About
Mike Murchison is CEO of Ada, the agentic customer experience company. A serial…
Articles by Mike
Activity
18K followers
-
Mike Murchison posted thisJohn Ruffolo and I wrote about "AI for All," Canada's new national AI strategy Evan Solomon released last month. The strategy is built on trust, opportunity, and sovereignty, and it points everything at one goal: adoption. That is the correct target. Canada is world-class at inventing AI and middling at using it. Only 12% of Canadian businesses have meaningfully put AI to work. Small businesses in the Nordic countries are at 29-42% We push on three things: 1. Focus. Six pillars and dozens of initiatives risk delivering nothing at scale. A good strategy says what it will not do. 2. Fewer funds. More funds are not more outcomes. Each new fund adds applications, bureaucracy, and reporting for the founders we say we're helping. Consolidate before creating the next one. 3. Procurement over grants. Nothing builds a durable company like a real customer. Government is the largest buyer in the country. It should lead with demand. Sharing the full piece in the comments.
-
Mike Murchison posted thisOnly about 12% of Canadian businesses use AI today. Canada's national AI strategy is built around changing that, and I think that's exactly right. Productivity growth, new businesses, quality of life - all of it is downstream of adoption. We've had the research foundation and talent for a long time. What's been missing is a national, unapologetic, commitment to making sure all of that translates into how Canadians actually work and live. I think this strategy begins to change that, and I think the ambition should go even further. I believe Canada can become the most AI literate population in the world. At some point we'll need to get more sophisticated about how we measure this; not just whether people and businesses are using AI, but whether it's creating genuine impact. That conversation is coming. But right now, the most important thing is speed. Get it into people's hands and lead by example. We're proud to be contributing to this at ada CX 🇨🇦
-
Mike Murchison shared thisHad the privilege of joining the stage at the University of Toronto's Convocation Hall with Reynold Xin, co-founder of Databricks, in a conversation moderated by Amanda Lang. The last time I spent meaningful time in this building was first-year organic chemistry. This time the subject was pretty different: we talked about why taste matters more than ever in the era of AI, how to surround yourself with people who raise your level of ambition, and the outsized opportunity in front of the world's most driven young people. I'd argue a disproportionate number of them are coming from the University of Toronto. Thanks for a great event!
-
Mike Murchison shared thisI'm looking forward to speaking at the World Aviation Festival this October in Lisbon alongside these customer experience leaders from airlines around the world!Mike Murchison shared this✈️ At World Aviation Festival 2026, this expert customer leaders panel will explore how airlines are innovating their customer experience strategies. Topics include: • Building a strong customer proposition and brand experience • How Agentic AI and new communication tools are reshaping airline-customer interactions • Using technology to minimise friction and remove customer pain points • Identifying which CX trends are truly transformational, and which are simply hype With Beatriz Guillen from Iberia, Rossen Dimitrov from SAUDI AIRLINES, Samson Arega Bekele (BA, MSc) from Ethiopian Airlines, Rajesh Dogra from Air India Limited, and Mike Murchison from ada CX. ➡️ Book your ticket now and save €1,225 with our early bird discount: https://lnkd.in/e6c22hka
-
Mike Murchison shared thisThis past week we had our company-wide offsite, Stradaganza, in Toronto and it was our most energizing one yet. The focus, intensity, and creativity on display were something else. It was also our most productive Stradaganza to date both in sharpening how Ada is empowering the world's agentic customer experience teams and in the quality of new experiences we're about to bring to life. I couldn't be more excited about it. One of my favorite moments: we ran an AI buddy-up program where our team shared their Claude Code setups with each other, side by side. Just an hour long, but I think the impact will be outsized. It's one thing to understand someone's AI stack intellectually. It's a different thing entirely to actually see it in action over their shoulder. Endless gratitude to the Ada team for your hard work, and for putting our customers first every single day. It's an honor to get to build alongside you. And a huge thanks to our People Ops team for pulling Stradaganza together so thoughtfully. You nailed it 🚀
-
Mike Murchison shared thisTuning in from our Stradaganza, our company-wide offsite. Such great energy!
-
Mike Murchison shared thisGood window into what it’s like to work at Ada. (And we love our UofT and Waterloo coops!)Mike Murchison shared thisOn my first day at ada CX, I learned that all employees are called Ada Owners, and I didn’t quite get why. First off, the way this team works on a daily basis is unlike any other I’ve seen. Not only has AI been adopted, but it’s become core to every function at the company, from sales to marketing to product development. One of my biggest takeaways is that POCs are the new standard. Have an idea? Build it, demo it, and if it’s good enough, run with it and deploy it. If it’s not, restart the process. The time cost of failure today is just so low, that the volume of this ideation loop leads to an extreme rate of product growth that’s going to become the norm in this industry in the next couple of years. That culture is already there at Ada. It was special to be part of, especially because that loop led me to take end-to-end ownership of an MCP server where I built, tested, and shipped tools I genuinely found useful for our product. But to be able to build AI-native operations, it takes a TON of people to be on board with trying, failing, iterating, and sharing their experiences and learnings. Now this is where I was most surprised: the people at Ada are insanely meticulous about the product, but they care equally as much about each other and the interns. My incredible team, Adam B., Cristina Staicu, Michael Bassili, Elan Langburt, Vanessa P., and Kai T. treated me like a real engineer. They questioned my solutions, provided constructive criticism, offered help, and celebrated my wins, all with a smile. The Adoption Team is small but mighty, and I’m so thankful to have been a part of a mini chapter of it. By the end, I understood that being an Ada Owner means ownership isn’t tied to a role or title. Everyone is responsible for the work, the product, and each other. There’s something magical in the air at Ada that I can’t explain, and I’m so looking forward to following the team's progress. Big things are coming.
-
Mike Murchison shared thisExcited to introduce Ada Labs, our agentic cx research division. Ada has been quietly doing applied AI research for years: pioneering the use of LLMs to evaluate conversational quality, inventing new retrieval paradigms, and building multimodal reasoning architectures that now process more than 2 trillion tokens a month. Now, we're making more of our research public. I'm particularly excited about our work ahead on memory systems, agent-to-agent collaboration, super-long horizon task execution, and hyper-specialized small models. Our team is growing - join and shoot me a DM if you're interested in learning more!
-
Mike Murchison shared thisGreat CX is revenue-generating. Ada-powered agents can now process payments securely. With Ada's PCI DSS compliance, when a customer is ready to pay, cardholder data flows directly between them and the payment processor. Ada never stores it, never touches it. The processor handles the transaction and Ada picks back up in the same thread, confirms the booking, sends the receipt.Mike Murchison shared thisMaking payments inside AI conversations has always hit the same wall. A customer is ready to book a flight, renew a subscription, or complete a purchase — and the AI agent hands them off to a human. The conversation breaks, and the experience breaks with it. Ada’s PCI DSS compliance changes that. When a customer is ready to pay, cardholder data flows directly between them and your PCI-compliant processor. Ada never stores it, never touches it. The processor handles the transaction. Ada picks back up in the same thread, confirms the booking, and sends the receipt. For your customers: one conversation, start to finish. For enterprises: a turnkey solution that fits within your existing compliance program. Watch it in action 👇
Mike Murchison commented on a post
5d
Excited for this!
-
Mike Murchison liked thisMike Murchison liked thisAda is now on Instagram. Ada-powered AI agents can answer Instagram DMs natively: text and images in both directions, interactive replies, and human handoff supported end to end. Connecting is fully self-serve: sign in with Meta from the dashboard, and your agent is live in your DMs. Here's what that means for your customers: -A shopper replies to a story and gets stock and order status answered in seconds, not hours. -A traveler DMs mid-disruption and gets rebooking options right in the conversation. -A subscriber gets sign-in help in the app they already have open. The DM inbox is where customers reach brands first. Now it's where they get answers. Your customers are already in your Instagram DMs. Now your AI agent is too. Learn more here → https://lnkd.in/g4w_5BZY
-
Mike Murchison liked thisMike Murchison liked thisA while back, I wrote that the hard part of voice AI isn't latency or voice quality, it's behavioural science. Since then, I've been focused on one of the toughest problems in voice experiences today: interruptions. Humans make noise to indicate that they are actively listening. For example: "Yeah." "Okay." "Mm-hmm." Linguists call these signals "backchanneling." In some languages these cues aren't optional: in Japanese they're called aizuchi, and skipping them reads as checked out, or even rude. Voice agents hear all of this as interruption, leaving the politest, most engaged callers with the most broken experience. Take the word "yes." When the agent is in the middle of explaining something, a caller's "yes" just means keep going. Right after a yes/no question, that same "yes" is the answer. The audio is identical; only the moment changed. To a voice agent, these moments are ambiguous, so it guesses. Guess wrong, and it either stops for a nod or talks straight over an answer. Two weeks ago, OpenAI replaced ChatGPT's default voice mode with GPT-Live: a full-duplex model that listens while it speaks. I had hoped it would solve this backchanneling problem for good. Early tests showed it handles a murmured "mm-hmm" fine. But a plain "ok" while it's answering, meaning nothing more than "I'm listening," can stop it mid-sentence. Recently I had a breakthrough. Most backchannel and interruption solutions focus on what the caller says, in isolation. They study the energy and tone of the caller's audio to decide if something was a backchannel, and that helps a little. But the real signal is what the agent is saying at that moment, and what that speech invites. Then I learned I wasn't the first. In 1974, the sociologists Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson published a study of how people take turns in conversation. Their finding: listeners don't wait for you to finish; they project what's coming from what you're saying. Schegloff later wrote an entire paper about "uh huh." He called these tokens continuers: signals that just mean keep going. Whatever you say to someone, you can roughly anticipate what comes back. Explain something, and you can expect small signs of listening. Ask a question, and you can expect an answer. The question-answer case has a name too: the adjacency pair. Every action invites a matching response. So I've been working on a project called act-aware turn-taking. As our agent speaks, it tags what each moment invites. Mid-explanation: expect nods, talk through them. Right after a yes/no question: the next "yes" is an answer, stop and listen. Waiting on a booking reference: expect letters and numbers. The listening side stops guessing and starts anticipating. Now, when that ambiguous "yes" arrives, the agent already knows which one it invited and what to do with it.
-
Mike Murchison liked thisMike Murchison liked thisWould be an understatement to say that my entire family loves YETI and mornings would fall apart if we can’t find all the yeti gear my son takes to school. So when I log on to the yeti website and see an ada CX AI agent support the brand - it’s definitely a moment I take pride in! Extremely grateful to be supporting world class brands like Yeti in elevating their customer experience.
-
Mike Murchison liked thisMike Murchison liked thisWe just got off a prep call for next week’s Consero CX Summit in NYC. We're skipping the high-level AI talk to dive right into what it actually takes to operationalize AI into a high stakes environment. A few things we'll be discussing: -- Fix your data first. No AI tool will save you if your internal knowledge base is outdated and your APIs are broken. Technical debt is a real bottleneck. --Rethink your QA. Instead of managers policing agents with spreadsheets, let agents use AI for self-coaching. It works—one of our panelists saw CSAT jump from 86% to 92% just by shifting this ownership to the agents. -- Look for hidden patterns. AI shouldn't just deflect tickets; it should inform your business strategy. --The chatbot era is (almost) over. The transition to an agentic era is happening fast. I’ll be moderating this session next week with Colin Crowley (Quick MD), Joep Everts (Elsevier) and Sharanya Ravichandran (The Wall Street Journal) If you’re attending the summit, come join the session. Let me know if you'll be there. #CustomerExperience #ContactCenter #ConseroCX ada CX
Experience & Education
-
Ada
View Mike’s full experience
See their title, tenure and more.
or
Honors & Awards
-
Forbes Top 30 Under 30
Forbes
https://www.forbes.com/30-under-30/2019/enterprise-technology/#77997bd81e1d
-
Next 36 Alumni Award
Next Canada
Languages
-
French
-
Recommendations received
-
LinkedIn User
4 people have recommended Mike
Join now to viewOther similar profiles
Explore more posts
Explore collaborative articles
We’re unlocking community knowledge in a new way. Experts add insights directly into each article, started with the help of AI.
Explore More