Thought Voice Bots Were Dead? Turns Out They’re Quietly Replacing Humans And Doing A Better Job - I Will Not Promote

Just listened to a founder who builds AI voice agents for big brands(2x founder here). He’s been working on this for a while and recently raised a sizable round($80M), but what stood out wasn’t the money. It was how far voice AI has come, and how only a few people seem to realize it. Some of the takeaways that stuck with me:

1. Phone calls still work, and AI is finally good at them He used to run a large contact center and noticed something odd. When his team emailed customers, about 2% would respond. When they called them, 20-30% picked up. Most of us assume no one answers phone calls anymore, but that’s not true if someone has just signed up or asked for info. These are high-intent people. High-intent = Quality leads Now that AI agents can handle those conversations without screwing up, companies are quietly swapping humans out. Same results or better, but for a fraction of the cost.

2. Companies keep testing AI in the wrong places One mistake this founder sees all the time is teams running pilots on the smallest possible task. Things like six overnight calls per month. Even if the AI performs perfectly, it doesn’t prove anything. The best move is to pick something that matters to the business and test AI on just 1% of it. That’s low risk, but high signal. It also helps the company get real feedback faster, without wasting cycles.

3. Building the voice agent isn’t the hard part A lot of people think the hard work is building the voice itself. It’s not. That part is getting easier every day. What’s difficult is everything around it. Routing the conversation correctly. Pulling in customer data. Knowing when to escalate. Running tests. Monitoring quality. Handling compliance. Most AI startups skip over all of that and assume the model is enough. It isn’t.

4. The funding didn’t come from hype, it came from customer retention They didn’t raise money by pitching flashy ideas. They pitched customers first, not investors. If a customer liked even one slide in the deck, they’d build that one thing and start charging. No product yet, but revenue came from day one. What convinced VCs later on wasn’t growth. It was that the customers stuck around and kept using the product. That was the real signal.

I always thought voice AI was too clunky to be useful. But after hearing this, it feels like we might be closer to a shift than most people realize.

Has anyone here actually tried replacing parts of sales or support with voice AI? Curious whether it held up or fell apart under real-world pressure.