CNME Editor Mark Forker sat down with British tech entrepreneur Daniel Wagner, to find out how his company Rezolve AI is harnessing the power of conversational AI to completely transform and revolutionise customer experiences in digital commerce.
It has been said that the UAE doesn’t just imagine the future, it builds it.
The same accusation could be levelled at Daniel Wagner, Chairman and CEO of Rezolve AI.
Wagner is a serial tech entrepreneur, who has a proven track record of building hugely successful technology companies since beginning his career back in the 1980’s.
He first came to prominence when he created MAID in 1984, which was one of the world’s first online information services, and he eventually took the company public in 1994, whilst it was also listed on the NASDAQ in 1995.
In 2001, he launched another hugely successful venture with the creation of Venda, which was a cloud-based enterprise-class commerce platform that he eventually sold to US IT behemoth Oracle.
In 2003, he co-founded Attraqt, which was an e-commerce software company that he again took public on AIM in 2014, and sold to a private equity firm in 2019.
Wagner was one of the first to recognise the benefits of packaging electronic information and data back in 1984, and 32 years later he could see the potential of conversational AI in providing a human touch to the digital commerce space.
Wagner began the conversation highlighting the factors that led to the company’s inception.
“When I started Rezolve, I was obviously bringing decades of experience, knowledge and an intrinsic understanding of how commerce and search all worked. It didn’t come out of nowhere, the company was born out of my deep understanding of natural language processing, and my objective was very clear, and that was we wanted to create the best salesperson on the planet by leveraging the power of conversational AI. Instead of trying to create a wide, generic solution like ChatGPT we created a platform that was specifically tailored to enable online retailers to create the best salespeople in the world,” said Wagner.
Wagner pointed to the main crux of the problem for online retailers and outlined how they are trying to resolve the problem pardon the pun.
“Look, when you go online to buy items, 70% of people drop out of the process. That is a huge number. However, when you go into a physical store then 70% of people buy something, so there is something fundamentally wrong in the online shopping experience. It is completely reversed and the difference between one or the other is 70%. The reason for that is very obvious. For example, if I ask my wife to go and buy me a mobile phone, she couldn’t do it online because she doesn’t know what an OLED screen is, she doesn’t know what a MB is, she doesn’t know the difference between iOS and Android. She doesn’t know any of these things, but in an online environment then that’s how these products would be presented to her. But if she went into a mobile phone shop and said, “I need to buy a phone for my husband,” one or two questions would be asked of her, and then the salesperson would be able to sell her a phone,” said Wagner.
Wagner stressed that the business model of Rezolve AI is engineered towards empowering online retailers to create what he described as the ‘perfect salesman’ through the use of natural language processing.
“We’ve developed our own language model, and it’s essentially like a salesperson ready to learn about the retailer’s products. That salesperson has sales techniques—it’s trained on how to sell and close sales, how to discuss products and engage with customers in a way the very best human salesperson would in a physical store. We know it’s going to be a market leader, and Google and Microsoft have also recognised that what we have is totally unique in this space, and that’s why they have partnered with us. We haven’t just jumped on the AI bandwagon either, we have been working on this since 2016 and have invested $130m during that period,” said Wagner.
Wagner also added that Rezolve AI has a language model with products layered on top that allows them to go to any retailer in the world.
“We support 96 languages, so we can work with retailers in Arabic, Korean, Chinese, French, Spanish etc, and they can engage with us in their own language, and that is an extremely powerful capability to have when you are trying to humanise that online digital experience. We are levelling up commerce and that’s the way I see it,” said Wagner.
One of the many key differentiators of what Rezolve AI does is in relation to its ability to tackle hallucinations.
“There are plenty of companies out there in the marketplace saying they’re providing AI solutions that allow some sort of conversational engagement with retail. However, crucially most of it is around customer service. When you’re dealing with a product catalogue, there are real problems with Gen AI. If I’m a cosmetics retailer with 200 products, and say there is 100 fragrances for men and 100 for women, then these products could have names like ‘Sauvage’ and ‘Beast.’ The issue is the descriptions may say things like its smells like ‘blackberries with sandalwood notes’, but Gen AI doesn’t understand that. There’s no context. So, it hallucinates and gives wrong or nonsensical answers. At the end of the day, the propensity for hallucinations goes way up. Normally, Gen AI hallucination rates are about 3–4%. But with product catalogues, it’s about 17%. We have spent nine years solving this hallucination problem in product catalogues, and that’s what makes us really unique,” said Wagner.
Wagner reiterated the importance and significance of their partnership with Google and Microsoft in terms of the market credibility it gives Rezolve.
“We have three patents on how we do what we do, and ultimately that’s why tech giants such as Microsoft and Google are partnering with us. Microsoft is a massive leader in AI, and Google is the number one search company in the world—they’re not going to partner with us unless we have something special, and we do. They’re selling us into their customer base. We’ve got videos and references from both saying this, and crucially, we’re the only ones who’ve been focused on solving this specific problem for the last nine years and that gives us a huge advantage,” said Wagner.
The success of Rezolve AI since beginning to roll out their platform at the start of the year has been nothing short of staggering.
“The company went public in August 2024, but in April 2025, we got publicly listed on the NASDAQ after processing $50bn in sales through our technology in just the first 3 months of us going live with our platform. We started in January, before that we had almost no revenue. As the old saying goes, the numbers don’t lie, and they certainly don’t in our case. The success we have had is unprecedented really, and only serves to further reinforce how unique we are, and how we are going to be the global market leader in this space. From a standing start, over 41 million consumers now have our technology on their phones, in their apps. And we’ve improved conversion rates by 25% on the sites where we’ve been deployed, and that is astronomical,” said Wagner.
Wagner said they are excited about the opportunities emerging all across the Middle East.
He said the company is laying solid foundations in the Gulf, and hopes to be in a position very soon to announce a very significant customer in the region.
When asked was he preparing the company to ultimately be acquired by a large tech company, Wagner insisted that they were only at the beginning of the journey.
“Look in all reality, I don’t need to do this, I’ve had a hugely successful career. However, the fact remains that I am driven by a desire to build products that can totally transform and revolutionise industries. In relation to the question of us being acquired, it’s a fair question. In the 1980s, I created the world’s first digital information businesses, and then in the late 1990s and early 00s, I built one of the first cloud-based commerce platforms – and both of those were acquired by Oracle. Now, I’m building the future of retail interaction, but I see this as my career’s pinnacle, and I’m totally energised by it all, and trust me, this is just the beginning of the journey,” said Wagner.
