Notes from London: Building AI Across EMEA

A year ago, I joined Decagon in New York. Since then, the job has taken me a little farther than I expected.

I came to London, spent time with customers across Europe, and saw firsthand what it looks like to build AI across markets, languages, and cultures.

The biggest thing I’ve learned is simple: scale comes from staying close to customers, to the product, and to the people you’re building with.

In Stockholm, that meant sitting with a team spanning product and customer service over three kanelbullar each and hearing how much they love Duet. In Munich, it meant helping build a voice agent that could guide users through signing up, then debriefing with the engineers at a beer hall. In Amsterdam, it meant seeing what happens when a customer trusts you enough that the relationship starts to feel less like vendor and client, and more like a true partnership.

The best enterprise work rarely comes from solving a problem once. It comes from understanding it deeply enough to turn what you learn with one customer into something that can scale across many more.

Over the past year, that has changed my role too. Increasingly, my job has become about strategic enablement: giving teams enough context to move quickly, and creating the conditions for us to take on bigger problems faster, together.

Sometimes the results show up in unexpected ways. For one customer, our Swedish voice agent Max was nominated for (and won!) the monthly employee award for the quality of service he provided. With another, I helped launch voice across 20 languages, and somewhere along the way found myself testing conversations in Dutch: “Ik heb een probleem.”

One of our agents also helps people move money around the world. I certainly stayed close to the product: that agent even helped me pay for my own first month’s rent here.

Later, when the project lead presented the agent to his entire company, one of the first questions he asked was, naturally, “Who will win the World Cup?”

AI agents are becoming part of how companies actually operate: talking to customers across languages, completing real workflows, and apparently even getting nominated for employee awards.

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The London office

London has been the home base for it all. It’s the place where work and the people around it have started feeling inseparable.

Some days, our Liverpool Street office (with a superb view over London) is full of conversations about customers, deployments, and the next market we’re building for. On another day, a senior engineer comes back from Switzerland with chocolates for everyone.

Our sales leader showed up in a bright red England jersey for a World Cup match, which we all watched together over Pizza Pilgrims.

Lunch conversations have wandered from weddings and childhood stories to travel plans and a director’s decision to take a Lime bike (sorry, cycle) to the office in pouring rain.

I’ve come to think that building an international team is less about putting people from different places in the same room and more about creating enough trust that people share context, take ownership, and genuinely enjoy building together. That is increasingly how I think about leadership, too: stay close enough to understand the problem, but build teams strong enough to solve much bigger ones together.

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One year later

Fittingly, my parents visited our London office on my exact one-year Decagon anniversary. A year earlier, I couldn’t have predicted that I would be living in London, working with customers across Europe, speaking questionable Dutch to AI agents, helping teams take on increasingly ambitious work, or using an agent we’d built together to help pay my own rent.

When my parents came into the office, I expected to introduce them to my colleagues. Instead, I realized I was introducing them to my friends.

My time at Decagon has changed the scale of what I think is possible, not just in the products we can create, but in the partnerships I can help build and the problems I want to spend my time solving.

New York will always be home.

But one year after joining Decagon, standing in our Liverpool Street office with my smiling parents, surrounded by people who had become friends, the world felt a lot smaller than it had twelve months earlier.