Palona partners with Mila to Accelerate the Future of AI in Sales and Hospitality
We’re excited to share that Palona AI has joined the Mila eLab program, a community-driven entrepreneurship hub for cutting-edge AI startups at one of the world’s leading AI research institutions. This partnership marks a turning point of our journey, as Palona AI has evolved from an ambitious idea to a leading innovator in shaping the future of sales with AI.
Nikita Dvornik, PhD and Professor Steve Liu
About Mila
Founded by Turing Award winner and deep learning pioneer Professor Yoshua Bengio, Mila – Quebec’s Artificial Intelligence Institute is the world’s largest academic research center dedicated to deep learning, uniting over 1,300 machine learning researchers. A globally recognized non-profit organization, Mila drives scientific progress in AI fields such as language modeling, computer vision, and generative models, while promoting the responsible and beneficial use of AI.
How we got here
At Palona, we set out on a bold mission: build agents that don’t just automate tasks but engage like top salespeople. That means understanding customers, building trust, and driving meaningful results, all while staying true to a brand’s voice.
What began as a vision is now reality. Today, our AI agents are working on the front lines of customer-facing businesses, especially in fast-paced sectors like food and beverage. By answering phone calls, handling orders, and responding to guest inquiries, Palona’s voice AI agent helps restaurants boost revenue while delivering the hospitality their guests expect.
This momentum caught the attention of Mila. They saw in Palona a unique opportunity to explore how real-world large-scale AI deployments can inform and accelerate the responsible evolution of AI, grounded in research, tested in practice, and shaped by everyday human interactions. The Mila eLab program is highly selective, welcoming only the most innovative startups tackling high-impact challenges with AI. For us, joining this circle is both an honor and a powerful validation of what we’ve built, and what we’re building next.
What’s next
With support from Mila, we’ll be pushing the boundaries of what agentic AI can do: not just to assist, but to connect. Our goal is to build agents that understand customers at a deeper level, foster trust through natural personalized interactions and truly represent a brand. Backed by cutting-edge research at Mila, we’ll be able to integrate richer context, new modalities, and adaptive behaviors to make every conversation feel less like software, and more like real service.
This collaboration goes beyond the tech. It’s also about deepening our roots in Montreal and Canada, growing our R&D presence in the industry, and creating new opportunities for research, internships, and community engagement.
This partnership marks the beginning of something bigger: a shared commitment to redefine AI-powered commerce. Smarter, more human, and built for the long game. Stay tuned, we’re just getting started.