰@GradientLabsAI has expanded its Series A financing to $26 million,
https://t.co/IFuU6suiAG It came from
new investors @OctopusVentures and @commerzventures alongside follow-on backing from @Redpoint and Exceptional Capital.
#ai #funding #uktech #london #innovation #vcfunding #investment #aiagents

[Gradient Labs @GradientLabsAI]

When it comes to deploying AI, most of the conversation is around which model to use, what to automate, and whether the outputs are good enough.

And while that’s important, there’s another piece to this puzzle: what does the product feel like to the people using it?

We frequently run user research sessions with our customers, with the goal to better understand how operations teams feel about AI agents. How do they navigate them? What makes them feel simple to use? What builds confidence?

We kept hearing two things:

1) Teams want an uncomplicated setup that leads to quick wins
2) Early results build confidence to go further

There's an emerging group of AI-native operations leaders who live in these tools every day. They have high standards for what good looks like.

In the same way we obsess over your customers' experience, we obsess over the experience of the people building with us.

[Gradient Labs @GradientLabsAI]

"Demos are easy to create. The real difficulty starts when you try to build something that works reliably in practice."

Our Chief Scientist @AntoniaDanai was interviewed for @FortuneGreece this week. The interview covers:

🦾 Why AI agents for financial services are so tricky to build
📈 Where AI outperforms humans (and vice versa)
💡 What our team has learned from implementation with real customers

Read the article: https://t.co/xBw2DACkaW

[Gradient Labs @GradientLabsAI]

Read the guide here: https://t.co/Xm5mT5wKEF

[Gradient Labs @GradientLabsAI]

Have you ever seen a messy AI voice demo? Chances are… probably not.

Next opportunity you get, ask to see a demo where the caller mumbles, interrupts, discloses they've just lost their job, and then asks for financial advice before switching topics entirely. Our CEO Dimitri Masin calls that "a normal Tuesday afternoon in any financial services contact centre."

In the real world, AI Voice needs to navigate all this and more. And in financial services the consequences of floundering in production are much worse than merely frustrating the end user.

So what can you do? Rigorously test your AI agent before it ever calls a customer.

We put together a guide with 40 core scenarios to test for, based on our live voice AI deployments. Check it out: https://t.co/SFRpWBQV4h

[Gradient Labs @GradientLabsAI]

ICYMI: we’re one of eight startups selected for @NatWestGroup's 2026 Fintech programme. 🏦

This year's theme is "How is AI shaping the future of customer experience?"

Candidates needed to prove product-market fit, an active user base, and real revenue. They also needed to prove their product meaningfully changes how financial services companies handle the customer experience.

Over the next 12 weeks, we’ll be partnering closely with NatWest’s Open Innovation team, exploring collaboration opportunities to advance customer experience with specialised AI agents across customer operations.

Thrilled to be part of this programme. Stay tuned for what’s next.

[Gradient Labs @GradientLabsAI]

In two weeks, our team will touch down in Amsterdam for @money2020 🇳🇱 You can chat with us at booth 5D58, where you'll catch our CTO Neal Lathia in his good bot hat. Ready to talk about…

🛠️ Getting an AI project from pilot to production

🏦 How leading banks and fintechs are automating disputes, KYC, and collections

📈 Real AI success stories from the biggest banks and fintechs in Europe

We're also hosting a special, Michelin-starred dinner for anyone who wants to deep dive about these topics. 🌟

Leave us a comment if you want the details ⬇️

[Gradient Labs @GradientLabsAI]

On 19th May, our CTO and co-Founder Neal Lathia will present on the panel: “Data You Can Defend: Building Decision-Grade Information” at the Banking Transformation Summit in London. 🎙️🇬🇧

Stop by the Gradient Labs booth to say hi to our team, and don’t miss the chance to ask Neal questions in the room.

[Gradient Labs @GradientLabsAI]

Read more here: https://t.co/TE9biCqCVA

[Gradient Labs @GradientLabsAI]

We’re working with more and more lenders across the UK, US, and Europe, and they all share the same challenge: lending is high-volume, time-sensitive, and compliance-heavy, which makes it difficult to scale.

We’ve built an AI agent for lending that automates the borrower lifecycle, from application through to servicing and collections.

Borrowers get fast, personalised support on every interaction, and lenders don’t have tickets sitting in queues.

We’re already processing 100,000+ calls per month across our customer base, matching human recovery rates 1:1, and staying compliant at every step.

[Gradient Labs @GradientLabsAI]

It’s a common challenge for lenders: a customer picks up an outbound call, actually wants to talk about their loan options, but doesn’t have enough time.

To solve this challenge, SteadyPay launched a Voice AI agent that not only handles outreach, but can schedule a callback with a customer for any day or time that suits them.

As a result, more customers are having calls on their schedule. This means better conversations, more empathy, increased financial clarity, and more trust in the lender.

☎️ Read the full story: https://t.co/feCxHUZOIM

[Gradient Labs @GradientLabsAI]

For AI voice agents in financial services support, good enough isn't good enough. That goes for every language our customers operate in.

Today, we've partnered with @DeepgramAI to support Flux Multilingual, a conversational speech recognition model across 10 languages.

So we can deliver safe, human-quality voice agents with sub-second latency, wherever our customers do business.

Learn more here: https://t.co/5pv0kpFTHY

[Gradient Labs @GradientLabsAI]

@temporalio Read more about our AI voice agent in action: https://t.co/zbnlCtAXCz

[Gradient Labs @GradientLabsAI]

ICYMI: you can catch our engineer Eliot Miller speaking at Replay 2026 in San Francisco next week. 🚀 He’ll talk about how we built a real-time voice agent with @temporalio that’s currently handling outreach calls for lending companies, inbound queries for banks, and more.

Can’t make it to Replay 2026 but still want to see our voice agent in action? Check it out: https://t.co/MhyfG0Coww

[Gradient Labs @GradientLabsAI]

Repayment outreach is one of the hardest parts of the lending lifecycle to scale. SteadyPay has proved that AI voice technology, deployed with the right compliance guardrails and empathetic tone, can handle these conversations at a volume no human team could match.

Gradient Labs’ outbound AI voice agent handles ID verification, communicates outstanding balances, presents payment options, secures commitment dates, and logs outcomes directly to SteadyPay's systems. If a customer can't talk, the agent schedules a callback and initiates it automatically.

After about a month of deployment, the SteadyPay team achieved:
☎️ 33,000 outbound calls per month
✅ 60% success rate after IDV
📈 +20% customer reactivation

The key takeaway? Better financial outcomes for customers, stronger repayment performance for SteadyPay, and proof that Gradient Labs’ AI voice technology is ready for one of financial services’ most sensitive use cases.

Read the full story: https://t.co/67uR2mnwtY