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Case Study - PolyAI

Case Study: PolyAI × Shuttle

PolyAI is an enterprise AI company automating customer experiences across voice and chat. Its AI agents handle hundreds of millions of conversations for some of the world’s largest organisations every year, particularly in hospitality and highly regulated industries like banking, telco, and utilities — environments where reliability, compliance, and payment completion are mission-critical.

What

The company’s agentic AI helps enterprises show up as “the best versions of themselves” in every conversation. With human-level understanding and enterprise-grade reliability, many of its largest deployments already do the work of 1,000+ full-time employees. These conversations aren’t just about FAQS, they’re complete real transactions — including bookings, reservations, upgrades, and payments.

Why

As PolyAI customers pushed to fully automate high-value workflows, payments became the last blocker. AI agents could handle the conversation — but completing the transaction often still required a handoff to a human, especially when specific or niche payment gateways were required

The Problem

PolyAI faced a classic platform crossroads. Customers increasingly wanted end-to-end automation, including payment capture, inside AI-driven voice and chat flows. But enabling this at enterprise scale created several challenges:

Many customers required industry-specific or niche payment gateways not supported by native platforms

Twilio supported payments, but with a limited gateway ecosystem

Building and maintaining gateway integrations in-house would slow down deployments

In regulated industries, customers demanded the same gateways used by human agents with no compromises

The risk was clear: payments could become the bottleneck that stopped AI voice from delivering true end-to-end automation.

The Solution

PolyAI partnered with Shuttle to treat payments as infrastructure, not a product they had to own.

Shuttle enabled PolyAI to:

Continue using Twilio for voice orchestration while unlocking any required payment gateway

Integrate gateways once, without building or maintaining them internally

Support enterprise-grade, regulated payment flows without expanding PCI scope unnecessarily

Treat legacy payment providers as if they were modern, API-first SaaS services

Keep PolyAI focused on AI, UX, and customer outcomes

One of the first major use cases was integrating FreedomPay, a dominant gateway in hospitality and hotels, particularly in the US and UK.

The Result

For PolyAI

Enabled fully automated voice payments for high-value transactions

Thousands of hotel reservations completed end-to-end with no human handoff

Hundreds of thousands of dollars processed through AI-led voice flows

Payment gateway complexity abstracted away behind Shuttle

Faster delivery into regulated industries without becoming a payments company

A scalable foundation for future chat-based and hybrid payment experiences

“It allowed us to treat legacy payment providers as a modern SaaS service.” — PolyAI

For PolyAI’s Customers

Ability to complete transactions entirely via AI voice

No compromise on gateway choice — AI agents use the same PSPs as human agents

Faster deployments into regulated environments

Reduced cost-to-serve by removing human payment handoffs

Improved operational consistency across voice, chat, and human channels

In hospitality, this meant AI agents could:

take bookings

negotiate availability

manage customer accounts

process payments

complete reservations

— all in a single voice interaction.

For the End Customer (Caller)

Zero wait times

A natural, uninterrupted voice experience

Successful payment completion without transfers or callbacks

PolyAI reports that over 75% of callers who begin a payment flow complete it, a strong success rate for fully automated voice transactions, a historically low-trust environment.

In Summary

PolyAI wanted to focus on providing the best customer experience. Its customers didn’t want partial automation. Shuttle enabled PolyAI to embed payments into AI voice and chat — across industries, gateways, and geographies — without sacrificing speed, compliance, or focus.

This is what happens when payments stop being a blocker and start behaving like infrastructure.

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