The CAI Company Founders Feature in Conversational AI Leaders List
Darren Ford and Alice Kerly named in The CDI Foundation’s annual list of the most influential and innovative minds in Conversational AI
Bristol JULY 2025
The CAI Company is pleased to announce that Darren Ford, Founder & CEO, and Alice Kerly, COO & Co-Founder, have been included in the Conversational AI Leaders List 2025, compiled by The CDI Foundation.
The CDI Foundation develops industry wide design standards that create human-centric and inclusive AI Assistants; it is part of The Conversation Design Institute, a world leading training and certification institute for creating AI Assistants.
In order to recognise and celebrate exceptional individuals who are shaping the future of Conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI), The CDI Foundation compiled the Conversational AI Leaders List which features trendsetters and visionaries whose insights and contributions are vital in guiding the evolution of Conversational AI (CAI). It acknowledges those who have made significant contributions to Customer Experience Design and CAI through innovation, research, and leadership.
Darren Ford, Founder and CEO at The CAI Company, has spent his career working with global enterprises delivering customer experience solutions. With experience in a range of verticals he provides strategic advice, program management and multi-discipline team leadership for building advanced Conversational AI applications. This includes customer service virtual assistants, home automation assistants, voice-driven automation and intelligent Interactive Voice Response (IVR) solutions.
A frequent speaker and advisor in the AI space, Darren is known for his practical insights on key factors that enable a successful Conversational AI program, operationalising AI, and coaching teams to succeed with next-generation virtual assistants.
Passionate about the need of a coherent business case, Darren has been known to say that “if you can’t articulate the business results you want to achieve, don’t start!”
Customers attest to the fact he builds longstanding relationships based on trust, experience and quality.
In addition to leading the company, Darren spear-headed development of The CAI Company’s patented technology, Chatpulse, to fill a gap in the Conversational AI domain concerning qualitative analytics of large scale conversational data. Chatpulse is a SaaS solution for chatbot analytics that shows users how to significantly improve bot performance – regardless of their bot development platform – at a level of scale suitable for the worlds largest companies. Users are able to identify and quantify insights, unlock trends, evaluate performance, monitor change, review any individual conversation from the entire dataset, prioritise development, and measure the impact of changes.
Dr Alice Kerly, COO and Co-Founder at The CAI Company, is an experienced consultant, mentor and trainer who has been quietly getting on with shaping, influencing and supporting the conversational AI sector for 20 years. She delights in the diverse challenge of combining cutting edge technologies with human language and psychology.
Alice has published papers on use of conversational agents in education – exploring AI in this context long before most of the world. She has presented at international conferences and is published in peer-reviewed journals as well as distinguished conference proceedings series, such as Knowledge-Based Systems and Lecture Notes in Computer Science.
Her ground-breaking work really does change the game for the rest of the industry. She started the Forum for AI Research Students (FAIRS) in 2007, a group that connects PhD and MPhil students working on AI related projects with senior scholars in the field. It has helped hundreds of bright minds in the field and is still running today.
Alice’s passion for using CAI to do the right thing also means she has spent many hours advising pro bono for social causes, helping others develop conversational AI strategies in education, health and wellbeing. She advises physicians at the cutting edge of technology at a leading London university, using CAI to make great strides in combating mental illness.
Her influence extends beyond academia and consultancy. As a company founder, she has helped develop and nurture a team of conversational AI practitioners and created a clear framework for full-stack conversational developers to grow in seniority and expertise. The CAI Company takes people in from entry level, something which is often lacking in the industry and it’s Alice that ensures the training and L&D matches or outperforms the onboarding you might find in a global enterprise company.
Darren said “Conversational AI really is our passion, and our experience has shown that the art to delivering meaningful results is a firm focus on business objectives combined with the creation of exceptional user experiences with intelligent automated dialogues. We couldn’t be happier to see this recognised by inclusion on this list; it’s a real honour to be alongside our industry peers who bring together the technical and human aspects of CAI. An exciting industry to be in that’s for sure!”
– ENDS –
The CAI Company Founders Feature in Conversational AI Leaders List – Press release PDF
Notes to Editors
About The Conversational AI Leaders List
The CDI Foundation Conversational AI Leaders List is based on suggestions from the community and carefully curated by the CDI Foundation Board, with criteria that includes
- ethical and responsible advocacy
- innovation – creating and working with groundbreaking ideas and technologies that push the boundaries of Conversational AI
- impact on the industry: shaping the Conversational AI landscape, influencing current practice and future directions.
Those on the list have been chosen based on their achievements, impact on the industry and contribution to advancing the field of conversational AI. Included are academics and research leaders, industry experts, corporate leaders, CxD pioneers, and community contributors who are using Conversational AI in new domains.
Find out more at https://www.conversationdesigninstitute.org/leaders-list/
About The CAI Company
The CAI Company is a team of highly skilled specialists that provide Conversational AI strategy, design and build expertise to companies deploying Conversational AI projects; customers include HelloFresh, AT&T, CSG International and Swisscom. Expertise in business strategy, computational linguistic, conversational design, data science, machine learning, and UX skills drive exceptional business outcomes for customers from automated Conversational applications.
Decades of successful Conversational AI project experiences show that the art to delivering meaningful results is an unrelenting focus on business objectives, combined with the creation of exceptional user experiences with intelligent automated dialogues.
Please visit www.theCAIcompany.com to find out more or follow us on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-cai-company.
About Chatpulse
Chatpulse is a SaaS bot analytics tool designed and used by conversational AI specialists to review millions of conversations. Built by chatbot specialists, Chatpulse offers quantitative and qualitative bot analysis in one tool, giving you in-depth insights that go beyond traditional KPIs into your business’s AI conversations.
Find out more at https://chatpulse.ai
