Introducing the new Bland dashboard

From the beginning of Bland’s history, we bet and believed that one day our models would be ready to lead the conversation. Today, they are.

Pathways were the original innovation that made our phone calls great. They let teams craft conversations with maximum context and behavior control in hand. They also lent visibility into how the models navigated a conversation as you could inspect each step of the conversation in isolation based on where you were in that pathway. Most of all, pathways translated structured, standard operating procedures into instructions AI could understand. Much of the customer experience industry adopted this style of agent building as the standard.

Since then, the underlying models have gotten dramatically smarter and more efficient. They can work through an unexpected question, recover when a caller goes on a tangent, and gracefully handle edge cases. While pathways offer fantastic control for the highest stake scenarios, they lack the inherent flexibility to react on the fly when real calls inevitably take an unexpected turn. Accommodating each of these edge cases required another branch in the pathway, which is how, for many of our customers, their pathways span hundreds of nodes.

We’ve rebuilt our product around today’s smarter models, on the belief that they’ll only keep getting smarter. Building an agent with Bland now centers on the model itself and how it uses its resources to handle the task at hand. Pathways are still there for moments that require following instructions to a T, like reading a disclosure or verifying identity. But they no longer orchestrate the conversation. Instead, they’re one of several resources your agent can draw on, alongside tools and knowledge.

Killing rigid phone calls#

Instead of building pathways or personas, you now build a single agent. At the center of every agent sits the agent node: your agent's brain. It is responsible for driving the conversation forward, tool and pathway use, and setting your agent’s identity. Its prompts and settings define your agent's personality and abilities. As you attach tools, knowledge, and pathways, you'll see them connect to your agent in the graph.

Pathways don't go away. They become a component your agent references as the conversation unfolds, the way a human rep might reference an instruction manual.

Placing more agency on the model lets its intelligence shine, moving flexibly between pathways and tools as the conversation unfolds. It also makes agents easier to maintain since you can manage and configure individual pieces of a conversation rather than untangling webs of nodes and edges.

Said simply, with this new approach to building, as models get smarter, so too do your agents.

And that's not all#

While we were reimagining agents for the future, we couldn't help but make a few more big upgrades.

Omnichannel agents#

Your customers don't only call, so your agent shouldn't only answer the phone. The new dashboard brings calls, SMS, webchat, and API under one roof. Gone are the days of configuring a separate pathway for every channel. Now you build one agent and choose the channels it lives in. Need channel-specific actions or instructions? You keep full control over those in the builder.

Build with a coding agent#

More and more teams build on Bland with coding agents like Claude and Codex. We believe this is the future, and a prerequisite for the very exciting vision we have for self-improving agents. So we made it faster and cheaper for your coding agent to read, change, and improve a Bland agent.

More good stuff#

We're also shipping A/B experimentation to compare versions of your agent across the metrics that matter, branded agent identity so your agent’s calls come from a saved contact, deeper analytics to more deeply understand your customer relationships, a reimagined evals suite to test agents before they reach customers, and a more powerful post-call analysis engine.

What we need from you#

All production pathways and personas need to be migrated to the new agent builder by November 15th. Don’t worry — your current agents remain untouched until you’ve built, tested, and switched traffic over.

Enterprise customers#

Your implementation partner will handle the transition for you. Over the next few weeks, they'll migrate your pathways and personas to the new builder and test them for parity, without touching production calls. Once you've reviewed the new agent, we'll gradually shift traffic over to it.

Self-serve customers#

Self-serve customers have access to three migration tools to help them with their own transitions. You can migrate using your coding agent, migrate and upgrade your agent, or migrate as-is. This guide walks you through everything you need to know.

The new Bland dashboard is live today. Log in and build your first agent. Questions? Reach out at support@bland.ai.