Original article posted on the National Retail Foundation website.

One of the new solutions at NRF 2025: Retail's Big Show Europe was Voicebox, an enterprise-ready platform that captures customer feedback by processing voice into actionable intelligence. In this interview, Voicebox's CEO, Karan Gupta discusses the importance of customer experience, privacy and what makes Voicebox unique.

How does Voicebox reflect a shift in customer experience strategy? What sets the solution apart?

We're witnessing a necessary shift from reactive customer support to proactive customer intelligence. Today's consumers have incredibly high expectations, yet paradoxically, they've come to expect very little when it comes to brands actually responding to their needs. This disconnect has to change. The fundamental problem is that brands are operating on incomplete data. Most current solutions - surveys, analytics, transaction data - only capture post-purchase behavior. They don't reveal what customers were actually thinking in the moment. They don't know that a customer browsed for 20 minutes, got frustrated, and bought from a competitor instead. They're missing the "why" behind every decision.

Voicebox changes this by creating touchpoints throughout the entire customer journey. From the moment someone enters your store or lands on your website, through checkout, delivery, product assembly, and even years into product ownership - we capture authentic voice feedback at every critical moment. Think of Voicebox as email reimagined for voice. It's designed to be just as simple and fast for your team to manage, but instead of asking customers to type lengthy responses they'll never complete, they simply speak for 30 seconds. In that time, they naturally share 100+ words of rich context - compared to the 5-10 words you might get from a traditional survey, if you're lucky enough to get a response at all.

What makes this powerful is the intelligence layer. You're not just collecting voice notes - you're getting location-aware insights, campaign performance data, and AI-driven recommendations about exactly what customers want. The system identifies patterns across thousands of voices and surfaces opportunities you'd never catch manually. But the real differentiator is Voicebox’s AI-driven automation. Once you have these deep insights from authentic first-party voice data, Voicebox automatically triggers appropriate responses - whether that's a personalised WhatsApp acknowledgment, a targeted coupon, a referral link, or an alert to your customer service team. The customer feels heard, and you've acted on their feedback before your competitor even knows they exist.

Can you tell us about Voicebox's privacy-first framework?

Privacy isn't just a feature for Voicebox - it's fundamental to our company. Let me put this in context: I've led technology at two public retail companies, invested in startups and advised many. I've seen firsthand how customer data flows through typical retail tech stacks. Most solutions today connect to 80+ third-party vendors that people don't even know about. Your consumer data is shared with hundreds of companies you've never heard of, each capable of aggregating and monetising that information.

As someone with a background in AI Robotics, and many years across Silicon Valley tech, I know that privacy cannot be retrofitted. If you want to build a privacy-first company, it has to be in the DNA from day one. It’s why we built Voicebox from scratch with privacy at its core. Voicebox does not connect to Google Analytics or any third-party tracking software. We built our own analytics pipeline and audit logging system. The entire platform can run on an airplane with no internet connection - it's designed to be that secure and self-contained.

We're inspired by Europe's strict privacy standards and are already compliant with or in certification for GDPR, SOC2, CCPA, and HIPAA. We don't use customer data for AI training. We don't send data to third-party AIs like ChatGPT. We host and run our own AI models, giving enterprises complete control over their customer intelligence.

What are your predictions for retail trends in the near future, and how is Voicebox designed to respond?

Some things in retail never change: customers always want better value, faster delivery, and products that last. What's fundamentally changing is how customers evaluate the brands they engage with. Simply having good products or convenient locations isn't enough anymore. Customers have unlimited options. They're choosing brands based on experience, on feeling valued and heard. Social proof and authentic engagement are becoming primary drivers of purchase decisions.

Three trends are converging that make voice intelligence critical: First, consumers are increasingly willing to share feedback through voice - it's how they communicate with friends, why wouldn't they communicate with brands the same way?

Second, privacy regulations are tightening globally. Governments are implementing strict rules around AI usage, data ownership, and customer consent. Voicebox is already built for this future - we can deploy different LLMs based on regional regulations, run entirely on-premise for sensitive industries, and guarantee data sovereignty.

Third, the entire retail industry is recognising that traditional feedback methods are broken. Surveys don't work. Focus groups don't scale. Reviews are gamed. Voice is the only channel that captures authentic, in-the-moment customer truth at scale. Voicebox resonates - it’s why NRF has selected Voicebox for their Innovators Showcase three times - Singapore, Paris, and now New York. It's why major retailers like those in our pipeline are moving quickly to implement voice intelligence. And it's why major conferences themselves are choosing Voicebox instead of traditional event surveys which get ignored.

The future of retail isn't about collecting more data - it's about collecting the right data, and turning it into immediate action, to ultimately better serve the customer. That's what Voicebox is built to do.

Voicebox is currently working with leading retailers globally and will be showcasing at NRF 2026: Retail's Big Show in New York. For more information, visit vbx.to.