Five attempts
In late August the BBC reported on a 71-year-old woman in northern England. A stroke had changed her speech. Her GP practice had recently put an AI assistant on the phone to take appointments.
She tried five times. The assistant could not understand her.
She then deregistered from the practice where she had been a patient for years. The practice has since switched the system off and put people back on the phone.
This is not an argument against AI on the phone
Before anyone reaches for the comfortable conclusion: the practice had a real problem. Too many calls, too few hands, a queue at eight in the morning that nobody enjoys. That is exactly why they bought the system.
A GP practice is not a trades business. The problem is the same one: a phone that never stops ringing and too few people who can answer it.
So the question is not whether AI belongs on the phone. The question is what was actually bought.
Three more cases, the same fortnight
- A British patient watchdog reported that AI assistants taking notes during medical appointments had written wrong diagnoses and wrong drug names into patient records. Patients noticed, not staff. There is no clear route to get such an entry corrected, and the responsible regulator decided not to classify these systems as medical devices. So nobody is systematically looking. (Guardian, 31 August)
- In Germany, GP practices lost their AI phone assistant when the provider became insolvent. The practices went back to answering the phone themselves overnight. (Günter Born, 25 August)
- A contact-centre trade publication ran the numbers on one deployment with more than 37,000 calls. Advertised: up to 60 percent of calls handled without a human. Measured: 11.7 percent. Both figures come from the provider, the comparison from the publication. (CX Today, 27 August)
The call is the cheap part
None of these four cases failed at picking up. All four failed at what came next.
What an off-the-shelf assistant does reliably: pick up, be polite, take notes, send you a summary. That is real, and it is worth considerably more than an answering machine.
What it does not do is decide where any of it belongs, and answer for that decision. A call can be a job, a complaint, a rescheduled appointment, a question about an unpaid invoice, or the twentieth salesperson this week. Five routes, five different people, five different deadlines.
Whoever does not decide that hands the decision back to the person who used to make it on the phone. Then you have saved the call and lost the morning anyway. Just later.
What the entry tier actually contains
Which is why "we connect it to your systems" is the sentence that matters. And why it appears in almost every brochure.
So I went and looked. One review platform lists 103 products in the category. Going through it, it is more of a catalogue than a market: 61 entries with no rating at all, 53 with no price, and mixed in among them time tracking, appointment booking and ordinary phone systems. Maybe ten to fifteen providers have a meaningful number of users at all.
Published prices run from 0 to 390 euros a month, where the zero is a sandbox tier you are not allowed to serve an actual customer with. At the other end, heise reports on one provider's customers paying more than 100,000 euros a year. These are not the same products wearing different price tags.
Then I went through five entry tiers, the way a customer would receive them. In three of the five, the connection is not included. One unlocks customer records only one price step up, one only in the enterprise tier, one delivers nothing but an email summary. In two it is included from the entry price. For half the catalogue it cannot be established at all, because no price is published.
So the sentence is usually true. Just not in the tier being discussed. That is the difference between a lie and a brochure.
Two more things. These entry tiers often allow one conversation at a time: one number, one user, one call. The second customer ringing at 10:40 still does not get through. And almost every German-language market overview you find when searching was written by a provider that is itself on the list.
Three questions no brochure answers
None of them is technical. All three can only be answered by someone who knows your business.
- Which field does it write into, and who owns that field? Not "we have a connection," but: which field, in which system, the one your team opens every morning anyway? If it writes into your system, a provider's insolvency costs you a phone assistant. If it only writes into theirs, it also costs you everything it ever wrote down.
- Whose rules does it sort by, and who notices a mistake? Who decides what counts as a job and what counts as a complaint? Who changes that when you add a service in spring? And who catches it when the assistant misunderstands something, you or your customer? In all four cases above, it was the customer.
- Who answers when the voice promises something? Since 2 August, EU rules say a caller has to learn there is an AI on the other end. Who says it, who can show it was said, and who replies when somebody complains? If that is not in the offer, it is nowhere.
I build these systems, so read the next sentence with the appropriate discount. Whoever can answer those three questions is not selling you a product, they are selling you work.
What the practice did in the end
It switched the system off and put people back on the phone. That is the most expensive way to answer those three questions: afterwards.
And the assistant did work. It picked up, it was polite, it understood what most callers wanted. It failed on the one caller it could not understand, and on the fact that nobody was responsible for noticing.
Answered is not handled. For the woman in northern England, that difference was an appointment she never got.