Nexus vs Yellow.ai: Conversational AI vs Autonomous Agents
Yellow.ai automates customer conversations across 135+ languages. Nexus agents handle the 90% behind the conversation. Compare pricing, scope, and outcomes.
Last updated: February 2026
Quick honest summary
Yellow.ai is a conversational AI platform built for customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) automation. It deploys chatbots and dynamic AI agents that handle customer support conversations, HR helpdesk queries, and IT self-service across 135+ languages and 35+ channels. It does this well, particularly for enterprises with high-volume multilingual customer interactions in APAC and global markets. Sony, Hyundai, Domino's, Randstad, and over 1,300 other enterprises use it for CX automation.
The structural reality of conversational AI, though, is that conversation is only about 10% of the problem. The other 90% is the complex work BEHIND the conversation: collecting data from multiple systems, validating it, making decisions, handling exceptions, routing edge cases, and taking action. Yellow.ai is designed around the conversation. That is the 10%. The validation, the compliance check, the system update, the exception routing, the cross-department coordination that the conversation triggers? That is the 90%, and it still falls to humans or separate tools.
Nexus is designed around the work. It is a solution, not just software: a platform for building autonomous AI agents combined with Forward Deployed Engineers who embed with your team to ensure those agents deliver measurable financial outcomes. Nexus agents handle the conversation when needed, but their real value is in the 90% behind it: collecting data across systems, validating it against business rules, making decisions, routing exceptions, checking compliance, and executing actions end-to-end. The platform handles the technology. The embedded engineering team handles the organizational change that makes it stick.
The right choice depends on which part of the problem you are trying to solve. If your primary challenge is the 10%, automating customer conversations across many languages and channels, Yellow.ai addresses that specific problem with a mature product. If your bottleneck is the 90%, the complex work behind those conversations that spans multiple systems, departments, and decision points, and you need dedicated engineering support to make sure adoption actually happens, that is what Nexus is built for.
Side-by-side comparison
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When Yellow.ai is the better choice
Yellow.ai is the right choice in specific scenarios, and it is worth being honest about that. When the conversation itself IS your bottleneck, not the process behind it, Yellow.ai addresses that well:
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Your primary challenge is multilingual customer support at scale. If you operate across dozens of markets and need customer-facing chatbots in 135+ languages, with nuanced localization rather than just translation, Yellow.ai has invested deeply in this. The language coverage is genuinely strong. For enterprises where multilingual CX is the core problem, that matters.
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You are focused on APAC markets specifically. Yellow.ai has a strong presence and deep expertise in APAC markets: India, Southeast Asia, Middle East. If your CX automation needs are concentrated in these regions, Yellow.ai understands the local channel preferences (WhatsApp, LINE, WeChat), regulatory nuances, and customer interaction patterns better than most competitors.
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Your priority is customer-facing conversations and employee self-service, not cross-department workflows. If the business case is specifically about deflecting customer support tickets, automating FAQs, handling HR policy questions, and improving first-response times, and you are not trying to automate workflows in sales operations, compliance, or data harmonization, Yellow.ai addresses that scope well.
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You need voice AI for contact center automation. Yellow.ai has invested in voice automation for customer service, handling phone-based customer interactions with AI. If your customer support volume is heavily phone-based and the goal is reducing contact center costs through voice automation, that is a capability Yellow.ai has built specifically for.
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You want a self-serve platform without embedded engineering support. Yellow.ai is a software platform. If your team has the internal resources and CX expertise to implement, tune, and maintain conversational AI without dedicated external engineering support, and if the scope stays within CX and EX self-service, the self-serve model works.
When Nexus is the better choice
Enterprises that partner with Nexus tend to share a specific pattern: they have tried automating the conversation and discovered the conversation was never the real problem. It was maybe 10% of it. The other 90%, collecting data from multiple systems, validating it, making decisions, handling exceptions, routing edge cases, taking action across departments, was still falling to humans or stitched-together tools. Conversational AI resolves inquiries through dialogue, but each inquiry represents an entire workflow that still needs to be completed. Nexus exists for enterprises that need the full workflow automated, not just the chat layer on top. And they have learned, often from experience, that deploying that kind of AI at enterprise scale requires more than software. It requires Forward Deployed Engineers who handle the organizational change that makes adoption stick.
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You need agents that complete the work, not chatbots that handle the conversation about it. Yellow.ai automates the conversation layer: what the customer says, how the bot responds, when to hand off to a human. That is the 10%. This same limitation applies to other conversational AI platforms like Ada and Cognigy. Nexus agents automate the 90% behind it: collecting information from multiple systems, validating it against business rules, checking compliance, routing exceptions to the right team, executing actions across CRM, ERP, and internal platforms. The conversation is one step. The work is everything else.
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You need AI across multiple departments, not just customer support and HR helpdesk. Sales research and pipeline monitoring, proposal generation, compliance monitoring across millions of interactions, data harmonization across legacy systems, internal operations automation: these are high-value processes where enterprises need autonomous AI. Yellow.ai's scope centers on CX and EX self-service. Nexus agents operate across all departments. Orange built agents for customer onboarding. A multi-billion euro telecom operator built agents spanning support, compliance, registration, and data harmonization. Lambda built sales intelligence agents monitoring 12,000+ enterprise accounts.
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You want a solution, not just software. Yellow.ai sells a platform. Nexus provides a platform plus Forward Deployed Engineers who embed with your team from day one. Your FDEs identify the highest-impact use cases, design agents for your specific workflows, handle integration complexity, run pilots without consuming your internal resources, and guide the organizational change that makes adoption stick. This is why Nexus has a 100% POC-to-contract conversion rate: every pilot delivers measurable value because there is dedicated engineering making sure it does.
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Your CX problem is actually a process problem. Many enterprises discover that their customer experience issues are not really about the conversation. They are about the broken processes behind it: slow onboarding, manual data entry, siloed systems, inconsistent compliance checks. Unlike workflow automation tools that follow rigid rules, Nexus agents handle the exceptions that break simple automations. Improving the 10% (a better chatbot, faster responses, more languages) does not fix the 90% (a broken onboarding workflow, manual validation across three systems, compliance checks that depend on a person remembering to do them). An autonomous agent that handles the entire workflow does.
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Business teams need to own the AI, not depend on CX platform specialists. Yellow.ai typically requires CX teams and NLU specialists to design conversation flows, train intents, and manage dialog trees. Nexus agents are built and owned by the business teams who understand the workflows, with Forward Deployed Engineers supporting them through the process. No NLU training, no intent libraries, no dialog flow design. Changes happen in hours, not weeks.
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Per-conversation pricing does not align with your use case. If your highest-value workflows are not customer conversations, if the real impact is in onboarding completion, compliance automation, sales intelligence, or cross-department operations, paying per conversation does not map to the value you need. Nexus charges per-agent, meaning you pay for outcomes delivered across any workflow.
What enterprises experienced
Orange Group: beyond conversations, autonomous onboarding
Orange, a multi-billion euro telecom with 120,000+ employees, did not need a multilingual chatbot. A platform like Yellow.ai could have automated the customer-facing conversation in multiple European languages. But Orange needed autonomous agents that complete the entire customer onboarding process end-to-end across multiple European markets, not just the conversation layer.
Their business team (not engineering) built customer onboarding agents using Nexus, collecting customer information, validating data against systems, checking compatibility, routing exceptions, escalating complex cases with full context. Deployed in 4 weeks with a Forward Deployed Engineer embedded alongside the team. 50% conversion improvement. $4M+ incremental yearly revenue.
The distinction matters: a conversational AI platform would handle the customer-facing chat, the 10%. The other 90%, the validation, the system checks, the routing, the compliance, the escalation logic, would still fall to humans. Nexus agents handle both. When the agent is confident, it proceeds autonomously. When uncertain, it escalates to a salesperson with full context. Every step visible. Every decision logged. 100% adoption because the agents integrate into the channels teams already use. 100% compliance because governance is woven into the workflow itself.
A multi-billion euro telecom operator: agents across support, compliance, and registration
Another major European telecom (13,000+ employees, EUR500M+ revenue) had the 10% covered. They had tried conversational AI for the front-end, and it handled customer-facing interactions adequately. But the 90% behind those conversations, compliance validation, cross-system data harmonization, registration processing, escalation routing, still required humans to coordinate across multiple systems.
They built a coordinated suite of agents with Nexus: support agents, compliance agents, registration agents, data harmonization agents, and escalation handlers. Each agent handles a complete business process, not just a conversation.
The result: 40% of their support capacity was freed. Full regulatory compliance maintained across millions of interactions. 12-week deployment timeline. The key difference from a CX chatbot approach: these agents do not just talk to customers. They complete the work. Compliance is verified, data is validated across systems, registrations are processed, and complex cases are routed to the right team with full context.
Lambda: AI company chose to buy, not build
Lambda ($4B+ valuation, 500M+ ARR) is an AI infrastructure company with world-class AI engineers. If any company could build sales intelligence internally, it is Lambda. AI is literally their business.
Their Head of Sales Intelligence, who has no engineering background, built a deep research agent on Nexus that monitors 12,000+ enterprise accounts annually, identifying buying signals, market intelligence, and competitive movements. The result: $4B+ in cumulative pipeline discovered, 24,000+ research hours added annually (equivalent to 12 full-time analysts), with anticipated value exceeding $7M by 2026 as the agent fleet expands across sales and marketing.
Lambda tried open-ended AI agents first (intelligent but inconsistent) and traditional automation (reliable but rigid). They also evaluated building in-house but concluded the opportunity cost was too high. Nexus delivered both: intelligent and consistent. Their CTO said the opportunity cost of engineering time was too high. They deployed in days what would have taken months internally.
This matters for the Yellow.ai comparison because Lambda's use case, autonomous sales intelligence across thousands of accounts, is the kind of workflow that lives entirely outside the CX and EX scope. It is an example of what becomes possible when the platform is built for any department, not just customer-facing conversations.
Key differences explained
Designed around the conversation vs. designed around the work
This is the fundamental distinction, and it matters more than any feature comparison. Conversational AI platforms are designed around the conversation. Agents are designed around the work. These are different categories with different design centers.
Yellow.ai automates customer and employee conversations. A customer sends a message, the bot understands the intent, provides a response or routes to an agent. An employee asks about PTO policy, the bot answers from the knowledge base. The value is in the conversation layer: faster responses, better deflection rates, multilingual coverage. That is the 10%. The other 90%, the work behind the conversation (onboarding the customer, verifying their data across three systems, checking compliance, updating CRM and ERP, routing the exception that does not fit standard rules) is still handled by humans or separate automation. The conversation gets resolved. The workflow it represents often does not.
Nexus agents are designed around the work. An agent handles customer onboarding end-to-end: collecting information, validating against multiple systems, checking regulatory compliance, routing exceptions intelligently, and executing actions across CRM, ERP, and communication platforms. It handles the conversation too, but that is a small part of what it does. Another agent monitors compliance across millions of interactions. Another handles sales intelligence across 12,000+ accounts. Another harmonizes data across legacy systems. None of these are conversation problems. They are work problems.
The conversation is one touchpoint in a larger workflow, roughly 10% of it. Yellow.ai optimizes that touchpoint. Nexus automates the full workflow. For enterprises where the real bottleneck is the 90% behind the conversation, not the conversation itself, this distinction determines which platform delivers the outcome they need.
CX/EX self-service vs. enterprise-wide agent platform
Yellow.ai positions for both CX and EX (Employee Experience). Its EX capabilities cover HR policy FAQs, IT helpdesk queries, leave requests, and similar self-service interactions. These are valuable, but they are still the 10%: an employee asks a question, the system answers or routes it. The work behind the question (processing the leave request across HR, payroll, and manager approval systems, or resolving the IT issue across ticketing, provisioning, and access management) remains outside the platform's scope.
Nexus is department-agnostic and workflow-complete, designed for the 90%. The same platform that deploys customer-facing agents also deploys sales intelligence agents, HR people analytics agents, compliance monitoring agents, and operations agents. Orange uses Nexus across customer onboarding and support operations. A European consulting firm built 5 agents spanning their entire business lifecycle: interviews, proposals, staffing, HR, and project matching. Lambda built a sales research agent that monitors thousands of accounts autonomously. None of these are conversation problems. They are work problems that Nexus solves with agents designed around the work.
The question for enterprises is not "which CX/EX platform is better?" It is "is the conversation our bottleneck, or is it the work behind the conversation?"
Software vs. solution: the service layer that changes the outcome
This is where Yellow.ai and Nexus are most fundamentally different. Yellow.ai sells software. You implement it, configure it, maintain it.
Nexus is a solution: platform plus service. Forward Deployed Engineers embed with your team from day one. They do not just help with setup. They identify which use cases will deliver the highest financial impact. They design agents tailored to your specific workflows and systems. They handle the integration complexity. They guide the change management that drives adoption. And they stay engaged through optimization, not just deployment.
This matters because automating the 90%, the complex work behind conversations, touches more systems, more teams, and more organizational habits than automating the conversation itself. Enterprise AI at the workflow level fails at the organizational level far more often than at the technology level. Most platforms sell software and leave you to figure out how to rewire your processes around it. Nexus FDEs handle that rewiring alongside your team. That is why the POC-to-contract conversion rate is 100%: dedicated engineers ensure every pilot delivers measurable value before the enterprise commits.
Multilingual conversations vs. multilingual workflows
Yellow.ai's 135+ language support is genuinely strong for the 10%, the conversational layer. If the goal is a chatbot that speaks to customers in their language, Yellow.ai delivers that well.
But multilingual capability at the conversation layer is different from multilingual capability at the workflow layer. The 90% behind a conversation also varies by market: different regulatory frameworks, different system configurations, different compliance requirements, different process flows. Orange deployed autonomous onboarding agents across multiple European markets and languages. The agents do not just converse in multiple languages. They complete the entire onboarding workflow in each market, adapting to local system requirements, regulatory frameworks, and process variations. The language of the conversation is one dimension. The work behind it, the validation rules, compliance checks, and system integrations that differ by market, is where multilingual complexity actually lives.
Frequently asked questions
Can I use both Yellow.ai and Nexus?
Yes, and it can make sense in specific scenarios. Yellow.ai could handle the 10%, the front-end conversational layer for multilingual customer support across chat, voice, and messaging. Nexus agents would handle the 90% behind those conversations: onboarding, compliance, data validation, escalation workflows, cross-department coordination. They address different layers of the same enterprise challenge. In practice, most enterprises we work with find that Nexus handles both the conversation and the work behind it on a single platform, which simplifies their stack.
We already invested in Yellow.ai for customer support. Does Nexus replace it?
Not necessarily. If Yellow.ai is working well for customer support and HR self-service conversations, it can continue serving that purpose. It handles the 10% well. The question is whether the 10% is the only thing you need to automate. If your enterprise needs AI for the 90% behind those conversations, onboarding workflows, sales operations, compliance monitoring, data harmonization, or any cross-department process that conversational AI does not reach, Nexus addresses that gap. The two can coexist, or Nexus can handle both the conversation and the work behind it on a single platform.
How does Nexus handle multilingual use cases compared to Yellow.ai?
Nexus agents deploy across multiple languages and markets. Orange runs autonomous onboarding agents across multiple European countries and languages. The difference is scope: Yellow.ai's multilingual capability is optimized for the conversational 10%. Nexus agents are multilingual across entire workflows, the 90% that includes validation, compliance checks, system interactions, and escalation logic, not just the conversation. If your multilingual need is purely conversational, Yellow.ai's 135+ language coverage is strong. If you need multilingual workflows end-to-end, where the work behind the conversation also varies by market, Nexus handles that.
What are Forward Deployed Engineers and why do they matter?
Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) are real engineers who embed with your organization throughout the engagement. They are not implementation consultants who disappear after setup. FDEs identify the highest-impact use cases for your specific business, design agents that fit your reality (not generic templates), handle integration complexity so your team does not have to learn the platform from scratch, run pilots without requiring internal engineering resources, and guide the change management that drives adoption. This is the service layer that separates Nexus from platforms that sell software and leave you to figure out the hard part yourself.
How does pricing compare?
Yellow.ai uses usage-based pricing tied to conversation volume, channels, and features. Nexus charges per-agent: you pay for the value the agent delivers, not the number of conversations it handles. Orange generates $4M+ yearly revenue from agents that cost a fraction of what volume-based conversational AI licensing would represent across their markets. Every Nexus engagement starts with a 3-month POC tied to specific outcomes, so you see the math before committing.
We are strong in APAC. Is Nexus relevant for our markets?
Nexus works across markets and is deployed with enterprises operating across Europe, the US, and beyond. Orange operates across Europe and Africa. If your APAC operations need more than customer support chatbots, if you need agents that complete business processes end-to-end, the platform is market-agnostic. The agents integrate with whatever systems and channels your APAC teams use. And the Forward Deployed Engineers work with your team regardless of geography.
Yellow.ai claims EX (Employee Experience) automation too. How is Nexus different?
Yellow.ai's EX capabilities center on the conversational 10%: answering HR policy questions, handling IT helpdesk queries, routing leave requests. These are valuable but limited to the conversation layer. The work behind those interactions, actually processing the leave across HR, payroll, and manager approval systems, or resolving the IT issue across ticketing, provisioning, and access management, is still the 90% that falls outside the platform.
Nexus agents handle the 90%. People analytics agents that surface org health, burnout risk, and internal mobility opportunities. Employee onboarding agents that coordinate IT, HR, and manager tasks across systems. Interview coordination agents that schedule, collect feedback, and build candidate files. Internal mobility agents that match talent, coordinate approvals, and manage transitions. These are not conversations. They are complete business processes, the work behind the conversation, that happen to involve people data.
Worth exploring?
If Yellow.ai handles the 10% well, the customer conversations, but your enterprise has realized the bottleneck is the other 90%, the complex work behind those conversations that spans systems, departments, and decision points, it might be worth seeing how Orange achieved 50% conversion improvement and $4M+ yearly revenue by automating the entire onboarding workflow (not just the chat), or how Lambda built sales intelligence across 12,000+ accounts that identified $4B+ in pipeline.
Every engagement starts with a 3-month proof of concept tied to specific outcomes, with a Forward Deployed Engineer embedded alongside your team. You see the results before committing.
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