More Customers Chose the AI Agent Than Anyone Expected | Tom Chen, Aircall

I've had the experience of stumbling onto an AI voice agent. You can hardly tell at this point that it's not a human. Typically, a human agent can only take one call at a time. But with an AI voice agent on air call, they can take a 100 concurrent ones at a time. I'm still getting phone trees or chat bots that have canned answers, and it's just frustrating. It shouldn't be like that. How do you see the market? Is an AI voice agent going to be as performant as your smartest agent who's been around, who kinda has all the knowledge of the things that are never documented? Probably not yet. But I do think that it is better than the average rep in call center. Can you start by introducing yourself to listeners? Give a little bit of your background so far as it's relevant and how you got to Aircall and then what Aircall is, and and we'll start talking about it more deeply. So I, Tom, I work at Aircall as the chief product officer. When I first joined Aircall about two years ago, it was a little over two years ago, almost getting two and a half. We were in a completely different world. I mean, this was about a year after, I think, ChatGPT had launched. There was some early promise, but I don't think anybody sitting in my shoes or most people's shoes would have guessed how quickly it might have moved. Of course, there were folks who are maybe more prescient than, or or more future looking, better future predictors than than some of us. But I think it probably caught most of us by surprise in terms of how well and how fast it's moved, especially in certain, general AI spaces like coding and others. And so since my time, you know, joining, Aircall to now, you we've really turned from what you would describe as a software SaaS business to much more of an AI business, because almost all customers around the world no longer look at, you know, a phone system or customer communication software as just the software itself, but more around, you know, what can you help me actually resolve? Whether it's tickets from conversations or, you know, can can you actually autonomously handle conversations? And while deployment and, you know, uptick is not across the entire world uniformly at a 100%, we're still in the single digit early innings. You can bet that all businesses are thinking about it and trying to find, you know, a future partner who have the capabilities that they can really lean on and trust, moving forward. And trust is a is a is an interesting thing because it it runs across the gamut of not just the AI services, but also your base reliability in, you know, whether it's your chat or telephony services, your ability to navigate, the different telco regulations around the world. All of those …