Endava & Upstream Works launch AI contact centre platform

AI partnership

Endava and Upstream Works have partnered to launch the Upstream Works AI Experience Platform, with Endava serving as the launch partner.

Endava will implement and deliver the system to enterprise clients in sectors including travel, hospitality, financial services and retail. Aimed at omnichannel contact centres, the platform is designed to manage agentic AI workflows across customer service operations.

The partnership brings together Upstream Works, a long-established contact centre software provider, and Endava, a New York-listed technology services group. Endava will deliver a product that can sit alongside existing contact centre as a service systems rather than requiring a full replacement.

Data control

The platform combines smaller language models tailored for customer experience tasks with private large language models. It can be deployed in cloud environments, in a virtual private cloud or on premises, giving clients greater control over where customer data is held.

That level of data control is likely to matter in regulated sectors such as banking and financial services, where governance and data sovereignty remain central issues in AI adoption. The platform also includes security, privacy, compliance and observability features.

The product is intended to orchestrate AI agents across multiple channels, interactions, business systems and data sources. When a task passes to a human worker, the platform is designed to provide the employee with context, suggested responses and recommended next actions.

Upstream Works has also linked the launch to its AgentNow product, which supports customer interactions across video, voice and chat. The new platform adds AI-led resolution and guidance functions to those exchanges, including during travel disruption and more complex service cases.

Broader industries

The companies said they have worked together for the past year, initially focusing on the travel and airline market. They now plan to use the partnership to target a broader range of industries, extending beyond aviation into hospitality, retail and financial services.

The announcement comes as companies face pressure to improve customer service while keeping tighter control of technology spending. One focus has been whether AI can reduce the volume of avoidable contacts reaching service queues, rather than simply improving how requests are routed once they arrive.

Paul Elliott, Managing Director at Endava, outlined the company's view of the commercial case for the new system.

"The biggest benefit clients see with this platform is how quickly it can deliver real commercial value," said Paul Elliott, Managing Director, Endava. "By partnering together, Endava brings proven expertise in AI-native software engineering and governance to help enterprises realise tangible value faster across dynamic industries such as travel, hospitality, financial services and retail."

His comments reflect a wider debate in the customer experience market over how enterprises move from trials and pilots to operational AI systems that can be integrated into existing technology estates. For many businesses, the cost and disruption of replacing contact centre infrastructure has been a major barrier to broader deployment.

Reasoning-first CX

Upstream Works is positioning the platform around that issue, arguing that inefficient service demand begins earlier in the customer journey. Its commercial leadership framed the problem less as one of call routing and more as one of how organisations address issues before they become queue-based service requests.

"We believe the cost to serve isn't a routing problem, it's a reasoning problem. Most of this is what we know as 'failure demand' - issues that never should have reached a queue in the first place. We built this AI experience platform to solve this issue at the root, and with Endava's enterprise scale and governance behind it, we're defining 'reasoning-first CX', replacing routing as a new category in customer experience," said Palmer.

Endava employs 11,225 people across Europe, the Americas, Asia Pacific and the Middle East. Upstream Works has spent more than 25 years supplying contact centre technology, a history that underpins the platform's focus on integrating with existing systems rather than replacing them outright.