PolyAI vs Replicant (2026)

Agents call customer written tools, which are functions with state variables, return values and a conversation API client, and API integrations during a call. Integrations include Salesforce, Zendesk ticketing, Epic EHR, Stripe, PCI Pal, OpenTable, Tripleseat, HotSOS, Gladly and Google Sheets, with contact center handoff to Genesys, NICE CXone, Five9, Amazon Connect and others.

SourcePolyAI, docs.poly.ai (Tools introduction, Integrations overview)read 2026-09-28

Connectors that work out of the box come in six categories. CCaaS covers Genesys, Five9, NICE inContact, Talkdesk, Amazon Connect, Ujet and 8x8, CRM covers Salesforce, Zendesk, ServiceNow, Kustomer and Gladly, ERP covers SAP and PeopleSoft, iPaaS covers MuleSoft and Twilio, point of sale covers Stripe and Shopify, and telephony covers Cisco, Avaya, Telnyx and Spectrum.

The list is not exhaustive, and custom integrations are available. The agent acts as well as reads, since its use cases cover authentication, billing and payments, and account and order management, which require writing to and transacting against those systems. Prismatic, in the sub processor list, is the integration platform used to manage and scale customer integrations.

Sourcereplicant.com/platform/integrationsread 2026-09-05

Flows are built in a no code builder or the ADK from steps, entities with validation, transition functions and advanced steps. They are triggered from topics or functions and versioned through branches, diffs and staged environments, and the recipes include a retry counter that escalates after failures.

SourcePolyAI, docs.poly.ai (Flows introduction, Triggering flows, Transition functions, Environments)read 2026-09-28

Agents work through to resolution instead of deflecting. They are built with the customer's business logic, knowledge, workflows and guardrails and resolve up to 80 percent of conversations end to end, across use cases that each need several dependent steps, including authentication, billing and payments, account and order management, appointment scheduling and reservations, and call routing. Authentication comes before a transactional step, and it is a use case of its own.

Sourcereplicant.com/platformread 2026-09-05

Agents answer inbound calls on PolyAI numbers or through SIP and contact center integrations, and an API triggers outbound calls. Inbound SMS, RCS, email and web chat reach the agent, and external events post results into running conversations.

SourcePolyAI, docs.poly.ai (Outbound calling setup, Trigger outbound call API, SMS deployment, Email integration)read 2026-09-28

Work reaches the agent over voice, chat and SMS, three separately described channels. SMS sends links and documents to resolve an issue in text, chat handles complex issues beyond a basic chatbot, and agents speak more than 30 languages and dialects. The agent also starts calls itself, with outbound reminder calls as a use case of their own. Voice arrives through the customer's existing estate over a proprietary telephony stack with third party backups, with Cisco, Avaya, Telnyx, Twilio and Bandwidth among the telephony names in its integrations and sub processors.

Sourcereplicant.com/platform/conversation-automationread 2026-09-05

Knowledge base topics are created, updated and deleted in Agent Studio or through the Knowledge Base API, and RAG retrieves from them and from connected external knowledge sources. Transcripts can show the topic citations behind each answer, and new knowledge enters by adding a topic or source, not by retraining.

SourcePolyAI, docs.poly.ai (RAG, External knowledge sources, Knowledge Base API, Studio transcripts)read 2026-09-28

Agents are built on the customer's own conversation data so they emulate that customer's best live agents instead of starting from scratch or relying on trial and error, and the build stage loads the customer's business logic, knowledge, workflows and guardrails.

Proprietary guardrails against hallucination, unsafe responses and prompt injection constrain answers at runtime, and high risk workflows use responses approved in advance.

Replicant describes no index, embeddings layer, retrieval architecture, refresh behavior or citation of sources, so a maintained retrieval structure is claimed but not shown, and nothing explains how the knowledge behind a live answer is kept current.

Sourcereplicant.com/platform/conversation-automationread 2026-09-05

Agent memory is a key value store keyed to the caller's phone number. It is read at the start of each turn and written at the end of a conversation for declared state keys, holding data such as preferences and booking history between conversations, and it expires at the end of the contracted retention period. No manual per caller delete path is described.

SourcePolyAI, docs.poly.ai (Agent memory persistence)read 2026-09-28

There is no memory layer with a stated scope or lifetime. What Replicant describes happens at design time, not run time. Agents are built from the customer's own conversation data so they emulate the best live agents instead of starting from scratch, which is how the agent is authored. All calls that interact with the product are recorded and stored, and information is kept as long as needed to provide the service, which is a data retention position, not state an agent carries between conversations. Customers have no persistence they could name, scope or delete.

Sourcereplicant.com/platform/conversation-automationread 2026-09-05

Five platform guardrails block jailbreaks, hold the agent to its knowledge base, filter unsafe content and escalate at once on emergencies, and handoff actions pass callers to live agents with state. No action waits for a person's sign off before it commits.

SourcePolyAI, docs.poly.ai (Safety guardrails, Handoff actions)read 2026-09-28

Business rules and security policies are written in code outside LLM prompts, so adherence is deterministic, not persuaded.

A supervisory architecture of several agents audits every conversation turn in real time for brand compliance, hallucinations and policy violations, and high risk workflows use responses approved in advance so the model does not compose an answer where a wrong one costs the most.

Proprietary guardrails cover hallucination, unsafe responses and prompt injection, with exhaustive testing for prompt injection, jailbreaks and adversarial misuse, and escalation to a person is a main path with seamless handoff.

Sourcereplicant.com/platformread 2026-09-05

Access control runs on Admin and Member roles, with each member set to None, Read or Edit per area, such as Analytics, Behavior, Knowledge, Flows, Tools, Testing and Deployments, plus a secrets vault with its own access control. No SSO is described. Compliance standards cover ISO/IEC 27001, SOC 2 Type II, PCI DSS, HIPAA where applicable, GDPR and Cyber Essentials Plus, with no dates given.

SourcePolyAI, docs.poly.ai (Role permissions reference, Compliance standards) and poly.ai/securityread 2026-09-28

SOC 2 Type 2, PCI DSS and HIPAA are independently validated, with GDPR and CCPA alignment and certification marks shown, TLS 1.2+ and AES-256 encryption in transit and at rest, intrusion detection and prevention with continuous threat monitoring, and the OWASP Top 10 built into the development lifecycle. Replicant says the platform adheres to the NIST Cybersecurity Framework and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, and it runs a published vulnerability disclosure program.

Access controls include granular role based access control with full audit trails, built in multi factor authentication, and automatic redaction of PII, payment data and regulated content across transcripts, logs and QA analytics. The privacy policy confirms the access model, in which client administrators create users who reach the application through their own identity provider and grant them roles with different permissions, and Auth0 is the authentication sub processor. ISO 27001 is not claimed.

Sourcereplicant.com/safety-ai-securityread 2026-09-05

Studio transcripts carry timestamped turns and audio, with toggles for tool calls, topic citations, flows and steps, and variables. Structured logging from functions, diagnostic layers in conversation review, alert rules, the Conversations API and S3 export sit beside them.

SourcePolyAI, docs.poly.ai (Studio transcripts, Conversation review, Alerts API)read 2026-09-28

Audit visibility covers all conversational behavior, including what the AI said, why, and what triggered it, which traces decisions instead of summarizing outcomes.

Around it, the platform captures and analyzes 100 percent of conversations across channels and agents for full traceability, role based access control carries full audit trails so every interaction with customer data is logged and traceable, real time analytics report dispositions, CSAT and escalation drivers, dashboards can be customized, and any call or set of calls can be questioned conversationally inside the platform. Splunk, in the sub processor list, monitors application logs, which is Replicant's own infrastructure telemetry, not a surface for customers.

Sourcereplicant.com/safety-ai-securityread 2026-09-05

The platform is hosted on AWS, with no deployment or region choice. The compliance standards name no data residency region, and the privacy policy's transfers between the United States, the EEA and the UK rest on contractual clauses and adequacy. Staged environments are release stages, and S3 export copies call data out.

SourcePolyAI, poly.ai/security, docs.poly.ai (Compliance standards) and poly.ai/privacy-policyread 2026-09-28

Data is processed in the continental United States, and no residency choice is offered. Replicant relies on legally provided cross border mechanisms, and all thirteen sub processors sit in the United States and Canada, two of them in the United States only. Cross border protection rests on Standard Contractual Clauses and European Commission adequacy decisions, which are legal mechanisms, not residency. There is no region menu, VPC, single tenant or self hosted option.

The security page has a heading on data residency and sovereignty protections, but the text beneath it covers secure transfers over APIs that keep residency boundaries under GDPR, which is transfer compliance, not a location a customer selects. A recent blog post claiming the ability to define residency and sovereignty boundaries has nothing listed behind it and is contradicted by the privacy policy. Infrastructure across several regions and vendors distributes workloads for automated failover and 99.95% uptime, which is reliability, not a residency choice.

Sourcereplicant.com/legal/privacy-policyread 2026-09-05

The Recipes collection offers copy and paste patterns such as SMS confirmation, retry with handoff, caller ID validation and intent based routing, presented as a starting point. ADK tutorials walk through building agents such as a restaurant booking agent, and no catalog of prebuilt agents ready to adopt is published.

SourcePolyAI, docs.poly.ai (Recipes, ADK tutorials)read 2026-09-28

Seven use cases have their own pages, covering appointments and scheduling, frequently asked questions, outbound calling reminders, call routing, account and order management, authentication, and billing and payments, alongside seven industry configurations, and a builder without code lets teams create and edit agents with natural language instructions.

There is no packaged agent, template or pack a customer selects and puts into service. The use case pages describe what the platform is used for, not an asset to adopt, and Replicant's own delivery model runs the other way, since under Replicare it builds the agents for the first and every later use case as a full service.

Sourcereplicant.com/replicareread 2026-09-05

Customers choose the model for voice and chat from PolyAI's own Raven family, OpenAI models (GPT-5.2, GPT-5 mini and nano, GPT-4.1, GPT-4o) and Amazon Bedrock models (Claude Opus, Sonnet and Haiku, Nova Micro). Bring Your Own Model connects any endpoint on the OpenAI chat completions schema with an API key or bearer token.

SourcePolyAI, docs.poly.ai (LLM model selection, Bring your own model)read 2026-09-28

Several models run under Replicant's own orchestration, and the customer neither selects nor supplies one. The platform coordinates several fine tuned models across speech recognition, text to speech and reasoning for a best of breed result, and model redundancy, which Replicant calls a vendor agnostic architecture, protects against downtime and latency. The sub processor list names the providers and shows where the variety sits, with Azure, Google Cloud and Deepgram for speech recognition, Google Cloud, ElevenLabs and Amazon Web Services for text to speech, and OpenAI for large language models.

Customers get no model selection, routing control or option to bring their own model, and when new models are released Replicant tests and deploys them under Replicare, so the choice sits with Replicant's delivery team, not the customer. Replicant's own sources disagree on how many LLM providers there are. The platform page claims failover across several vendors for telephony, text to speech and LLM, while the sub processor list names a single LLM provider.

Sourcereplicant.com/legal/privacy-policyread 2026-09-05

The Agents API creates and duplicates agents and manages branches, behavior rules, knowledge topics, variants, deployments, numbers, secrets and voices. Conversations, Chat, Messaging, Outbound, Webhooks and Alerts APIs sit beside it, along with iOS and Android SDKs, the ADK CLI, and authenticated Builder and Data MCP servers for PolyAI's own platform.

SourcePolyAI, docs.poly.ai (API reference introduction, MCP overview)read 2026-09-28

There is no developer surface for Replicant's own platform. The site carries no developer portal, API reference, SDK, documentation subdomain or Model Context Protocol server. The Replicare page lists robust APIs for smooth integration, but as a skill of Replicant's own telephony and integration engineers under a heading about the delivery team, with nothing published for a customer to read, authenticate against or call.

The prebuilt connectors run outward into the customer's CCaaS, CRM, ticketing and systems of record, and the agent builder that takes natural language without code is a console, not a way in from outside. Prismatic, in the sub processor list, is the integration platform Replicant uses to manage and scale customer integrations, a build dependency of its own, not a customer capability.

Sourcereplicant.com/replicareread 2026-09-05

Simulation tests describe a caller scenario, generate the caller's turns and mark each assertion passed or failed, including system actions that check the backend operations the agent triggered. Tests run before publishing and in CI through the API, and A/B testing compares variants on live traffic.

SourcePolyAI, docs.poly.ai (Simulation tests, CI automation, A/B testing)read 2026-09-28

Before launch, a Test stage simulates conversations and stress tests an agent for quality and compliance, and teams build and edit agents themselves without code, using instructions in natural language, and test them against synthetic customer data to improve performance. Launches run through A/B tests.

After launch, generative AI scoring assesses every conversation for policy adherence, customer satisfaction and customer effort, with real time dashboards on dispositions, CSAT and escalation drivers and point and click script editing to push a better conversation to every customer. Results can be read and compared before and after launch, and what is tested is the customer's own agent. Under Replicare, Replicant's own team also runs experiments to refine flows and tests new models on the customer's behalf, which is the engagement, not the platform.

Sourcereplicant.com/platformread 2026-09-05

PolyAI agents work over voice, SMS, RCS, email, web chat and mobile SDKs and act through tools and APIs, with no browser, desktop or computer control. DTMF input collection reads a caller's keypad, not an interface the agent operates.

SourcePolyAI, docs.poly.ai (llms.txt, DTMF input collection)read 2026-09-28

There is no browser control, hosted session, virtual desktop or remote computer control. Instead, agents reach the customer's CCaaS, CRM, ERP, point of sale and telephony systems through named connectors that work out of the box and a managed integration layer, and reach customers over voice, chat and SMS.

Sourcereplicant.com/platform/integrationsread 2026-09-05