Ada vs SESTEK

Ada is an AI customer service platform from Toronto, founded in 2016 by Mike Murchison and David Hariri. It started as a no-code chatbot builder and has repositioned itself as an agentic customer experience platform: AI agents that answer and resolve customer inquiries end to end across messaging, email and voice, rather than deflecting them to a help article.

The agent orchestrates several large language models, reads your knowledge base, and uses Actions to call your systems so it can look up orders, change bookings or issue refunds. Playbooks encode multi-step standard operating procedures, and the platform includes testing, coaching, analytics and an automated resolution metric to track how many conversations finish without a human. Ada lists SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR and PCI DSS compliance. There is no self-serve plan: pricing is quote-based after a sales demo.

Ada fits large consumer brands with hundreds of thousands of support conversations a year, such as Pinterest, monday.com, Grab and Life360. Smaller teams usually get faster value from Intercom Fin or Tidio Lyro, which price per resolution and install in an afternoon. Zendesk AI agents make more sense if you want to stay inside one helpdesk vendor, and Decagon and Sierra are the main newer enterprise rivals.

In February 2026 Ada launched a unified Reasoning Engine that powers its agents across all channels from one intelligence layer. When evaluating, ask for a pilot on your own transcripts and compare the automated resolution rate, not deflection, against your current baseline.

SESTEK is a conversational AI and speech technology company founded in Istanbul in 2000 by Levent Arslan, a former Boğaziçi University professor. Since October 2022 it has been part of Unifonic, the Saudi customer engagement platform. SESTEK builds AI for contact centers: virtual agents that answer calls and chats, in-house speech recognition and text to speech, and analytics that transcribe and score every customer conversation. Much of the suite has been sold under the Knovvu brand.

The product line covers AI agents (the Knovvu Virtual Agent gained LLM-based agentic capabilities in April 2025), Agent Assist and Agent Copilot for live guidance to human agents, a Virtual Translator, conversational analytics, automated quality management (AQM) and coaching. The same codebase runs in the public cloud, hybrid or fully on-premise. There are no public plans: every deal is an enterprise project with a custom quote.

SESTEK fits large contact centers in banking, telecom and energy, especially where Turkish or Arabic speech accuracy and on-prem hosting matter. It is not a self-serve chatbot for small sites. Yellow.ai is broader on omnichannel chat, Ada is a cloud-only service automation product for digital brands, and CBOT is the closest local rival in Turkish banking; SESTEK is stronger on voice and speech analytics than all three.

Recent proof point: Arçelik put Knovvu Agentic AI live in its Turkish call center in January 2026, and SESTEK's case study reports 70% of cases resolved without a human agent. Buying tip: run a pilot on your own recorded calls first.