Case Study: PolyAI achieves low-latency, customer-controlled RAG with SurrealDB

High-performance customer service AI powered by RAG

PolyAI, a leader in conversational AI, faced a challenge as its enterprise customers wanted to integrate their own knowledge bases with the Agent Studio platform. Customers sought to avoid vendor lock-in, retain full data ownership, and maintain the real-time performance critical for natural voice interactions, without any increase in perceptible latency.

SurrealDB was integrated as an external RAG provider, requiring no architectural changes or data migration. The solution operated within the customer's own infrastructure, providing full data control. SurrealDB delivered a low-latency vector search that added only ~30ms of delay, matching PolyAI's internal performance and ensuring conversations remained seamless and natural.

PolyAI

Colman Yau

Vice President of Engineering