A system, method and program product that provides a conversational AI platform using a declarative graph model. A system is included having a natural language (NL) interface the receives NL user inputs from a message queue; an intent analyzer that determines an intent of a received NL user input and loads a graph associated with the intent; and a graph traversal manager having traversal logic to first traverse the graph first along a start path from an intent node to a dialog node, then traverse an ask path to a question node to obtain missing entity data, then traverse a contacts path to a service node to execute an external service and return a fulfillment response based on submitted entity data, then traverse a replies with path to a response node to create a formatted fulfillment response that is forwarded to the message queue.