Lewis Crook
Practitioner writer on enterprise voice AI
I've spent 20 years in enterprise technology, in just about every technical and commercial role there is — solutions architect, infrastructure engineer, technical consultant, presales. FTSE 100 accounts. Multi-million-pound CX voice deployments, including one of Microsoft's largest Teams rollouts. Years of translating complex technical problems into outcomes for people who don't care how it works, only that it does.
My foundation is enterprise telephony at scale — Skype for Business, Lync, SIP integration, high-availability voice architecture — learning how voice systems actually work, why latency matters, and what breaks in production. That's exactly the world modern conversational AI is now replacing, which is why I understand both the legacy IVR past and the AI-native future.
In between, I co-founded a health-tech company in Indonesia and scaled it to profitability. Then I spent two years running the technical and commercial side of voice AI deployments across South-East Asia, Australia and New Zealand — platform selection, SIP integration, data residency, rollout strategy — at over a million minutes a month, including a 110+ clinic network that had to recover from a previous implementation failure.
The thing that shaped how I work is that I've sat on every side of this. I've been the buyer wondering if the demo was real. I've been the engineer finding out what breaks at scale. Now I work with CX and contact-centre leaders on enterprise voice AI — and I write The Voice AI Brief to share what actually works.
Elsewhere: LinkedIn · The Voice AI Brief on Substack.
I work as Lead Solutions Engineer, UK & Ireland at Parloa. This site is my own — Parloa does not sponsor, fund, commission, or review anything published here.
The frameworks and evaluation criteria are vendor-neutral by design. No vendor (including Parloa) is named, ranked, recommended, or criticised in any guide, glossary entry, framework, or note. Views are my own.
If you spot anything that reads as vendor-favourable or vendor-hostile, that is a content bug — please flag it via the corrections page.
See also: editorial policy and corrections.
Credentials and focus
- 20 years across solutions architecture, infrastructure engineering, technical consulting, and presales
- Enterprise telephony at scale — Skype for Business, Lync, SIP, high-availability voice architecture
- Scaled voice AI deployments to 1M+ minutes/month across APAC, including recovery from failed implementations
- Co-founded and scaled a health-tech company to profitability
- Experience as buyer, builder, and advisor to CX and contact-centre leaders
How this site is funded
This site has no advertising, no sponsorship, no affiliate links, no paid placements, and no service packages for sale. It is funded by the author.
Editorial principles
- No vendor agenda. No paid placements, no sponsored coverage, no service packages. No vendor — including my employer — is named, ranked, or recommended in any guide, glossary entry, framework, or note.
- Production over pilot. Claims are grounded in what survives the operating model after go-live.
- Honest economics. Per-minute and per-resolution rates are both quoted on this site; both are modelled into cost per resolved call so the comparison is fair. Net deflection, not gross.
- Entity consistency. One author, one definition, across every page.