AI now answers your customers' calls. Soon it will make them too.

Two announcements this week put AI on both ends of a business phone call. Ringg, a voice-agent platform, says its agents resolve up to 65% of routine customer requests without a human, and Google has started testing a Gemini feature that calls businesses for its users. If your business takes bookings or support by phone, both ends now affect you.

Voice agents already resolve most routine calls at large companies

In an OpenAI case study, Ringg says its agents handle more than 7 million connected calls a month. At Indian insurance platform Policybazaar, 67% of calls are handled without a human and average response time fell from 8-12 minutes to under 60 seconds. Practo, a healthcare platform, reports 85% first-call resolution, more than 1,000 bookings a day through the agent, and operating costs 70% below its previous human-led workflow.

Beyond answering questions, the agents check policies, pull account records, schedule appointments, update the CRM, and hand the case to a human with a summary when they can't finish it.

ElevenLabs, whose voice runs Klarna's first-line phone support for 35 million US customers, says the setup depends on the call. Informational calls can run on open-source models. For authentication, transactions or refunds, CEO Mati Staniszewski says "there's no room for error."

Your customers' AI assistants are starting to call you

Google's "Call for Me" lets Gemini phone a business to ask whether a product is in stock, book a restaurant table, move an appointment or put items on hold. It navigates phone menus and waits on hold, calling from the user's own number while the user follows a live transcript and can take over.

It is still a test, limited to US Pixel 11 owners with a paid Gemini subscription. TechCrunch reports the AI will "introduce itself," but not whether it tells the business it is an AI. Meta's AI agents can already place calls for users.

Disclosure is the open question on both ends

Staniszewski: "I think there should be disclosure at this time," because callers "don't want to feel cheated on that call." He suggests offering a choice when the wait for a human is long, such as 30 minutes, and says callers almost always pick the agent, a claim from a company that sells the agents.

Routine calls go to the agent, money and identity stay with people

These systems handle the repetitive calls: availability, bookings, rescheduling, status. Calls that move money or verify identity are where even the vendors say errors are costly. And some bookings will start arriving from customers' assistants instead of customers.