Introduction

AI phone calls will transform how the healthcare, customer engagement, and personalized services industries operate: to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.

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This technology that was impossible a year ago, and is just now possible - because of advancements by OpenAI, ElevenLabs, and the AI calling platform Bland - has a million different use cases. Let's dive into them.

But first, aren’t robocalls and AI calls the same?

Over time, as AI agents sound and feel increasingly human, people will prefer speaking with them over actual humans. After all, AI agents are always incredibly friendly and helpful. They make you feel listened to, cared for, and supported.

The stages of transformation

To start, AI calls will replace existing tedious and manual phone calls. In the healthcare domain, doctors' offices constantly make phone calls to patients, other offices, pharmacies, and insurance companies. Americans spend an incredible 12 MILLION hours/week making phone calls to insurance (Source: Becker’s hospital review). The first applications of AI calling will enable patients, offices, and pharmacies to delegate work to AI callers (like waiting on hold for insurance and scheduling appointments).

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Next, AI calls will enable entirely new applications. Sticking to the healthcare example: for most health plans, phone numbers are the best method of contacting members, especially those from low-income populations who are hard to reach. Currently, engaging all those patients with phone calls would be incredibly expensive, to the point that it doesn’t make financial sense. The advent of AI phone calls, though, enables health plans to constantly check in with every member to ensure they adhere to medications, show up for annual checkups, and pay their insurance bills. This represents both a massive technological shift and a huge opportunity for health insurance to make billions in additional revenue.

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Notice that there are two stages of transformation. The first is replacing humans making phone calls with AI agents and the second is creating entirely new use cases for phone calls, now that they’re drastically more cheap, scalable, and impactful.

Customer engagement

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Every single industry, from e-commerce (Postscript, Attentive, and Emotive) to automotive (Text2Drive, ShopGenie), to small business (Podium) has platforms for customer engagement. Such platforms enable companies to retain customers by sending them promos at crucial touchpoints and offering them regular reminders and updates.

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SMS - the current medium of communication between companies and customers - feels impersonal and spammy, because each interaction is automated. Phone calls, on the other hand, are hyper-personalized; customers feel cared for when speaking to agents who understand their entire purchase history and preferences, and help them navigate new purchasing decisions. Given how impactful customer experience is to boosting and retaining revenue, engagement platforms will very soon integrate hyper-personalized calling products into their platforms.

Personalized Services

Therapists, career coaches, college counselors, and every other type of 1 on 1 human-to-human interaction can be augmented and replicated with AI.

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The best therapist will train an AI to answer questions and help patients just like they would. Then they’ll enable anyone to get therapy - at a fraction of the typical cost. The same goes for career coaches, college counselors, and maybe one day Lawyers (e.g. DoNotPay).‍

Wrapping it all up

AI phone calling will change the world. Pretty soon, voice interaction will become the default way people, customers, and companies communicate; it’s the fastest, most emotionally expressive way to share your thoughts and get help. And it’s the most personalized channel of communication. If you want to add AI calling capabilities to your own business or application, check out Bland AI’s phone calling platform. It’s free to start, $0.07/minute to continue. Docs are linked here.