Former Google, Meta leaders launch Palona AI, bringing personalized, emotive customer agents to non-techie enterprises


Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More


Speaking for myself, interacting with any merchant’s AI-powered chatbot on their website is often an exercise in frustration. Phone trees with robot voices are typically worse. I’d wager I’m hardly alone in my assessment. Who amongst us hasn’t experienced long hold times, slow responses, lack of updated information and awareness of the customer’s own account history, a granting faux politeness and a host of other inefficiencies?

A new startup called Palona debuted last week that aims to fix this sorry state of affairs. It equips direct-to-consumer enterprises — think pizza shops and electronics vendors — with live, 24/7 customer support sales agents that are uniquely reflective of each business’s brand personality, voice, inventory stock, and value proposition. The electronics vendor has a “wizard” agent made by Palona, while the pizza shop gets a surfer dude agent personality — naturally.

In all cases, Palona focuses on creating AI agents that have high “EQ,” or “emotional intelligence / emotional quotient,” building them from a combination of open source and proprietary AI models and training some of their own using human sociology research.

“A kind of fundamental thesis that the company is that we can create something an experience that is delightful and feels genuine, like a real human conversation,” said Palona co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO) Tim Howes, in an in-person interview with VentureBeat recently. “ChatGPT is a hugely useful tool, but it does not feel like a human conversation.”

Palona claims its system can be easily implemented by a non-techie brand on their website, mobile app or phone lines — with responses uniquely tailored to each brand and each communications environment. And in fact, its agents are already at work handling orders, answering questions and complaints, and suggesting products and upsells to customers.

Strong founding background

In addition to Howes, Palona is co-founded and led by a team of engineers from some of the top tech companies in the world, among them: Maria Zhang, Palona’s CEO, is a former VP of Engineering at Google, VP/GM of AI for Products at Meta, and CTO of Tinder. She also founded Alike, acquired by Yahoo in 2013.

Palona’s chief scientist Steve Liu, PhD, was formerly chief scientist at Samsung AI Center and Tinder. A tenured professor at McGill University, Liu is also a Fellow of IEEE and the Canadian Academy of Engineering, with over 390 research papers to his name.

And Howes himself is the co-inventor of the industry-standard, open source Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) online data storage system, as well as co-founder of LoudCloud and OpsWare (the latter acquired by HP for $1.65 billion). He was also previously the chief technology officer at Netscape, HP Software, and led Developer Productivity at Meta AI Infrastructure.

“We’re building fully autonomous sales agents—not tools for salespeople, but actual AI salespeople,” said Zhang in the same live interview, adding that it was “the employee of the century.”

24/7 polite, distinct, personable sales agents

Palona AI positions itself as a solution for companies looking to improve their sales performance, customer engagement, and brand loyalty.

The Palona Agents act as customized virtual sales employees, combining soft sales skills with 24/7 availability, unlimited capacity, and advanced memory recall, and can interact with customers in an online chatbot format, an SMS/text number they can correspond with, or even AI-powered voices over the phone.

“100%—we support voice,” Zhang explained, “For example, in pizza ordering, voice is still a major user pattern. In the Midwest, about 50% of people still call to order. On the East and West Coasts, it’s around 20%, but it’s still significant.”

Palona’s voices are licensed, but the company has the ability to train and deploy custom ones, even voice cloning of authorized customer reps or a CEO, let’s say.

The company realized through testing that the voice version of Palona’s AI sales agents would need to have distinctly different interaction styles from the text chatbot.

“We tested different voice interactions, and for pizza ordering, for example, customers wanted efficiency,” Zhang related. “They didn’t want a chatty AI—they just wanted to get their order done as fast as possible. So we optimized for that, making it have less personality, less verbosity, more efficiency.”

Unlike traditional chatbots that serve as assistants to human representatives, Palona AI is designed to handle entire sales cycles without human intervention.

“There’s a big gap between lifelike AI models like ChatGPT and what businesses actually need—an AI agent that can fully sell, convert, and upsell,” Zhang explained.

Palona claims to minimize errors and reduces AI hallucinations by up to 98%, ensuring reliable interactions.

Zhang and Howes said that for even the most analog businesses, it was a short lead team to get going with Palona, only several days for a simple implementation.

The enterprise provides Palona with “FAQs, employee training manuals, policies, and procedures,” said Howes.

Then, they define with Palona what actions the agent should take — be it processing orders, answering inquiries, or handling support issues.

“The biggest factors affecting setup time are: how much integration is needed with the customer’s existing systems (e.g., POS, CRM, ordering platforms). If we already support their system, it’s plug-and-play,” Howes explained. “If it’s a system we already support, the agent can be ready in a couple of days. If they’re using a new, unfamiliar system, that requires additional engineering work, which could take longer.”

In addition, Zhang said that Palona was “actually in the process of automating agent setup. Eventually, businesses will be able to use a Palona agent to configure their own Palona agent!”

Three language models are better than one

Palona does all this by combining three different models: the first is a custom, fine-tuned large language model (LLM) that serves as the basis for every distinct business sales agent — the pizza shop gets a different tone and personality from the electronics vendor, and each one is customized to each customer out of the box.

There’s also a supervisory model that detects, catches, and removes hallucinations from the main model before it outputs them to the customer.

Finally, the system also incorporates a real-time memory tracking small language model (SLM), allowing it to build deep customer profiles based on previous interactions—leading to personalized conversations and stronger customer relationships.

“AI is very good at either remembering absolutely everything, which leads to a terrible experience,” Howes said, due to it bringing up unimportant details. “Or it remembers nothing, which, again, terrible experience,” because it won’t know what happened previously in the conversation.

To get around this, Palona trained its own small model to help its base LLM manage its memory.

It’s that small model’s “job to figure out, ‘okay, what’s important here, what’s not important,’” in every conversation, Howes said.

Overall, the company included an interesting dataset for all its models that reflects the wide range of human emotional responses all sales and customer-facing humans (and agents) have to deal with on a regular basis.

“We trained our models to have higher EQ [emotional intelligence] by surveying the literature in psychology, and identifying what actually makes someone emotionally intelligent,” Howes told me. “It turns out there’s an eight-dimensional definition of EQ, and we trained our AI against those benchmarks.”

Palona also trained its models to perform “gentle persuasion,” and reply to customers with humor, emoji, and sensitivity.

Early customer testimonials: Wyze, MINDZERO, and Pizza My Heart

Palona AI is already working with several consumer brands, including Wyze, MINDZERO, and Pizza My Heart, to enhance customer interactions and increase sales conversions.

Wyze, a smart home camera company, has integrated Palona-powered AI sales assistants to personalize customer support.

Yun Zhang, CEO of Wyze, said in a statement: “I’ve always wished that I could personally connect with every customer to share why they should choose our camera and CamPlus plan. Palona has made that possible with the Wyze Wizard AI Agent, delivering the curated, personalized buying journey I wish I could give every customer myself.”

MINDZERO, a wellness studio specializing in contrast therapy, uses Palona AI Agents to answer customer questions naturally and engagingly. David Semerad, CEO of MINDZERO, highlighted the impact of the technology: “Our Palona agent, Jen, has become our new best friend—she’s able to answer customer questions in such an authentic, kind, and helpful way, it really blows our minds.”

Pizza My Heart, a well-known West Coast pizza chain, has transformed its brand persona into an AI-powered interactive experience. The company’s Palona AI Agent, “Jimmy the Surfer”, allows customers to order pizza through voice or text while engaging in lighthearted conversations.

Chuck Hammers, CEO of Pizza My Heart, commented on the experience: “Palona AI brought Jimmy to life in a way that just makes me smile—which I never expected from an AI. Now, Jimmy helps my customers order pizza by talking to them directly—via voice or text.”

Three pillars of Palona’s success

Palona’s AI solutions are built on three core principles:

1. Brand Consistency – AI Agents are trained on a company’s knowledge base to ensure conversations remain true to the brand’s voice and identity.

2. High EQ (Emotional Intelligence) – Palona Agents dynamically adapt to conversations and outperform both human representatives and competing AI models in emotional engagement.

3. Persuasiveness – The AI identifies key sales opportunities, proactively recommending upsells and cross-sells at the right moments to increase revenue and customer lifetime value (LTV).

I saw all these in action in a short demo of a “Wizard” customer sales chatbot agent, in which even when I complained to it about my dogs barking at my neighbors (sorry guys!), it managed to smoothly redirect the conversation to a home camera I could buy to help keep an eye on them.

What’s next for Palona?

“We intentionally went after the hardest problem first—sales and conversion,” Zhang noted. “It requires more technical sophistication, but if you can solve that, expanding into other areas like customer support and loyalty programs is easier.”

As AI continues to shape the future of commerce, Palona’s approach suggests that customer relationships don’t have to be sacrificed for automation—instead, AI can enhance personalization, drive conversions, and build lasting brand loyalty.



Source link

Share

Latest Updates

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Articles

China’s JD.com moves into food delivery, starts recruiting restaurants

China's e-commerce giant JD.com is venturing into the country's highly competitive food delivery...

Realme P3 Pro Design Teased; to Be Available With a Glow in the Dark Rear Panel

Realme P3 Pro is set to be unveiled in India on February 18....

Texas awards grants to five space companies

WASHINGTON — A Texas state agency awarded $47.7 million in grants to five...
SULTAN88
SULTANSLOT
RAJA328
JOIN88
GFC88
HOKIBET
RUSIASLOT88
TAHU69
BONANZA99
PRAGMABET
MEGA55
LUXURY777
LUXURY333
BORJU89
QQGAMING
KEDAI168
MEGA777
NAGASLOT777
TAKSU787
KKSLOT777
MAS77TOTO
bandar55
BOS303
HOKI99
NUSA365
YUHUSLOT
KTP168
GALAXY138
NEXIA138
PETIR33
BOOM138
MEGA888
CABE888
FOSIL777
turbospin138
KAPAKBET
SUPERJP
sultankoin99
dragon88
raffi888
kenzobet
aladin666
rgo365
ubm4d
GERCEP88
VIVA99
CR777
VOXY88
delman567
intan69
CABE888
RNR303
LOGO303
PEMBURUGACOR
mpo383
cermin4d
bm88
ANGKA79
WOWHOKI
ROKET303
MPOXL
GURITA168
SUPRASLOT
SGCWIN
DESA88
ARWANA388
DAUNEMAS
ALADDIN666
BIOWIN69
SKY77
DOTA88
NAGA138
API5000
y200m
PLAYBOOK88
LUXURY12
A200M
MPO700
KENANGAN4D
cakrabola
PANDAGENDUT
MARVEL77
UG300
HOKI178
MONTE77
JASABOLA
UNTAR4D
LIDO88
MAFIABOLA77
GASPOL189
mpo999
untung138
TW88
JAGUAR33
MPOBOS
SHIO88
VIVO4D
MPOXL
JARISAKTI
BBO303
AONCASH
ANGKER4D
LEVIS4D
JAGO88
REPUBLIK365
BOSDEAL88
BOLA168
akunjp
WARTEGBET
EZEBET
88PULSA
KITAB4D
BOSDEAL88
STUDIOBET
MESINKOIN
BIMA88
PPNUSA
ABGBET88
TOP77
BAYAR77
YES77
BBTN4D
BBCA4D
VSLOTS88
MPO800
PAHALA4D
KPI4D
JURAGAN77
QQ188
BOLAPELANGI
C200M
QQ998
GWKTOGEL
MEGABANDAR
COLOWIN
VIP579
SEVEN4D
MPO188
DEWATA88
SURAT4D
SINAR123
LAMBO77
GUDANG4D
AWAN4D
PLANETLIGA
GT88
ROYALSPIN88
MAMAJITU
MITO99
PEDIA4D
WIBU69JP
333HOKI
SIDARMA88
NAGAEMAS99
HOLA88
CAKAR76
KINGTOTO
RATUGAMING
SSI168
PILAR168
ACTOTO
EYANGTOGEL
KAISAR328
SLOT628
KAISAR88
DOTA88
MAXWIN369
ALIBABA99
MM168
SQUAD777
NAGABET88
JAYABOLA
SEMPATIGAME
PANDAJAGO
PIKAT4D
SINGA77
YUYU33
MASTERPLAY99
VICTORY39
NASA4D
PERMATA55
SAKAUSLOT
CK303
MPOTOWER
CIPUTRABET
WINJUDI
DEWI5000
IYA777
MAHIRTOTO
GOSLOT88
TIPTOP4D
RAJA787
JBO680
JOKER188
EPICPLAY88
TRIVABET
KAISAR189
JOKER81
JPSPIN88
MAYORA4D
DJARUMPLAY
OVO88
BAKTI78
WINGSLOT77
ICAFE4D
PDTOTO
JETPLAY88
CMBET88
CMBET88
didascaliasdelteatrocaminito.com
glenellynrent.com
gypsumboardequipment.com
realseller.org
https://harrysphone.com/upin
gyergyoalfalu.ro/tokek
vipokno.by/gokil
winjospg.com
winjos801.com/
www.logansquarerent.com
internationalfintech.com/bamsz
condowizard.ca
jawatoto889.com
hikaribet3.live
hikaribet1.com
heylink.me/hikaribet
www.nomadsumc.org
condowizard.ca/aromatoto
euro2024gol.com
www.imaracorp.com
daftarsekaibos.com
stuffyoucanuse.org/juragan
Toto Macau 4d
Aromatoto
Lippototo
Mbahtoto
Winjos
152.42.229.23
bandarlotre126.com
heylink.me/sekaipro
www.get-coachoutletsonline.com
wholesalejerseyslord.com
Lippototo
Zientoto
Lippototo
Situs Togel Resmi
Fajartoto
Situs Togel
Toto Macau
Winjos
Winlotre
Aromatoto
design-develop-test.com
winlotre.online
winlotre.xyz
winlotre.us
winlotrebandung.com
winlotrepalu.com
winlotresurabaya.shop
winlotrejakarta.com
winlotresemarang.shop
winlotrebali.shop
winlotreaceh.shop
winlotremakmur.com
Dadu Online
Taruhantoto
a Bandarlotre
bursaliga
lakitoto
aromatoto
Rebahin
untungslot.pages.dev
slotpoupler.pages.dev
rtpliveslot88a.pages.dev
tipsgameslot.pages.dev
pilihslot88.pages.dev
fortuertiger.pages.dev
linkp4d.pages.dev
linkslot88a.pages.dev
slotpgs8.pages.dev
markasjudi.pages.dev
saldo69.pages.dev
slotbenua.pages.dev
saingtoto.pages.dev
markastoto77.pages.dev
jowototo88.pages.dev
sungli78.pages.dev
volatilitas78.pages.dev
bonusbuy12.pages.dev
slotoffiline.pages.dev
dihindari77.pages.dev
rtpdislot1.pages.dev
agtslot77.pages.dev
congtoto15.pages.dev
hongkongtoto7.pages.dev
sinarmas177.pages.dev
hours771.pages.dev
sarana771.pages.dev
kananslot7.pages.dev
balitoto17.pages.dev
jowototo17.pages.dev
aromatotoding.com
unyagh.org
fairparkcounseling.com/gap/
impress-newtex.com/ajax/
SULTAN88
SULTANSLOT
RAJA328
JOIN88+
HOKIBET
GFC88
RusiaSlot88
Tahu69
BONANZA99
Pragmabet
mega55
luxury777
luxury333
borju89
qqgaming
KEDAI168
mega777
nagaslot777
TAKSU787
kkslot777
MAS77TOTO
BANDAR55+
BOS303
Login-HOKI99/
NUSA365
YUHUSLOT
ktp168
GALAXY138