Introduction

The recent improvements in transcription, large language, and text-to-speech models have ushered in the era of AI phone calling, where AI can hold in-depth, personalized, human-sounding conversations with everyday people.

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Conversational AI will enable a new wave of automation, starting in industries like healthcare - where people spend millions of hours on the phone every week - and then will quickly expand to entirely new applications, like AI therapists and coaches. Soon, AI phone calls will be the default communication channel between enterprises and their customers, enabling applications from customer support, to AI appointment scheduling and sending real-time updates.

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Today, we’re going to examine a few fantastic use cases for AI phone calls. We’ll start in healthcare and then transition to e-commerce, small business, recruiting, and personalized services. By the end of this blog, you’ll understand how and why AI phone calls will fundamentally change how you do business, and you’ll even learn how you can leverage AI phone calling technology today with Bland, the platform for AI phone calls.

AI Calls in Healthcare

Automating Insurance Communications

Phone calls are the communication infrastructure for healthcare in the United States. Every day healthcare organizations make thousands of calls, from pharmacy stock checks to appointment reminders and medication adherence follow ups. Unfortunately, when administrators want to perform benefits investigations, complete pre-authorizations, or bill insurance, they spend hours waiting on hold and getting transferred between phone lines. That friction is totally wasteful and causes delays to patient care. Plus, humans are naturally error prone, and when they miss communicate or lose information patients suffer.

Personalized patient engagement

AI phone calling will unlock billions of dollars of value in healthcare. Medical practices, including telehealth and brick-and-mortar locations, can all decrease appointment no-show rates by sending phone call reminders. Healthcare organizations can share educational content with patients, on the phone, in any language, thereby reaching and engaging a broader patient population. Pharmaceutical hub services can automate calls to patients to check-in on the impacts of their medications and remind or even help them to refill their prescriptions during the call.

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Over time, even large insurers like United Healthcare and Humana may leverage AI phone calling in their businesses. Payers can use AI calls to reach every member, track their wellbeing, and prompt them to see their doctor or pay their bills. Over time, payers can also use call transcripts to forecast expected costs in real time, enabling them to quickly shift resources when specific ailments spike. In the end, almost every single call in healthcare should be automated by AI. Not only because AI calls are cheaper, multi-language, and infinitely scalable, but also because they eliminate human error and provide organizations full transparency into every single patient interaction. The result: happier patients, decreased expenses, and better outcomes.‍

Conversational AI in e-commerce

The goal of every e-commerce site is to increase the percentage of visitors who make purchases. The recent focus on dropping load speeds and optimizing landing page design is testament to the importance of creating an excellent shopping experience.‍

Boosting conversions with personalized conversational AI

Personalization, one of the factors in boosting conversions, has largely gone ignored; most stores display each customer the same set of popular SKUs, treating them like an “average” person instead of a unique individual. Whereas traditional stores welcome you in, ask what you’re looking for, and direct you to the perfect product, e-commerce stores provide shoppers catalogs and force them to find the answers themselves.

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AI e-commerce voice bots will fundamentally improve the online-shopping experience by making previously stale web experiences feel engaging and value-adding. Such assistants will greet customers, ask what products they’re looking for, and direct them to the best option. When customers want to compare and contrast products, and understand “is this running shoe also good for hiking?” an e-commerce voice bot will be ready to answer them. Customer satisfaction will increase along with conversion rates and top line revenues.

Small Business: Using an AI Phone Number

Consumers call small businesses when they want to ask questions and make purchases. Yet ⅔ times, they don’t pick up the phone. Much of this is due to resource constraints - but the result is lost revenue.

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Unfortunately for small businesses, they can’t afford an employee to wait by the phone and answer every call. They also don’t have time to implement SMS technology to regularly share promotions with their customers.

AI Phone Number for Engaging Customers

AI phone calls are the solution. In minutes, small businesses can train empathetic and helpful AI phone agents to answer questions about hours, stock availability, and current sales. Once you set up your AI phone number to answer calls, your small business will capture additional revenue from every customer who calls.

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Additionally, after every purchase, small businesses can continue engaging their customers. They can arrange pop-up sales, or offer specific discounts to customers based on their purchasing history. They can send calls on customer’s birthdays, or on holidays when they’re more likely to be free. They can keep customers updated about new stock and upcoming events to drive loyalty and repeat purchases.

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Check out this guide to creating a custom AI voice bot to learn how an AI voice assistant, AI appointment scheduler, and/or AI customer engagement specialist can supercharge your small business.

Automating Recruiting with AI Phone Calls

Recruiting is one of the professions most resistant to technological change; the lifeblood of the industry is stale resumes that recruiters waste most of their time sifting through. Given how busy they are, recruiters are selective with their time, and interview a limited number of candidates per day. Many times though, recruiters join calls and immediately know a candidate isn’t a fit: they’re low energy or lack basic communication skills or for some other reason don’t appear a culture fit. Suddenly, that recruiter just lost 30 minutes of their day.

Leveraging AI phone calls to engage more applicants

With AI phone calls, recruiters can perform screens to gauge candidates’ soft skills - their ability to be personable and communicate with others. After each call, recruiters can review a transcript summary, play back audio of the conversation, and decide whether to move candidates forward in the application process. Over time, companies can even find patterns between candidate answers on screener calls and their performance as employees, enabling recruiters to build well-tuned pipelines for onboarding extraordinary talent.

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To automate your hiring funnel check out our partner, Respell, a no-code platform for generative AI. Respell’s suite of generative AI functions provides all the tools your company needs to create a robust recruiting pipeline, from analyzing resumes to sending AI screener calls (with Bland).

Creating Personalized Services with Conversational AI

Over the next five years, personalized and effective therapists, nutritionists, and all other types of coaches will be available, cheap, and just a phone call away. Entrepreneurs will fine-tune existing foundational models and provide AI phone agents agents additional context to perform at the level of ultra-experienced professionals, bringing the best and most individualized services to every person globally.

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Many applications will emerge; when people can teach AI how they think and speak - via text and audio samples - they can create virtual AI clones of themselves. Your favorite actors and YouTubers will have AI doubles who are easily accessible, causing individuals - for better or worse - to build meaningful relationships with AI counterparts. While society may judge the positive and negative outcomes of such a shift, the age of abundance it will bring about is extraordinary. In education, the best teacher will be totally and fully available to answer any student’s questions in real-time. Children in elementary school can listen to Dr. Seuss - read out loud by Dr. Seuss - while college students studying particle physics can listen to lectures from the great Richard Feynman. AI cloning may even enable the deceased to communicate with the living, to share the stories of their past and connect with future generations.
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The possibilities are endless. It’s time to build.
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Bland's AI Phone Calling API‍

At Bland, we’ve built a platform for AI phone calling. We provide an easy-to-integrate API for AI calling that enables any developer to spin up a simple project in under 5 minutes. This - just 10 lines of code - is all it takes to send and receive phone calls with AI:

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Bland’s AI phone calling API also includes extensive functionality; from configuring inbound phone lines and dispatching outbound calls, to monitoring AI agent behavior, creating guardrails for behavior, and spotting problems when they occur. To get started, visit the developer portal or read one of our guides - like this one about how to build your own voice bot.

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Additionally, visit Bland’s landing page right now to send yourself an AI phone call.‍

Conclusion

AI phone calls will fundamentally change society in every industry from healthcare, to small business, to e-commerce, recruiting, and personalized services. Find out how AI calling will transform your business by visiting Bland’s developer portal right now.