Here’s what’s new:

See how AI Voice Agents handle calls before launch

Going live with AI Voice Agents shouldn’t mean crossing your fingers. With Simulations, you can now find out how AI Voice Agents handle calls before a real customer ever dials in. Run test conversations between an AI caller and the real agent, using its actual setup. Write your own scenarios or let AI generate them. Then see each conversation scored against your success criteria, with the full transcript and the reasoning behind every result. Even after launch, you’ll be able to test any updates or changes to the agent first.

Outbound that never clocks out

Outbound AI Voice Agent Campaigns can now run continuously, so AI Voice Agents keep dialing new contacts and handling conversations until you pause them. With no contact cap, one campaign can also reach thousands of contacts in one go.

When campaigns dial at that scale, every call starts with two things: the name people see and the number it comes from. Branded Caller ID covers the first, showing your verified company name and logo on each outbound call. Number Reputation covers the second, checking every number in your pool daily and flagging spam labels early. Together, they give each call a name people recognize and a number you can monitor.

Coming soon: Cellular Calling when Wi-Fi falls short

Reps in the field, on the road, or moving between office and home can’t always count on a strong internet connection. Cellular Calling routes calls over the cellular network instead of Wi-Fi or data while keeping everything inside Aircall, so recordings, AI summaries, analytics, and CRM logging stay intact. Coming soon on all plans, it works with the personal numbers your team links to Aircall.

AI Voice Agents for e-commerce

"Where is my order?" calls pile up fast during busy periods, and each one pulls your team away from more complex customer needs. The new Order Support template launches Shopify-ready AI Voice Agents in minutes, so those calls come off your team’s plate. Shopify AI Actions are expanding soon, with new actions for checking return eligibility and stock.

Getting ready for peak season? New customers get unlimited AI Voice Agent minutes until November 27, so call volume is one less thing to plan for.

How Venia Products went from voicemail to instant answers

When customers want to know where their order is, they don’t wait for business hours, and neither do Venia Products’ AI Voice Agents. Their inbound agents, Ruby and Tiffany, take turns: Ruby answers during business hours, and Tiffany picks up after hours and on Saturdays. Their outbound agents call with delivery status updates before customers have to ask, leaving reps free for the customers who need a person. All of these agents were tested and refined before going live, which means Venia Products’ customers can instantly get answers at any time of day and carry on with peace of mind.

What else is new at Aircall?

Know who’s calling from the get go

AI Voice Agents can now know who’s calling before the conversation even starts. Last month, Aircall introduced Caller Context AI Actions, which look up the caller in HubSpot, Salesforce, or Zendesk by phone number during the greeting. Admins turn it on by ticking "Use for caller context" on the action.

Set up Caller Context

See how AI Messaging Agents perform

The new Performance tab shows resolution, escalation, and goal completion rates, plus where conversations break down. You can also sort escalated conversations to the top of your Aircall Workspace inbox, and new webhooks let you send AI handoffs to Slack, your helpdesk, or your CRM.

Review agent performance

More languages, faster Live Prompts

Teams that take calls in two languages now get a transcript, summary, and scorecard for both after the call. Live Prompts appear faster during calls, with no drop in accuracy, and AI Assist Pro’s new onboarding helps new customers get to value sooner.

Explore AI Assist

Introducing the Aircall MCP Server, now in beta

Ask Claude or ChatGPT what went wrong on yesterday’s calls and get an answer from your Aircall call records. The Aircall MCP Server gives admins access to calls, transcripts, summaries, and sentiment. It’s read-only for now, so nothing can be edited or sent.

Join the beta

Thanks for reading! If Aircall has helped your team work smarter, we'd love your support. Leave us a review on Trustpilot to spread the word, and add us as a Preferred Source on Google to see more of our content!

See you next month,

The Aircall Team

• Aircall's AI Voice Agents answer order status, delivery, and returns calls 24/7 in a natural voice. They use live order data from Shopify and customer history from HubSpot.

• From October 15 to November 27, 2026, eligible Aircall accounts get unlimited AI Voice Agent minutes.

• Phone shoppers don't wait long. In Aircall's survey of 750 online shoppers, 9 in 10 said they'll wait no more than 5 minutes to reach someone.

• When a caller needs a person, the AI Voice Agent transfers the call to your team with the full conversation attached.

• Connect Shopify, load your policies, test on a share of calls, and scale before peak week.

Join our webinar on 22 October to see us walk through our vision for voice in e-commerce, show what’s coming next for Shopify merchants, and resolve a real “where’s my order?” call in a demo of our Shopify AI Actions.

What is the Aircall Black Friday AI Voice Agents offer?

Aircall is giving eligible accounts unlimited AI Voice Agent minutes through the busiest weeks of the year, so e-commerce teams can cover every order call without paying per minute during the spike.

Why do Black Friday calls overwhelm e-commerce teams?

Peak season doesn't just add calls. It adds the same calls, all at once.

• The same three questions dominate. "Where is my order?" is the most repetitive request in retail, followed closely by delivery timing and returns. (Here's why order status calls take over the queue.)

• Patience is short. In Aircall's shopper survey, 60% of people said they'd wait two minutes or less on the phone, and 29% would only wait one minute.

• Hiring can't keep pace. Seasonal reps need training before they can answer accurately, and the spike often arrives before they're ready. (How to manage seasonal call center employees.)

• Queues only delay the problem. Call queuing keeps callers in line, but it doesn't add capacity to answer them. (Ways to reduce customer queue time.)

Which Black Friday calls can an AI Voice Agent answer?

An AI Voice Agent answers the phone, understands what the caller wants, and resolves routine requests without a rep picking up. Aircall's AI order management agent is built for e-commerce and retail calls like these:

Every call the AI Voice Agent resolves is one your reps don't have to take. That leaves your team for the calls that need judgment and empathy.

How do AI Voice Agents use Shopify and HubSpot data?

Aircall AI Voice Agents connect to the tools your team already runs, through 250+ native integrations.

• Shopify: live order status, items, shipping, and tracking, so callers get real answers instead of a scripted "please check your email."

• HubSpot: customer history and previous conversations, so the agent knows who's calling.

• Caller verification: the agent identifies the customer automatically from their phone number before sharing order details.

AI Voice Agents speak naturally and expressively in 38 languages, with a choice of accents, so international shoppers get answers in their own language.

Can AI Voice Agents call customers before they call you?

Yes. Aircall AI Voice Agents can make proactive calls, which cuts inbound volume before it starts.

• Delay alerts: let customers know about a carrier delay before they call to ask.

• Delivery updates: confirm orders and share delivery windows.

• Restock alerts: tell shoppers when an item they wanted is back.

• Cart follow-up: re-engage shoppers who left items in their cart.

One rule applies to all outbound AI calls in the US. The FCC treats AI-generated voices as "artificial" voices under the TCPA, so you need the customer's prior express consent, and prior express written consent for marketing calls. Check your consent records before turning on outbound campaigns. (More on AI outbound calling.)

What happens when a caller needs a person?

The AI Voice Agent hands the call to a rep with full context: who the customer is, what they asked, and what the agent already tried. Your rep picks up where the agent left off, and the customer doesn't repeat themselves. It works like a warm transfer, with the summary already written.

AI Voice Agents vs. seasonal hires vs. longer queues: which works for Black Friday?

How do you set up an AI Voice Agent before Black Friday?

Start now so the agent is tuned before peak week, not during it.

1. Connect Shopify and your CRM. Both are native Aircall integrations.

2. Audit your source data. Make sure order statuses, return policies, and delivery windows are accurate. The agent answers from what you give it.

3. Write the agent's instructions. Cover your top questions first: order status, delivery, and returns.

4. Test on a share of calls. Route a portion of inbound traffic to the agent, listen to calls, and refine the instructions.

5. Brief your reps on handoffs. Show them how transferred calls arrive and what context they'll see.

6. Scale to all routine calls. Expand coverage once the agent answers accurately.

What this looks like in practice: TripCity now handles 54% of its calls with Aircall AI Voice Agents, and 87% of those are resolved without a live rep. (See the full breakdown.) For more peak-season planning, see how e-commerce teams prepare for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Frequently asked questions

What is an AI Voice Agent for e-commerce?

An AI Voice Agent for e-commerce is AI that answers customer calls in a natural voice and resolves order, delivery, and returns questions using live store data. Aircall's AI Voice Agents connect to Shopify and HubSpot and transfer complex calls to your team with full context.

Does the Aircall AI Voice Agent work with Shopify?

Yes. Aircall AI Voice Agents connect to Shopify to read live order status, items, shipping, and tracking. They verify callers by phone number before sharing order details.

Who is eligible for unlimited AI Voice Agent minutes?

Eligible first-time and returning AI Voice Agent users qualify for unlimited minutes from October 15 to November 27, 2026. Check the offer terms for full eligibility.

What happens to pricing after November 27?

Standard AI Voice Agent pricing applies after the offer ends. See Aircall pricing for current plans, or ask about the 20% discount on bundles over 2,500 minutes, available until November 27 with an annual commitment.

How many languages do Aircall AI Voice Agents speak?

Aircall AI Voice Agents speak 38 languages, with a choice of accents.

Is customer data secure with an AI Voice Agent?

Aircall AI Voice Agents answer from the data sources you connect, such as Shopify order details. Read how Aircall handles AI Voice Agent privacy.

Do I need to replace my current phone system?

No. If you already use Aircall, AI Voice Agents drop into your existing call flows. If you're new to Aircall, see how it works for retail and e-commerce teams.

Get your AI Voice Agent live before the rush

Black Friday volume is predictable. Long holds don't have to be. With Aircall AI Voice Agents answering routine order, delivery, and returns calls, customers get instant answers and your reps get time back for the conversations that need them.

• Aircall: free access with 100 AI Voice Agent minutes, then from $30/license/month

• Dialpad: 14-day free trial, then from $15/user/month

• Twilio: $15 trial credit, then pay-as-you-go from $0.014/minute

• JustCall: 14-day free trial, then from $29/user/month

• RingEX by RingCentral: 14-day free trial, then from $20/user/month

Prices reflect annual billing as of October 2026.

How do the top phone systems with a free trial compare?

Why test a business phone system before you buy?

A free trial shows you what a pricing page can't: call quality on your network, how long setup really takes, and whether your team will use it. Switching communication software later means porting numbers and retraining agents, so it pays to test properly up front.

What should you test during a free trial?

• Call quality: make and take calls on your own Wi-Fi and mobile data.

• Setup time: time how long it takes to get a number, invite users, and route your first inbound call.

• Call routing and IVR: build the call flow your team actually needs.

• Integrations: connect your CRM or helpdesk and check that calls log automatically.

• AI features: check call summaries, transcription, and whether AI can answer routine calls.

• Mobile and desktop apps: have agents test the apps they'll use every day.

Which business phone systems offer a free trial?

Aircall

Aircall is an AI-powered customer communications platform for sales and support teams, used by thousands of businesses. AI Voice Agents handle routine calls, and AI Assist helps reps during and after every conversation.

Free trial: Aircall offers free access instead of a fixed-length trial. New accounts get 100 AI Voice Agent minutes at sign-up, on top of the 50 included minutes every customer gets each month. In the US and Canada, new accounts can also test four pre-built AI Voice Agent use cases with zero setup, follow a guided Get started checklist, and use AI Assist and AI Assist Pro on their first number from day one.

Key features:

• AI Voice Agents that answer calls, resolve routine requests, and hand off to reps with full context

• IVR and smart call routing

• Call recording and transcription

• AI call summaries, sentiment analysis, and key topics (Professional plan)

• Business SMS

• 250+ integrations, including Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zendesk

Pricing:

• Essentials: $30/license/month (annual billing)

• Professional: $50/license/month (annual billing)

• Custom: contact sales (25+ licenses)

• All plans require a minimum of 3 licenses. See Aircall pricing for full plan details. AI Assist Pro is an add-on at $49/user/month.

Get free access to Aircall

Dialpad

Dialpad is a cloud phone system with AI built into every plan. Real-time transcription and call summaries are included from the Standard plan up.

Free trial: 14 days.

Key features:

• AI transcription and call summaries on all plans

• Unlimited calling in the US and Canada

• SMS and MMS

• Video meetings (up to 10 participants on base plans)

Pricing:

• Standard: $15/user/month (annual billing)

• Pro: $25/user/month (annual billing)

• Enterprise: contact sales

• Contact center and sales features are sold separately as Dialpad Support (from $80/user/month) and Dialpad Sell (from $39/user/month).

Twilio

Twilio is a developer platform, not an out-of-the-box phone system. Its voice APIs let engineering teams build custom calling, IVR, and voice AI experiences.

Free trial: a $15 trial credit with no credit card required, enough to buy a number and test calls.

Key features:

• Programmable voice APIs and SDKs

• Custom IVR flows

• Call recording and transcription

• Global carrier network

Pricing (US, pay-as-you-go):

• Outbound calls: $0.014/minute

• Inbound calls to local numbers: $0.0085/minute

• Local numbers: $1.15/month

• Recording, transcription, and voice AI features are billed per minute on top.

JustCall

JustCall is a cloud phone and messaging platform built mainly for outbound sales teams.

Free trial: 14 days.

Key features:

• Power and predictive calling modes for outbound campaigns

• SMS and WhatsApp messaging from a shared inbox

• AI call scoring and coaching

• Local numbers in 70+ countries

Pricing:

• Team: $29/user/month (annual billing)

• Pro: $49/user/month (annual billing)

• Pro Plus: $89/user/month (annual billing)

• Business: contact sales (10-user minimum)

• Most plans require a minimum of 2 licenses.

RingEX by RingCentral

RingEX combines business calling, video meetings, team messaging, and SMS in one app.

Free trial: 14 days.

Key features:

• Unlimited calling in the US and Canada

• Video meetings with up to 100 participants (200 on Ultra)

• IVR and call routing

• CRM integrations from the Advanced plan

• AI Receptionist available as a paid add-on

Pricing:

• Core: $20/user/month (annual billing)

• Advanced: $25/user/month (annual billing)

• Ultra: $35/user/month (annual billing)

Which phone system with a free trial should you choose?

• Choose Aircall if your sales or support team wants AI Voice Agents, a fast setup, and deep CRM and helpdesk integrations.

• Choose Dialpad if you're a small team that wants AI transcription at the lowest per-seat price.

• Choose Twilio if you have developers and want to build a custom voice app.

• Choose JustCall if outbound sales volume is your priority.

• Choose RingEX if you want phone, video, and messaging in a single app.

Frequently asked questions

How long are business phone system free trials?

Most last 14 days, including Dialpad, JustCall, and RingEX. Twilio gives a $15 trial credit instead of a time limit. Aircall offers free access with 100 AI Voice Agent minutes at sign-up.

Can I test AI voice agents during a free trial?

Yes, with Aircall. New accounts get 100 AI Voice Agent minutes at sign-up, and US and Canadian accounts can test four pre-built AI Voice Agent use cases with zero setup.

Is a free trial the same as a free plan?

No. A free trial gives you temporary access to test a paid product. None of the five providers here offers a permanent free business phone plan.

What's the cheapest business phone system with a free trial?

Dialpad has the lowest per-seat starting price at $15/user/month on annual billing. Twilio can cost less for very low call volumes because you only pay per minute, but you need developers to build on it.

What should I check before my trial ends?

Confirm call quality, test your full call routing setup, connect your CRM or helpdesk, and check the minimum license count and billing terms of the plan you'd buy.

This guide compares seven services across both models, with pricing checked in October 2026, so you can match the right one to your call volume, budget, and tech stack.

TL;DR

The best virtual receptionist depends on who should answer: a person, an AI, or both. Live services cost roughly $1.50 to $5 per minute of receptionist time. AI receptionists cost far less per call and answer 24/7 in multiple languages, but hand complex or emotional calls to your team.

• Best AI + human backup: Smith.ai, for intake-heavy teams like law firms.

• Best live, human-first answering: Ruby, for businesses where a warm human voice matters most.

• Best AI receptionist inside your phone system and CRM: Aircall, for teams that want calls answered, booked, and logged in the tools they already use.

• Best budget AI for solo operators: Goodcall, for trades and local businesses with predictable callers.

• Best for existing JustCall users: JustCall's AI Voice Agent, as an add-on to its phone plans.

• Best 24/7 live answering with web chat: AnswerConnect.

• Best live or AI answering for healthcare and legal: Go Answer.

Virtual receptionist services compared

What are the best virtual receptionist services in 2026?

Each service below is grouped by the job it does best, not by how loudly it markets itself. Pricing reflects US list prices at the time of writing.

1. Smith.ai

Smith.ai combines an AI receptionist with North America-based live receptionists, so routine calls stay automated and sensitive calls reach a person.

The AI answers first, handles FAQs and intake, and escalates to a human when a call needs judgment. Its live receptionist plans run on the same per-call model, which makes costs predictable for teams with longer, intake-style calls.

Best for: Law firms and professional services that need detailed intake and a human safety net.

Key features:

• Lead intake and qualification: Custom intake questions screen callers before they reach you.

• Legal-specific add-ons: Conflict checks, payment collection (LawPay, Square, PayPal), and third-party intake forms.

• Bilingual answering: English and Spanish on live plans.

Integrations include: HubSpot, Salesforce, Clio, and Zapier.

Pricing:

• AI Receptionist: Free for 25 calls/month ($3.00 per extra call), Pro from $150/month for 75 calls, Enterprise from $500/month.

• Live receptionists: $300/month for 30 calls, $810/month for 90 calls, $2,100/month for 300 calls.

Watch out for: Per-call pricing and paid add-ons (booking, transcription, extra transfer destinations) raise the real monthly cost.

2. Ruby

Ruby is a human-first live receptionist service with 24/7 coverage and bilingual English and Spanish answering on every plan.

Ruby has answered calls for small businesses for over two decades and positions itself on the quality and warmth of its receptionists. Every call reaches a trained person, which suits businesses where first impressions carry the sale.

Best for: Small professional practices that want every caller greeted by a real person.

Key features:

• 24/7 live answering: Nights, weekends, and holidays at no surcharge.

• Bilingual receptionists: English and Spanish included.

• Mobile app: Manage call handling, messages, and status from your phone.

Pricing:

• 50 minutes: $250/month

• 100 minutes: $395/month

• 200 minutes: $720/month

• 500 minutes: $1,725/month

Watch out for: Ruby is one of the most expensive options per minute, and a human answers every call, including simple ones like opening hours.

3. Aircall

Aircall's AI receptionist answers every call, books appointments on the call, and routes callers to the right teammate with full context, all inside the phone system and CRM your team already uses.

Most standalone answering services stop at taking a message. Aircall's AI receptionist resolves the request when it can, then logs the call, transcript, and outcome in your CRM. When a caller needs a person, it transfers them to your team with the full conversation attached, so no one repeats themselves.

It's one of several AI voice agents on the platform. Teams can add an AI Sales Agent to qualify inbound leads, an AI Support Agent to resolve common questions, or an AI Order Agent for ecommerce order calls.

Best for: Sales and support teams that want an AI receptionist connected to their CRM, helpdesk, and call routing, not a separate answering service.

Key features:

• Natural conversation and intelligent routing: Callers say what they need in their own words, no phone tree, and the AI resolves the request or routes the call with context.

• Appointment booking and reminders: Schedules, reschedules, and cancels appointments on the call, and calls ahead to confirm attendance.

• 38 languages: Answers in the caller's language at any hour.

• CRM logging: Verifies the caller, updates records, and logs every call in tools like HubSpot, Salesforce, and Zendesk.

• Setup in minutes: Start from a template, add your business information and knowledge sources, and go live without IT.

• Agent Performance dashboard: Tracks resolution, goal completion, and transfer rates, and flags fixes ranked by impact.

Integrations: 250+ native integrations, including HubSpot, Salesforce, Zendesk, Shopify, Calendly, and Stripe.

Pricing (US):

• Try AI Voice Agents: $0/month, with 100 minutes on sign-up and 50 included minutes per month after that.

• Pay as you go: $0.49/minute up to 2,500 minutes, then $0.39/minute. No contract or minimum usage.

• Prepaid bundles: $175/month for 500 minutes, $725/month for 2,500 minutes, custom pricing from 10,000 minutes.

See the full Aircall pricing page for phone system plans.

Results from teams already live: SJWD Water District handles 90% of after-hours calls automatically, and Aircall measured 95% caller satisfaction across 18,000 AI routing calls.

Watch out for: Per-minute billing means long calls cost more. Clear transfer rules keep complex calls short and with your team.

4. Goodcall

Goodcall is a budget AI receptionist that bills per unique caller rather than per minute, so long calls don't raise your bill.

Goodcall answers calls, captures caller details, and books work for small local businesses. Its pricing suits businesses with a steady base of callers who ring more than once.

Best for: Solo operators and trades businesses that want predictable AI answering costs.

Key features:

• Unlimited minutes: You pay by unique caller, not call length.

• Free demo agent: Build and test an agent before adding a number.

• Forms and logic flows: Collect caller details and branch conversations by need.

Pricing:

• Starter: $79/month for 100 unique callers

• Growth: $129/month for 500 unique callers

• Scale: $299/month for 2,000 unique callers

Watch out for: Lower tiers cap logic flows and call history, and there's no full phone system or contact center tooling behind the agent.

5. JustCall

JustCall pairs a cloud phone system with an AI Voice Agent that answers 24/7, qualifies callers, and books meetings.

The AI Voice Agent references your knowledge base, transfers calls to your team, and syncs activity with your CRM. It makes most sense if your team already runs its phones on JustCall.

Best for: Existing JustCall customers adding AI answering to their stack.

Key features:

• AI call answering: Qualifies callers, books meetings, and routes transfers.

• Multilingual support: Handles 14 languages.

• Mobile and desktop apps: Calls and texts from iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows.

Integrations include: HubSpot, Salesforce, monday.com, and Zapier.

Pricing:

• Phone plans: Team $29, Pro $49, Pro Plus $89 per user/month, billed annually, with a two-license minimum.

• AI Voice Agent: $0.99/minute pay as you go, or bundles from $99/month for 100 minutes.

Watch out for: The AI agent and phone seats are separate line items, and the two-license minimum raises the entry cost.

6. AnswerConnect

AnswerConnect provides 24/7 live receptionists who answer calls and web chats in English and Spanish.

Receptionists handle routing, appointment booking, and lead qualification, with call logs and recordings available in a client portal.

Best for: Businesses that want round-the-clock live answering plus website chat.

Key features:

• Call routing: Custom rules send each caller to the right person.

• Appointment booking: Receptionists schedule and manage appointments.

• Client portal: Call logs, transcripts, recordings, and usage on web and mobile.

Integrations include: Salesforce, Microsoft Teams, Freshdesk, and Serviceminder.

Pricing:

• Entry: $350/month for 200 minutes, plus a $49.99 setup fee

• Growth: $395/month for 300 minutes, includes live chat

• Standard: $575/month for 400 minutes, plus a $49.99 setup fee

• Larger plans: Custom pricing

Watch out for: Overage runs $1.85 to $2.50 per minute, which adds up fast in a busy month.

7. Go Answer

Go Answer offers both live virtual receptionists and an AI receptionist, with specialist options for medical and legal calls.

Live receptionists follow your custom scripts, take messages, and book appointments. The AI receptionist covers routine calls at a lower per-minute rate.

Best for: Medical practices and law firms that want specialist live answering, with an AI option for overflow.

Key features:

• HIPAA-trained receptionists: Go Answer says its receptionists complete HIPAA training for medical practices.

• Legal receptionists: A dedicated legal intake option for longer, complex intakes.

• Custom scripting: Greetings, routing, and responses tailored to your business.

Integrations include: monday.com, Twilio, Yelp, and Zendesk.

Pricing:

• AI receptionist: $95/month for 100 minutes, up to $800/month for 1,000 minutes.

• Live receptionist: $175/month for 100 minutes, $300 for 200, $345 for 300, $550 for 500.

• Add-ons: Bilingual receptionist +$0.30/minute, legal receptionist +$0.50/minute.

Watch out for: Specialist add-ons are billed per minute on top of the plan rate.

How we picked these services

We shortlisted services that rank and get recommended most often for "virtual receptionist" and "AI receptionist" searches, then compared them on four things:

• Who answers: AI, live person, or both.

• Published pricing: Every price was checked against the vendor's pricing page or a dated third-party review in September and October 2026.

• Integrations: Native CRM, helpdesk, and calendar connections.

• Handoff to humans: How cleanly a call reaches your team when it needs to.

Aircall makes this list, so weigh our pick accordingly. We've placed it where it fits best, not first.

Should you choose an AI receptionist or a live virtual receptionist?

Choose an AI receptionist if most of your calls are routine: bookings, FAQs, routing, and lead capture. Choose a live receptionist if your calls are emotional, high-value, or need judgment on every call. Many teams use AI first and send exceptions to a person.

Read more on AI voice agents vs. human agents and what an AI voice agent is.

How much does a virtual receptionist cost?

Most small businesses pay $100 to $800 a month. AI receptionists sit at the low end, and live receptionists at the high end. The pricing model matters as much as the headline price:

To estimate your cost, multiply your monthly calls by your average call length, then compare that figure against each plan's included minutes and overage rate.

What should you look for in a virtual receptionist service?

• Handoff quality: The caller should reach a person with full context, not start over.

• Integrations: Calls, transcripts, and outcomes should land in your CRM and helpdesk automatically.

• Appointment booking: Look for live calendar access, not message-taking.

• Language coverage: Match the languages your customers actually speak.

• Reporting: You need resolution and transfer rates to know if it's working.

• Security and data handling: Check encryption, access controls, and where call data is stored. Aircall's approach is on its security page.

• Overage terms: Check what happens when you exceed your plan, since that's where costs spike.

Answer every call with Aircall's AI receptionist

Missed calls are missed revenue. Aircall's AI receptionist picks up every call, books the appointment, logs it in your CRM, and brings your team in only when a caller needs a person. You can test it with 100 free minutes and no contract.

Hear how it sounds and set one up in minutes. See the AI receptionist.

Frequently asked questions about virtual receptionist services

What is a virtual receptionist?

A virtual receptionist is a remote service that answers your business calls. It can be a live person working off-site or an AI receptionist that answers, books, and routes calls automatically. Both greet callers, take messages, and transfer calls to your team.

What is the difference between an AI receptionist and a virtual receptionist?

A virtual receptionist is usually a live person answering remotely and billed by the minute or call. An AI receptionist is software that answers instantly, handles many calls at once, works 24/7 in multiple languages, and costs less per call. It hands complex calls to your team.

What is the best AI receptionist for small businesses?

It depends on your setup. Aircall suits teams that want the AI receptionist connected to their phone system and CRM. Goodcall suits solo operators on a tight budget. Smith.ai suits businesses that want live receptionists as backup.

How much does a virtual receptionist cost per month?

Live virtual receptionists typically cost $250 to $2,100 per month, depending on minutes or calls. AI receptionists range from free entry plans to a few hundred dollars per month, or roughly $0.39 to $0.99 per minute on usage-based plans.

Is a virtual receptionist worth it?

Yes, for most small businesses that miss calls. A virtual receptionist costs a fraction of a full-time hire, answers outside business hours, and captures leads that would otherwise reach voicemail. AI receptionists make the math stronger for high call volumes.

What is the best virtual receptionist for law firms?

Smith.ai is a strong fit for law firms because of its legal intake tools, conflict checks, and payment collection. Ruby and Go Answer's legal receptionists suit firms that want a human on every call. For professional services firms that want intake logged in their CRM automatically, an AI receptionist like Aircall's is worth testing.

Can an AI receptionist book appointments?

Yes. Aircall's AI receptionist checks your calendar and schedules, reschedules, or cancels appointments during the call. It can also call ahead to confirm attendance and reschedule no-shows.

Does an AI receptionist work with my existing phone system?

It can. Aircall's AI agents run through your existing Aircall numbers or the phone system you already have, so there's nothing to migrate or rip out.

At Aircall, our team faced more than 300 alerts a month. We wanted the depth of a large enterprise security program without the headcount that usually comes with one. So we built our own AI triage bot. It now triages those 300 alerts and leaves about 10 investigations a week for our engineers to dig into.

Here’s how we did it…

The problem: security operations don't scale just by adding people

Alert volume grows with your product, your customers, and your attack surface. Human review doesn’t grow at the same pace. Teams in our position have three options, and none of them are ideal.

• Expand headcount. Hiring more analysts is slow and expensive, and skilled security engineers are hard to find.

• Outsource to a managed detection and response provider. This adds cost and distance, and it can dilute the context that makes triage accurate.

• Compromise on security. Review fewer alerts, accept more risk, and hope the gaps don't matter. But they always do.

We refused to review fewer alerts. That meant changing the work, not the size of the team.

The shift: from a large operations force to a focused engineering team

For years, strong security meant a large security operations force, a separate security engineering function, and a dedicated incident response team. That structure works, but it's costly and it can bury expensive talent in repetitive triage.

Our AI triage bot changed the model. Instead of a large team clearing a queue, we now run a small team of skilled engineers who get called in only when something looks genuinely concerning. The rest of the time, those engineers do the work that strengthens our foundations: hardening systems, improving logging, and developing new detections. That kind of depth used to take a much larger program. A lean team can build it now.

How the AI triage bot works

The bot sits at the front of our alert pipeline and does the first pass that used to consume our analysts' days.

1. It ingests every alert. All 300 or more a month flow into one place instead of 30 scattered tools.

2. It gathers context automatically. The bot pulls the context a human would normally collect manually, so nothing waits on someone switching between dashboards.

3. It assesses and prioritizes. Each alert gets triaged against what we know about normal behavior. Clear noise gets closed. Real risk gets surfaced.

4. It escalates the few that matter. Roughly 10 investigations a week reach a human, with the context already attached.

The bot does the first pass. Engineers still decide what matters.

The benefits of our AI triage bot

• Less manual review. More than 300 alerts still arrive each month. About 10 a week need a person.

• Faster response. Context arrives with the alert, so engineers can start investigating instead of spending time gathering context.

• Deeper security work. Freed from the queue, our engineers build hardening, logging, and detections that used to be out of reach.

• A leaner, sharper team. We get enterprise-grade coverage without an enterprise-sized operations force.

Why we built it ourselves

We could have bought a tool, but we built our own for three reasons.

• Context. Our team knows our environment better than any outside product does. That knowledge makes triage more accurate.

• Control. Building it ourselves means we decide what the bot sees, how it handles data, and where the guardrails sit.

• Compounding value. Every detection we add and every rule we tune makes the bot smarter for us specifically, not for a vendor's average customer.

How your team can move toward this

You don't need to rebuild your whole program to start. Focus on moving the manual work away from your best people.

1. Map your alert sources. Count how many tools your analysts touch and how long a typical investigation takes. That's your baseline.

2. Find the repetitive triage. Identify the alerts that follow a predictable pattern. Those are the first candidates for automation.

3. Automate context gathering first. Before you automate decisions, automate the collection of signals a human needs to decide.

4. Escalate, don't replace. Let the system close clear noise and route the rest to humans with context attached.

5. Reinvest the time. Point your engineers at hardening, logging, and detection development. That's where a lean team builds enterprise depth.

Start small, measure the drop in manual review, and expand from there. The goal is a team that spends its time where it counts.

Security operations don't have to mean a wall of alerts and a growing headcount. With the right automation, a small team can protect a fast-growing business with the rigor of a much larger one. That's the model we run at Aircall, and it's the model we think more teams should build.

To learn more about how we protect our customers and their data, explore Aircall's approach to security and compliance.

Here's what's new:

Reach your whole contact list without your team making a single call

Now available on every plan, AI Voice Agent Campaigns let you upload a contact list (from 10 to 5,000 contacts), assign an agent, and launch outreach in minutes, with no two contacts ever called twice. Every contact gets handled with the skill of your best rep, and warm leads or conversations that need a human get passed straight to your team. You'll also see which outreach campaign performed best in real time, so the next one starts stronger.

AI Agents that resolve, not just respond

When your AI Agent can't reach your CRM or helpdesk, it can only take a message and pass the customer along. Aircall's AI Ecosystem changes that. Your agents can now act directly inside the tools you already use, looking up a record, updating a deal, or booking a meeting mid-conversation, with no handoff required. Connections to Attio, HelpScout, Front, HubSpot, and Calendly are live now, with new partners joining every month.

Launch AI Voice Agents in minutes with pre-built templates

Building a new AI Voice Agent from scratch means figuring out prompts, flows, and configuration before you can even test it. With AI Voice Agent templates, pick a proven use case, like a receptionist or a HubSpot lead qualifier, and your agent comes pre-configured and ready to review. Adjust it to fit your business, and go live in minutes, fully in your control. Stay tuned for more to come!

Branded Caller ID: Now available for US numbers

Most people won't pick up a call from a number they don't recognize. Branded Caller ID fixes that. Once Aircall verifies your company's identity and outbound numbers, your verified name and logo appear on the recipient's screen when placing calls. This gives customers and prospects peace of mind knowing exactly who's calling before they pick up, and also helps cut the risk of your calls getting flagged as spam.

MyAirbags sent 1,011 replies at any time of day in just two months

MyAirbags rebuilds airbag modules and other safety-critical car parts. Customers without theirs often can't drive safely, so questions and messages come in at any time of day. To handle the volume, MyAirbags deployed an AI Messaging Agent that pulls customers' order details directly from HubSpot, so conversations never wait. In its first two months, the agent handled inbound conversations from over 350 customers, with 38% occurring outside business hours.

What else is new at Aircall?

The best conversations start with feeling understood

Language shouldn't stand between you and a great customer experience. AI Voice Agents now speak 38 languages, including Mandarin, Japanese, Catalan, and Hindi, so you can deliver the same brand experience, agent behavior, and workflows across every market. The new Voice Library also lets you preview voices and accents and fine-tune filler phrases for a more natural feel.

Experience AI Voice Agents

Multiple AI Messaging Agents, one number

You can now assign multiple AI Messaging Agents to the same number, with only one active at a time, for business hours, holidays, or a specific campaign. That way, an intake agent can hand off to a full-service agent overnight without splitting your number in two.

Calls that don't drop when your WiFi does, even out in the field

Mobile app calls will soon have the option to run over the cellular network instead of the internet. They’ll ring through your phone's dialer under your business caller ID, with everything still native to Aircall. It’s one less thing standing between your team and the call, and a real lifeline for field reps working where the internet can't be trusted.

Thanks for reading! If Aircall has helped your team work smarter, we'd love your support. Leave us a review on Trustpilot to spread the word, and add us as a Preferred Source on Google to see more of our content!

See you next month,

The Aircall Team

What is sales dialer software?

Sales dialer software automates the mechanical part of outbound calling. Instead of a rep reading a number off a CRM record and keying it into a phone, the software loads a call list, places calls in order, and writes the outcome back to the CRM record.

The value is not the dialing itself. It is the minutes returned to selling. Every manual dial, every logged disposition, and every hand-typed note is time a rep spends not talking to a buyer. Aircall’s own figure for the Power Dialer is that it saves more than two minutes per call and lets reps reach three times more leads per hour.

Three things usually get bundled under the term:

• The dialing engine. How calls get placed and in what sequence.

• The CRM connection. Whether call outcomes, recordings, and notes land on the right record automatically.

• The coaching layer. Recordings, transcripts, and call analysis that let managers improve calls after the fact.

Teams that buy only the first one usually end up buying the other two within a year.

What are the five types of sales dialers?

The category words get used loosely, including by vendors. Here is what each mode actually does.

Which dialing mode should most B2B sales teams use?

Power dialing, in most cases. Power and progressive dialing are the two modes that keep a live rep on every connection, so neither produces abandoned calls or the pause before a rep comes on the line that tells a prospect they are on a sales list. Between the two, power dialing has the higher throughput because it does not force a fixed gap between calls.

Parallel and predictive dialing produce higher raw connect numbers, but they trade volume for answer-rate risk that compounds over weeks. Every dropped line registers as a missed call from your business number, and carriers flag that pattern. Once your numbers are labeled as spam, rebuilding reputation costs months of lost pipeline. PhoneBurner, whose entire product is single-line power dialing, makes the same case on its own product page: a power dialer keeps a live rep on every connection, with no pause and no abandoned calls.

How much does a sales dialer improve call volume?

Expect the gain to come from removing dead time, not from calling faster.

The three sources of recovered time, in the order they usually matter:

1. No manual number entry. Roughly the time it takes to read, type, and verify a number, on every call.

2. No manual logging. Call outcome, duration, and recording attach to the CRM record without a rep touching a field.

3. No list navigation. The rep never goes back to a spreadsheet to find who is next.

Vendor figures for the size of the gain: Aircall reports reps reach three times more leads per hour with the Power Dialer, and PhoneBurner reports dialing up to four times faster than manual, at up to 80 calls per hour. Treat any vendor multiplier as a ceiling rather than a forecast, because the realistic gain depends entirely on how much of your current call time is already conversation. As an illustration, a team whose reps talk for 40 minutes of every hour has almost no dead time left to recover, while a team whose reps talk for 12 minutes has a great deal.

What should you evaluate before buying sales dialer software?

Evaluate CRM write-back, dialing mode, and answer-rate protection first, because those three decide whether the tool works after purchase rather than during the demo. The full list, in that priority order:

• CRM write-back, not just CRM lookup. Many tools display the CRM record during the call. Fewer write the call back to it automatically. Ask to see a logged call in your own CRM sandbox during the evaluation.

• Dialing modes offered, and how they are packaged. Multi-line dialing is frequently an add-on rather than a plan feature, so the mode you evaluated may not be the mode you are quoted.

• Answer-rate protection. Local caller ID, number reputation management, and spam-label remediation. This is the capability buyers most often realize they needed after signing.

• Call quality at volume. Ask for the carrier and network architecture, then run a pilot on your actual rep locations and networks rather than the vendor’s.

• Recording, transcription, and call coaching. Coaching value compounds; dialing speed does not.

• Analytics that a manager will actually open. Connect rate, talk time, and outcome by list segment, available without an analyst.

• Admin control. Who can build lists, who can override caller ID, and what happens when a rep leaves.

• Platform breadth. Whether the same system also handles inbound calls, routing, and support conversations, or whether you are adding a second phone vendor alongside the one your support team uses.

• Compliance posture. Consent capture, call recording notification, do-not-call list handling, and regional rules. Have your legal team review this rather than a vendor’s summary of it.

Best sales dialer software in 2026: how the main options compare

Every fact below is drawn from each vendor’s own public product, pricing, or support documentation and was checked on 3 August 2026. Packaging in this category changes often, so confirm the specification attached to your quote before you shortlist.

Two things in that table are worth reading twice. First, multi-line dialing is usually packaged as an upgrade or an add-on, not as a plan feature, so a quote can arrive with fewer lines than the demo showed. Kixie’s own pricing page and PowerDialer feature page currently state different top line counts, which is a good reason to get the number in writing. Second, Aircall and JustCall are the two options here that also run inbound support, which changes the comparison from “which dialer” to “how many phone vendors.”

When a competitor is the better choice

The right shortlist keeps your team from spending a quarter evaluating a tool that was never the fit.

• Choose Orum if your bottleneck is genuinely conversations per rep per hour on cold lists, you have the list volume to feed 10 parallel lines, and you are keeping your existing phone system.

• Choose Kixie if you want multi-line volume wired tightly into HubSpot or Salesforce and you are comfortable with add-on based packaging and quoting.

• Choose PhoneBurner if your diagnosis is an answer-rate problem rather than a call-volume problem. Its answer-rate tooling is the deepest in this group, and its single-line-only design is a deliberate position rather than a gap.

• Choose JustCall if you want predictive or dynamic dialing inside a phone system rather than beside one, and your team fits the tier where those modes live.

• Choose Aircall if you want single-line power dialing inside a platform that also runs inbound support, with the widest native integration library of the five.

What does sales dialer software cost?

Pricing in this category is per user per month, and the dialer is usually gated behind a mid or upper tier, an add-on, or both. The Aircall Power Dialer is available on the Professional plan. Kixie packages its PowerDialer as an add-on to its Professional plan. JustCall reserves full predictive and dynamic dialing for its SalesPro tier.

Three cost lines get missed during evaluation:

• Tier or add-on uplift. Moving your whole team up a tier, or attaching a per-seat add-on, to unlock dialing for a subset of reps.

• Number and carrier charges. Additional local numbers for caller ID coverage, and per-minute charges on some destinations.

• Seat minimums and annual terms. Several vendors in this category price meaningfully differently on monthly versus annual commitments.

Ask for a quote that includes numbers, expected minutes, and the specific dialing tier, rather than a per-seat figure alone.

How do you protect answer rates once you increase call volume?

Raising dial volume without changing anything else usually lowers your answer rate. The mechanism is straightforward: carriers and handset apps score numbers on call patterns, and a number that suddenly places many short unanswered calls gets labeled.

Practical steps, in order:

1. Register your numbers with the applicable carrier and industry registries for your market.

2. Match caller ID to the region you are calling so the number on the screen is recognizable rather than foreign.

3. Spread volume across several numbers rather than pushing everything through one.

4. Close the dead-air gap. Any delay between answer and rep voice reads as automated to the person picking up.

5. Watch label status, not just connect rate. A number can be labeled before your connect rate visibly drops.

6. Have legal review your dialing configuration. In the United States, automated dialing and abandoned-call rates fall under the TCPA and the FTC Telemarketing Sales Rule, and rules differ substantially in the UK, EU, and APAC. This is a question for counsel, not for a vendor sales team.

How does the Aircall Power Dialer work?

The Aircall Power Dialer runs through the Aircall Chrome extension and is available on the Professional plan.

1. A rep browses a list, a CRM view, or a web page containing phone numbers.

2. The extension detects the numbers on the page and adds them to a call queue.

3. Aircall dials the queue in sequence, moving to the next number as soon as the rep finishes.

4. Each call, its duration, its recording, and its outcome write back to Salesforce, HubSpot, or any of Aircall’s 250+ native integrations.

5. Recordings and transcripts feed coaching, so the same calls that generate pipeline also improve the next batch.

Because dialing is a capability of the wider platform rather than a separate product, the same setup covers inbound calls, intelligent routing, call recording, and analytics for the teams that need them. Aircall supports 23,000+ businesses on that model.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between a power dialer and an auto dialer?

“Auto dialer” is the umbrella term for any software that places calls automatically. A power dialer is one specific type: it dials a queued list one number at a time for a single rep, advancing as soon as the previous call ends. Predictive and parallel dialers are also auto dialers, and they behave very differently because they dial multiple numbers at once.

Is a predictive dialer legal?

Predictive dialing is legal in many markets but heavily regulated, and the rules differ by country. In the United States, the TCPA governs automated calls to mobile numbers and the FTC Telemarketing Sales Rule limits abandoned calls for covered telemarketing. The UK, EU member states, and APAC markets each apply their own consent and abandoned-call rules. Treat this as a question for your legal counsel about your specific dialing configuration and call lists.

Do sales dialers work with Salesforce and HubSpot?

Most do at some level, but the depth varies. Confirm three things specifically: whether calls log automatically to the correct object, whether recordings and transcripts attach to that record, and whether a rep can dial from inside the CRM without switching tools. Aircall connects to Salesforce, HubSpot, and 250+ native integrations with two-way sync.

How many calls per hour can a rep make with a power dialer?

It depends far more on your list than on the software. Published vendor figures give a range: Aircall reports three times more leads reached per hour, and PhoneBurner reports up to 80 calls per hour on single-line power dialing. The honest way to size it for your own team: measure how many minutes of your reps’ current hour are actual conversation, and assume the dialer recovers most of the remainder rather than multiplying the conversation time itself.

Do I need a separate dialer if I already have a business phone system?

Not always, and this is worth checking before you add a vendor. Several business phone platforms, Aircall and JustCall among them, include dialing as a feature or tier of the phone system itself, which avoids running two phone systems, two sets of numbers, and two admin surfaces. Check what your current platform already covers before you buy a standalone tool.

What is parallel dialing and is it worth it?

Parallel dialing places calls on several lines at once for one rep and connects whichever person answers first, dropping the other lines. Vendors that offer it, including Kixie and Orum, currently top out around 10 simultaneous lines. It produces the highest raw connect volume of any mode, and it is worth it only when your list quality is disposable and you accept the reputation cost of dropped calls, because that pattern is exactly what triggers spam labeling on your outbound numbers.

Which Aircall plan includes the Power Dialer?

The Power Dialer is available on the Aircall Professional plan and requires the Aircall Chrome extension. Current plan details are on the Aircall pricing page.

Put more conversations in front of your reps

The right sales dialer is the one that removes dead time from your reps’ day without creating a spam problem, a compliance problem, or a second phone vendor. For most B2B teams, that means power dialing inside the platform that already handles the rest of their calls.

See how the Aircall Power Dialer fits into outbound call center software built for sales teams, or book a demo to walk through your own call list.

Most outbound teams didn't design their outbound sales technology stack. It accumulated. A dialer here, a sequencing tool there, an enrichment platform someone demoed at a conference, a dashboard nobody quite trusts. Each addition made sense on its own. The result, two or three years later, is a rep juggling six tabs to make one call, and a RevOps team spending more time maintaining integrations than improving them.

Aircall maximizes outbound connect rates with Power Dialer and AI guidance, and that's the piece most stacks get wrong first: the calling layer itself. But a dialer alone isn't a stack. This guide breaks down what actually belongs in the stack in 2026, why dialing, CRM, coaching, and analytics need to work as one system rather than four separate purchases, and how to prioritize what to add next instead of buying everything at once.

Key takeaways

• The average seller works across eight sales tools, 42% of reps report feeling overwhelmed by them, and overwhelmed sellers are 45% less likely to attain quota, according to Salesforce.

• Aircall provides the dialing, coaching, and CRM sync layers of an outbound sales technology stack, which most teams otherwise buy as three separate tools.

• A complete outbound stack has five functional layers: dialing, CRM, sales engagement, conversation intelligence, and data enrichment, not five random purchases.

• Aircall Power Dialer eliminates manual dialing so reps call 3x more leads per hour, dialing a list in sequence rather than in parallel.

• CRM sync should be judged on depth, not existence. A stack where every layer writes back to the CRM automatically beats a stack where reps do it by hand.

• 84% of sales teams without an all-in-one platform plan to consolidate their technology, per Salesforce.

What we are

The real cost of a stack nobody designed

Tool sprawl in outbound sales has a name, and increasingly, a price tag. Sellers use an average of eight tools to close deals, 42% of sales reps say they feel overwhelmed by the number of tools they are expected to use, and sellers who feel that way are 45% less likely to attain quota, according to Salesforce's most recent State of Sales research. That overwhelm is not just a morale problem. It shows up directly in quota attainment.

Gartner measured a different population and found a higher rate. Its September 2024 survey of 1,026 sellers found that 72% feel overwhelmed by the number of tools they are expected to use. Some of that cost is cognitive rather than financial.

Gloria Mark's research at UC Irvine found that interrupted work was resumed on average 23 minutes and 15 seconds later, and that people typically move through about two intervening tasks before returning to what they were originally doing. A rep switching between eight tools accumulates that cost many times a day.

None of this means fewer tools is automatically better. It means every tool in the stack needs to earn its place, and the layers need to talk to each other without a rep doing the translating.

• The average seller works across eight sales tools.

• 42% of reps report feeling overwhelmed by their tech stack, per Salesforce.

• 72% of sellers told Gartner the same, in a September 2024 survey of 1,026 sellers.

• Interrupted work is resumed on average 23 minutes and 15 seconds later, per Gloria Mark at UC Irvine.

The five layers of an outbound stack that actually holds together

Rather than a list of individual products, it's more useful to think in terms of functional layers. Each layer answers a different question about the outbound motion, and a healthy stack has exactly one strong answer for each, not three overlapping ones.

A sales engagement platform is software that manages multi-step outreach sequences, such as a scheduled mix of calls, emails, and LinkedIn touches, so reps follow a consistent cadence instead of manually tracking who to contact next. Conversation intelligence is the category of software that analyzes what was actually said on a sales call, using AI to transcribe the conversation and surface summaries, sentiment, objection patterns, and coaching signals automatically, rather than simply logging that a call took place and leaving a manager to listen to the recording for context. Most outbound teams already own tools in the engagement and enrichment layers; the gap tends to show up in dialing and conversation intelligence, where the calling experience and the CRM often don't talk to each other cleanly.

The dialer layer: how Aircall maximizes connect rate

Every layer in the stack depends on reps actually getting people on the phone. If the dialing layer is weak, a perfectly designed cadence in a sales engagement tool still stalls at the first step.

A power dialer is a phone system that automatically dials the next number on a rep's calling list the moment the previous call ends, removing the manual work of searching, dialing, and copy-pasting numbers one at a time. Aircall Power Dialer eliminates manual dialing so reps call 3x more leads per hour, automatically moving to the next number on the list the moment a call ends. Numbers detected on a prospect's website can be added to the calling queue directly, and CRM context appears on screen before the rep picks up, so the call starts with information instead of a blank contact card.

Frederik Schwerdtfeger, Business Development Manager at Zizoo, described the compounding effect this way: "If at the end of the day you save a couple of seconds per call, that's 10 minutes. All of a sudden you have another 2 to 3 hours by the end of the month. It really adds up." Read more about Power Dialer and how it fits into a broader outbound call center software setup.

• Manually searching for and copying phone numbers

• Dialing each number by hand between calls

• Losing calling-list order or duplicating dials

• Starting a call with no context on who's on the line

The AI coaching layer: turning live calls into ramp time

Conversation intelligence used to mean a recording a manager might review days later. In a 2026 stack, it means guidance that reaches the rep while the call is still happening.

Aircall coaches sales reps in real time with AI guidance during live calls, surfacing objection-handling prompts and next-step suggestions at the moment they're needed rather than in a post-call debrief. This matters most for new reps: instead of learning entirely through trial and error or shadowing a senior rep, they get in-call support from their first week. AI Assist Pro extends this into automated scoring and trend analysis, so managers can see patterns across every call, not just the ones they happened to sit in on.

The coaching layer and the dialing layer need to be the same system, not two systems that occasionally sync. A power dialer that maximizes calls per hour is only as valuable as the quality of those calls, and that's the coaching layer's job.

Real-time AI coaching vs. post-call coaching

Closing the loop: CRM sync and revenue intelligence

A stack with strong dialing and coaching layers still fails if the data from every call doesn't land back in the CRM automatically. Aircall embeds native CRM integrations that put calling, SMS, and AI summaries inside every major CRM, including a purpose-built Salesforce integration and HubSpot integration, so call outcomes, notes, and dispositions write themselves into the record instead of waiting on a rep's memory at the end of the day.

Aircall converts sales call data into actionable revenue intelligence through Aircall Analytics, tracking connect rates, talk time, and rep performance in one dashboard rather than a spreadsheet someone updates weekly. This is where RevOps earns its place in the stack. RevOps, short for revenue operations, is the function responsible for aligning sales, marketing, and customer success around a single revenue process, unifying the data, tooling, and reporting each team would otherwise manage separately so leadership works from one consistent view of pipeline and performance rather than three conflicting ones. RevOps gets the visibility it needs from a connected stack: not a report assembled after the fact, but a live view of what's working across the outbound motion. For a broader look at the category, see tools RevOps teams recommend for connecting the rest of the stack.

What should sync automatically after every call

• Call outcome and disposition

• AI-generated summary and sentiment

• Next-step or follow-up task

• Updated contact or deal record, with no manual entry

Sizing the stack to where your team actually is

Not every team needs every layer on day one. What changes by stage is which layer to fix first.

What to prioritize by stage

1. Under 10 reps: prioritize the dialing and CRM layers first. A single connected system beats five specialized tools that don't talk to each other yet.

2. 10 to 50 reps: add the AI coaching layer. This is typically where ramp time and inconsistent objection handling start costing real pipeline.

3. 50+ reps or a dedicated RevOps function: invest in the analytics and enrichment layers, since the volume of data finally justifies dedicated reporting and better targeting.

4. At any stage: audit before adding. If a tool's usage can't be tied to a specific layer from the table above, it's either redundant with something else in the stack or a candidate to remove.

Frequently asked questions

What tools make up a modern outbound sales tech stack?

A modern outbound stack has five layers: a dialer, a CRM, a sales engagement or cadence tool, conversation intelligence for coaching and analysis, and a data enrichment source for finding who to call.

Do I need a separate sales engagement platform if I already have a power dialer?

For the calling channel alone, often not. Aircall Power Dialer handles list-based sequential dialing, CRM context on screen, and automatic call logging without a sequencing tool on top. But a sales engagement platform also orchestrates email and LinkedIn steps in a single cadence. If your outbound motion depends on multi-channel sequences rather than call volume, you will still want one, and Aircall integrates with the major options rather than replacing them.

What's the difference between a power dialer and a predictive dialer?

A power dialer calls one number at a time from a list, connecting every call to a rep. A predictive dialer calls multiple numbers simultaneously and uses algorithms to predict answer rates, which can leave some answered calls without an available rep.

How does AI coaching fit into an outbound tech stack?

AI coaching sits inside the calling layer, giving reps real-time prompts during live calls rather than only reviewing performance afterward. Aircall coaches sales reps in real time with AI guidance during live calls as part of the same platform used for dialing.

Why does CRM integration depth matter for an outbound stack?

Shallow integrations log that a call happened. Deep integrations sync recordings, summaries, sentiment, and disposition into multiple CRM objects automatically, keeping the CRM accurate without manual rep entry.

How many tools should an outbound sales team actually use?

There's no universal number: it depends on team size and deal complexity. The better test is whether each tool maps to a distinct layer, dialing, CRM, engagement, intelligence, or enrichment, rather than duplicating one another.

A stack that adds up, instead of adding friction

The teams getting outbound right in 2026 aren't the ones with the most tools. They're the ones where the dialing, coaching, and CRM layers behave like a single system, so a rep's day is spent in conversations instead of stitching data between tabs.

Before adding the next tool to the stack, it's worth asking which layer it's actually filling, and whether an existing layer could already do the job if it were more deeply connected.

Aircall provides the dialing, coaching, and CRM sync layers of an outbound sales technology stack, so the calling layer reports into the same system as everything else rather than sitting beside it.

Here’s what shipped in August and September.

AI Voice Agent campaigns: turn contact lists into conversations at scale

AI Voice Agents can already call leads, follow up with customers, and handle routine conversations. Now, Outbound Campaigns lets you put an entire contact list to work, automatically.

Build a campaign once, upload your contacts, choose your AI Voice Agent, and launch. It works through the list for you, handling conversations end to end, from answering questions and qualifying leads to booking meetings, handling next steps and bringing in your team when needed. Track connection rates and outcomes as your campaign runs, so you can see how each outreach effort performs.

Run follow-ups, reminders, renewals or other repeatable outreach workflows at any volume, without adding more work for your team. Whether you’re reaching 10 contacts or 5,000, you can turn a list into thousands of conversations with a few clicks.

Outbound Campaigns are available on every plan and use your existing AI Voice Agent minutes.

A new way to create AI Voice Agents

You can now create an AI Voice Agent from a ready-made template, built around common use cases like FAQs and lead qualification.

Pick the use case you need and start with an agent that already knows how that conversation should work. The prompts, flow and configuration are already in place, so you can add your business information, review the agent, make it your own, and test it before going live.

That means you can start with a working foundation and spend your time refining the experience, rather than figuring out where to begin.

More templates are coming soon, including a Shopify-integrated Order Management Agent for e-commerce and retail.

Templates are available for inbound voice agents in English-speaking markets today, with more languages and use cases coming soon.

Put Salesforce at the heart of every conversation

Aircall has always been deeply integrated with Salesforce. Now, we’re taking that integration further, so your AI Voice Agents can start conversations with customer context, use your Salesforce content to answer questions and take action in Salesforce as the call unfolds, helping resolve more requests from start to finish.

Use Salesforce Knowledge

Connect your Salesforce Knowledge articles directly to your agent’s knowledge base, so it can answer questions using the same information your team relies on.

Know who’s calling

New AI Actions can look up the caller in Salesforce as the call begins, giving your agent relevant customer context before the conversation gets underway.

Take action in Salesforce

During the call, your agent can read and write directly into Salesforce, looking up and creating cases, opportunities, and more.

Keep your team in the loop

After the conversation finishes, the call is logged in Salesforce and Aircall Workspace, so your reps can seamlessly pick up where the AI Voice Agent left off.

Together, these updates bring Salesforce into the heart of the AI Voice Agent experience, helping your agent understand more, do more and resolve more on every call.

Reach more customers with 13 new languages

AI Voice Agents now support 38 languages, with 13 new additions this month including Hebrew, Catalan, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Tamil, Malay, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian.

We’ve also made choosing your agent’s voice much easier. The new voice library lets you filter by language and accent, listen to voices before choosing one, and find new accents and dialects including Austrian German, Quebecois French and Irish English.

Filler phrases and background noise can also be switched on or off, giving you more control over how your agent sounds.

Keep customer context moving

Three updates this month make AI Voice Agent conversations more connected, giving your agents the knowledge and context they need to deliver better experiences from start to finish.

First, your AI Agents can now tap into the knowledge your team already uses. Connect Zendesk, Salesforce, HubSpot or Document360 to your AI Agent’s knowledge base, and it can use your existing business documentation, product information and policies to answer customers accurately. When that content changes, your AI Agent picks up the latest information automatically, keeping answers current without manual migration or upkeep. And because knowledge is shared across voice and messaging, you can keep your AI Agents aligned across every customer channel.

Next, your agent can get to know the caller before the conversation even starts. Contact lookups in HubSpot, Salesforce and Zendesk now happen in the background during the greeting, so the agent can start with relevant customer details already in hand and get straight to helping.

Then, that context can follow the conversation wherever it goes. With Agent Memory, when one AI Voice Agent transfers a call to another, the receiving agent now gets the caller’s details, the reason for the transfer and everything shared so far. The next agent can pick up with the full picture and keep the conversation moving toward a resolution. In our pilot, that meant 69% less handling time for the second agent.

Together, these updates make every AI Voice Agent interaction feel like part of one continuous conversation, from the first hello to the final resolution.

That’s September

We’ve had a busy month!  With new ways to scale outbound conversations, get agents live faster, reach more customers, put Salesforce context to work, and keep multi-agent conversations moving, we’ve rounded out the summer with a real flourish!

And stay tuned; we can’t wait to show you what the fall will bring. See you in next month’s roundup.

According to Aircall's internal launch data, unknown numbers get ignored at scale, and answer rates can drop 40 to 60% once a number is flagged by a carrier. For sales, support, and success teams, that's lost revenue and a broken customer experience, call after call.

Aircall's new Branded Caller ID closes that gap at the source.

What does Branded Caller ID do?

When a customer places an outbound call from an enrolled Aircall number, the recipient sees the calling company's name and logo on their phone screen before they even answer. Not a mystery number, a call that visibly comes from a business they already know.

Once a number is enrolled, branding is fully automatic. Reps keep calling exactly as they do today. What changes is how the call looks on the other end.

Why call branding matters

Recipients have been trained not to answer unknown numbers, thanks to years of robocalls and spam. That default punishes every legitimate business calling from a standard number. Branded Caller ID flips it: instead of asking someone to trust an unfamiliar number, it shows them something they already recognize.

Per Aircall's coverage data, roughly 90% of US mobile subscribers are on carriers that support branded display, so most people your team calls will see the brand. Calls always connect either way. Display is additive, never a dependency.

Set up Branded Caller ID in 5 steps

1. Submit your legal business name, address, and supporting documents. Create display names (up to 32 characters) and assign them to Aircall numbers. Logo upload is optional.

2. Aircall verifies brand ownership and identity from your documents.

3. The submission goes to the carrier network for approval, trackable in the Dashboard. Vetting can take up to 10 business days; once approved, branding goes live automatically.

4. Reps call as usual. The brand appears automatically.

5. Track pick-up rates for branded vs. non-branded numbers directly in the new Numbers Performance report.

What it costs

$0.08 per branded call, charged only when branding is successfully delivered to the recipient's device, whether or not the call is answered. No plan restriction, no contract amendment.

The takeaway

Outbound calling has mostly been a numbers game: dial more, expect a percentage to answer. Branded Caller ID makes the platform work to get each call answered instead of leaving it to volume. For a brand that already shows up consistently on your website, email, and support channels, your phone calls can finally match.

Ready to see it in action? Watch the product demo or explore Aircall's outbound platform.

Tl;dr

Three capabilities are open through the Aircall Developer Portal: AI Assist for conversation intelligence, AI Voice Agents, and AI Messaging Agents across SMS and WhatsApp. You can read structured intelligence out of every conversation, trigger agents from your own workflows, and expose your system's actions to those agents over MCP. Connect a tool once, and every product in the Aircall AI suite can use it. Building on Aircall used to mean reading reference docs and reverse-engineering the build process, and most teams stalled before they shipped. The rebuilt portal documents the full path from design to publish for the first time.

AI Assist: every conversation becomes structured data

AI Assist turns every call and message into machine-readable intelligence: transcripts, summaries, sentiment, action items, QA results, and playbook outcomes. It’s available through REST APIs and webhooks, so you can pull or receive it wherever you need it.

The pattern is straightforward:

• Subscribe to a webhook, and the moment a conversation ends you receive a structured payload.

  • No polling, no scraping recordings, no manual tagging. 

• From there, it’s your logic:

  • Write the summary back to a CRM record

  • Route a negative-sentiment call to a managerPopulate a coaching dashboard

  • Feed action items into a ticketing queue. 

• AI Assist also pulls context from your connected tools to surface conversation history to your reps, then logs the conversation back into your CRM, data warehouse, or QA stack.

This is the layer that makes products smarter with every conversation. CRMs, helpdesks, QA tools, and coaching platforms can all consume the same intelligence and improve the more their users talk to customers.

Agents that act, not just answer

AI Assist tells you what happened. AI Voice and Messaging Agents do something about it while it’s still happening.

AI Voice Agents run calls end to end, follow the workflows you define, hold a natural conversation, and connect to external systems to take action. Inbound AI Voice Agent calls can be handled entirely inside Aircall, and outbound AI calls can be triggered from any product you build. AI Messaging Agents apply the same agent model to messaging across SMS and WhatsApp, on the same ecosystem and the same integrations, so there are no silos between channels.

The point of an agent has become resolution, not deflection. A conversation is only resolved when the agent can look up an order, qualify a lead, open a ticket, or book a meeting in real time. That requires your systems to be reachable mid-conversation, which is where MCP and AI Actions come in.

MCP and AI Actions: one light build, multiple possibilities

AI Actions is how Aircall's agents connect to and act within external tools. MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is how you make your system's capabilities available to those agents. Instead of building bespoke integration logic for each workflow, you describe your tools and let the agent decide when to call them.

The build is intentionally light:

• Stand up an MCP server that exposes your actions as tools.

• Write clear schemas and tool descriptions. The agent reasons over these to decide what to call and when.

• Register your MCP URL through the Technology Partner Program.

That is the integration. Aircall's agents discover your tools automatically and invoke them during conversations. One MCP server works across AI Agents and AI Assist automatically, not just in one product. Because MCP is becoming the standard for AI agent interoperability, the same server also works with every other MCP-speaking platform your customers use. It takes one investment and one build for a broad payoff.

MCP integrations are declarative, which lowers maintenance. When a workflow changes, you update your schema and descriptions rather than rewriting integration code. There is no brittle glue to keep in sync every time the conversation logic shifts.

The most integrated, end-to-end AI platform

When an Aircall agent reads and acts across several systems at once, it does a job rather than just answering a question. A retail Order Concierge can pull order details from Shopify, process a refund through Stripe, and log the outcome in the CRM inside one call. A Lead Qualifier can answer inbound, enrich HubSpot, and book a meeting in Calendly before the caller hangs up. The more systems you connect in a single workflow, the more the agent can resolve without a handoff.

A documented path from idea to marketplace

The rebuilt Developer Portal documents the entire path, from design to build to test to publish, across three tracks: AI integrations covering AI Assist, AI Voice and Messaging Agents, and MCP; classic REST integrations using the existing REST APIs and webhooks, now documented end to end; and embedded experiences that surface your product inside the Aircall workspace. Whichever track you pick, you get a defined route to a live, listed integration, plus marketplace visibility, co-marketing, and tier benefits across Aircall's 400+ integration base and 23,000 customers. Partners integrating now are visible to Aircall's customers from day one, while the ecosystem is still small enough to stand out in.

This isn’t a beta running on synthetic traffic. Our own Product Support team deployed AI Voice Agents on inbound calls before the platform opened to partners, and the agent exceeded its deflection target within the first week, with customer experience scores rising measurably over the weeks that followed. The capabilities you build on are the same ones already resolving live conversations.

Where to start

If you want intelligence out of conversations, start with AI Assist. Subscribe to a webhook and you’ll have structured data flowing in minutes. If you want your product to act inside conversations, stand up an MCP server and register the URL. If you need classic call and contact sync, the REST APIs are documented end-to-end for the first time.

Voice and messaging are becoming programmable in a way they never were before. The conversation is no longer a black box that ends in a recording. It’s a stream of structured events and a surface your code can act on in real time.

Head to the Aircall Developer Portal to read the docs, explore the AI Assist and MCP reference examples, and ship your first AI-ready integration.

A RevOps phone strategy closes that gap on purpose, rather than leaving it to whichever phone system a sales team picked up first. Aircall powers revenue operations teams with complete call intelligence, turning every call into structured data instead of an entry in a rep's memory. This guide covers what a revenue-generating call stack actually needs to include in 2026, and how to build one in phases rather than trying to fix everything on day one.

What we are

Key takeaways

• RevOps teams that align people, process, and technology see meaningfully higher revenue growth and profitability than siloed organizations, according to Forrester research.

• Aircall powers revenue operations teams with complete call intelligence, so call data feeds the same reporting layer as marketing and CRM data instead of sitting apart from it.

• A revenue-generating call stack needs four things working together: real-time analytics, automatic CRM sync, call recording with transcription, and AI coaching, not just a dial tone.

• Misaligned technology and conflicting metrics are among the most common obstacles RevOps teams report, which is exactly what disconnected call data creates.

• A phased rollout, starting with visibility, then sync, then coaching, gets a RevOps phone strategy live faster than trying to implement every layer simultaneously.

Why phone data still sits outside the revenue stack

Most revenue stacks were built channel by channel. Marketing automation platforms report on campaigns. CRMs report on pipeline. But the phone system is frequently chosen by whichever team needed it first, sales or support, and configured for that team's immediate needs rather than for how RevOps would eventually need to report on it. The result: call volume, connect rate, and call outcomes exist, but they live in a separate silo that has to be manually reconciled against everything else.

This isn't a hypothetical problem. Forrester's research on revenue operations names misaligned technology, conflicting metrics, and inadequate processes among the most common obstacles B2B leaders report when trying to run a unified revenue function. A phone system that doesn't sync automatically into the CRM or the analytics layer is a textbook version of exactly that obstacle, and it's one of the more fixable ones, since the data already exists. It's just not connected.

The stakes for getting this right keep rising. Gartner's own research on revenue operations has tracked a sharp increase in the share of high-growth companies formalizing a RevOps model, and research compiled by GTM 8020 links companies with a mature RevOps function to meaningfully higher revenue growth than peers without one. None of that growth shows up automatically just because a RevOps title exists on an org chart. It depends on every revenue channel, phone included, actually feeding the same reporting layer.

• Phone systems are often adopted by sales or support alone, not selected with RevOps reporting in mind.

• Misaligned technology and conflicting metrics rank among the top obstacles RevOps teams report, per Forrester.

• Call data usually already exists; the gap is in whether it syncs automatically into shared reporting.

• Gartner has tracked a sharp rise in companies formalizing a RevOps model among their highest-growth peers.

What a RevOps phone strategy actually needs to cover

"Call intelligence" gets used loosely. For a RevOps team, it needs to mean something specific and measurable, not just "we have call recordings somewhere."

Call intelligence is the structured data and analysis generated from phone conversations, including connect rate, talk time, call outcome, sentiment, and AI-extracted topics, organized so it can be reported on alongside other revenue data rather than reviewed call by call. Revenue intelligence is the broader discipline of turning that call-level data, plus CRM and pipeline data, into insight a RevOps or sales leader can act on, such as which talk tracks correlate with closed deals or where reps lose momentum in a call. Connect rate, the percentage of dialed calls that result in an actual conversation, is one of the most basic but most neglected metrics in a phone strategy, since without it, every other funnel metric downstream is built on an unmeasured assumption.

From call to pipeline: what powers revenue insight

Once call intelligence exists, the next question is whether anyone can actually see it without pulling a manual report. Aircall Analytics surfaces call performance and revenue insights in real time, tracking connect rates, talk time, and call outcomes in dashboards that update as calls happen rather than in a weekly export.

Andrew Katz, General Manager of Operations at CloudTrucks, described the shift this way: "Not only are all the metrics we want readily available, but a lot of metrics we wouldn't have even thought were important were prepackaged for us and have provided some great insight." That's the practical test of a revenue-generating call stack: it should surface patterns a team wasn't specifically looking for, not just answer the question someone remembered to ask.

For RevOps specifically, this is where phone data stops being a side channel and starts feeding the same forecasting and pipeline conversations as CRM data, since connect rate and call outcome trends are leading indicators for pipeline health, often weeks before a deal stage changes. This is what call intelligence for RevOps is meant to deliver: not a bigger dashboard, but earlier warning on the numbers that actually predict revenue.

What real-time analytics should surface

• Connect rate and dial volume, by rep and by team

• Talk time and call outcome trends over time

• Metrics nobody thought to ask for, surfaced automatically rather than requested

• Leading indicators for pipeline health, visible before a CRM stage changes

Making the CRM the single source of truth, automatically

Analytics only stays accurate if the underlying call data actually lands in the CRM. Aircall embeds native CRM integrations that put native calling, SMS, and AI summaries inside every major CRM, including a purpose-built Salesforce integration and HubSpot integration, so RevOps isn't reconciling a phone system's data against the CRM's data after the fact, there's only one record. That integration library spans 250+ apps across CRM, helpdesk, and productivity tooling, which matters for RevOps because the phone system has to connect to whatever the rest of the stack already runs on, not dictate it.

Underneath that sync sits call recording and transcription: Aircall automatically records and transcribes every call in multiple languages, generating AI-powered summaries with sentiment, key topics, and action items. That transcript is what makes the CRM record more than a timestamp, it's the actual content of the conversation, searchable and reportable rather than locked in an audio file nobody has time to listen to.

What should never require manual entry

• Call outcome and disposition

• Recording and transcript, attached to the correct CRM record

• AI-generated summary, sentiment, and topic tags

• Follow-up task or next step

Coaching at scale without adding headcount

A RevOps phone strategy isn't only about reporting on what already happened, it also has to improve what happens next. Aircall coaches sales reps in real time with AI guidance during live calls, surfacing objection-handling prompts and next-step suggestions as the conversation happens rather than in a coaching session days later. AI Assist Pro extends this into automated scoring across every call, giving managers a consistent, bias-free view of performance instead of the fraction of calls they had time to personally review.

For RevOps, this closes a loop that pure analytics can't close on its own: seeing that connect rates dropped for a segment of reps is useful, but coaching those reps in the moment is what actually moves the number back up. A phone strategy that only reports and never coaches is half a strategy.

What real-time AI coaching adds to the stack

• In-call prompts for objection handling, delivered while the call is live

• Automated scoring across every call, not just the ones a manager reviews

• Consistent, bias-free feedback criteria for every rep

• A direct feedback loop from analytics trends back into individual coaching

A phased plan for standing up a RevOps phone strategy

Trying to implement analytics, CRM sync, recording, and coaching simultaneously usually stalls. A phased rollout gets each layer working before adding the next.

A 90-day rollout

• Weeks 1 to 4: visibility first. Turn on analytics and get connect rate, talk time, and call volume reporting in one place before changing anything else. You can't fix what you can't see yet.

• Weeks 5 to 8: CRM sync. Connect the phone system to the CRM so every call, recording, and summary logs automatically. This is also when call recording and transcription should go live, since it feeds both CRM records and future coaching.

• Weeks 9 to 12: coaching layer. Turn on AI coaching once there's enough call data flowing to make in-call prompts and post-call scoring meaningful, rather than starting here with nothing to calibrate against.

• Ongoing: review the metrics that matter to RevOps specifically, not just sales, connect rate trends by segment, call-to-pipeline correlation, and rep ramp time, folding them into the same reporting cadence as marketing and CRM data.

For a broader view of how this fits into the rest of the stack, see tools RevOps teams recommend for the layers around the phone system itself.

Frequently asked questions

What does a RevOps phone strategy look like in 2026?

A RevOps phone strategy combines real-time call analytics, automatic CRM sync, call recording with transcription, and AI coaching, so phone data reports alongside marketing and CRM data instead of sitting in a separate silo.

What is call intelligence, and how is it different from a call recording?

A call recording is raw audio. Call intelligence is the structured data extracted from it, connect rate, sentiment, topics, and outcomes, organized so it can be reported on rather than reviewed call by call.

Why should RevOps care about the phone system specifically?

Phone systems are often chosen by sales or support alone, without RevOps reporting in mind, which creates exactly the misaligned technology and conflicting metrics that Forrester identifies as a top RevOps obstacle.

What metrics should a RevOps phone strategy track first?

Connect rate and call outcome are the foundational metrics, since most other funnel and forecasting metrics depend on assumptions about how many dialed calls actually become conversations.

Does a RevOps phone strategy require replacing the CRM?

No. Aircall's native CRM integrations sync call data into Salesforce, HubSpot, and other major CRMs directly, so the CRM stays the system of record while the phone system adds the call-level detail underneath it.

How does AI coaching fit into a RevOps reporting strategy?

AI coaching turns analytics from a rearview report into a real-time intervention, letting managers act on connect rate or objection-handling trends immediately instead of waiting for the next reporting cycle to notice a problem.

A phone system RevOps can finally report on

The phone doesn't have to be the one channel that resists measurement. When analytics, CRM sync, recording, and coaching operate as a single system instead of four disconnected purchases, call data stops being an afterthought and starts functioning the way every other revenue channel already does, visible, structured, and actionable.

The starting point isn't a full rebuild. It's turning on visibility first, then closing the sync and coaching gaps in sequence, so the phone system earns its place in the revenue stack instead of sitting outside it.

See how Aircall powers revenue operations teams with complete call intelligence, from first dial to closed deal. Get started today.

What you can build with Aircall

Our AI ecosystem gives developers three things to build with:

• AI Assist turns every call and message into structured intelligence: transcripts, summaries, sentiment, action items, and QA results, delivered over REST APIs and webhooks.

• AI Voice Agents run voice calls end-to-end. 

• AI Messaging Agents do the same across SMS and WhatsApp. 

The connective tissue is the MCP, which lets those agents discover and call your product's capabilities during a live conversation.

The important shift for developers is what an integration now does. Historically, you logged a call or synced a contact after the fact, for a human to read. Now your tool can be something an AI agent reaches for mid-conversation, to look up an order, update a record, or complete a task, so the conversation gets resolved rather than passed along. Connect your product once, and every Aircall AI product can use it.

For example, a retail team could build an Order Concierge; an AI Voice Agent that pulls order details from your commerce platform, processes a refund through a payments provider, and logs the outcome in the CRM, all inside one call. A sales team could build a Lead Qualifier that answers inbound, enriches the record in their CRM, and books a meeting in a scheduling tool before the caller hangs up. Each of those is several connected tools working together in a single conversation, and each tool is something a developer exposed to the agent.

The mental model: connect once, used everywhere

Before writing code, it helps to hold one idea in mind. You aren’t building three separate integrations for three products. You expose your capabilities once, and they become available across AI Voice and Messaging Agents, and AI Assist automatically.

There are two ways in, and most substantial integrations use both. MCP is how you expose actions an agent can take: you describe your tools declaratively with clear schemas and descriptions, stand up an MCP server, and share its URL. Aircall's agents reason over those descriptions and call the right tool at the right moment. REST APIs and webhooks are how you handle classic, event-based work: react to call and contact events in real time, log activity, and sync data into your systems of record.

A quick principle from the planning guide: build event-based integrations. Set up webhooks after user authorization so you react to Aircall events as they happen, rather than polling. And use OAuth for public apps, which gives you secure, scalable authentication and clean installation across many Aircall accounts.

Step 1: Plan your integration

Good integrations start with a plan, not a pull request. Aircall's plan your integration guide lays out four steps.

1. First, explore what Aircall's API and AI capabilities can do, and pick the ones relevant to your product and users. The feature set ranges from quick, high-impact wins to deeper capabilities. Call logging, insight cards, tag sync, logging AI Voice Agents calls, and triggering AI outbound calls are all low effort and popular. Conversation intelligence such as transcriptions, summaries, playbooks, evaluations, and sentiment, along with SMS and MMS messaging, contact sync, and call management, sits in the higher-value tier.

2. Second, talk to customers. Identify which Aircall workflows people handle manually today, where the gaps are, and where an agent that can act would save the most time.

3. Then, write an integration plan: the use cases you want to support, the features you will use, and how it all fits together. 

4. Lastly, share it with us. Once your partner application is approved, submit the plan as a shared document such as a Google Doc, Notion page, or PDF. Expect review feedback within one to five business days, after which you receive developer and OAuth credentials.

Step 2: Build and launch

With credentials in hand, you’ll move into setup and development. The build and launch guide breaks this into clear phases.

Setup comes first. You get a developer account, valid as a trial for four months (and extendable), which becomes permanent once your app reaches its first customers. You also receive two OAuth applications, one for development and one for production, with support for up to five redirect URIs each. One practical note that saves time: localhost URIs aren’t supported, so use a tunneling service such as ngrok while you develop.

A few OAuth specifics are worth knowing up front. An admin install grants a single account-level access token for the whole account. You match Aircall users to your own by email using the List all Users endpoint. And admins choose which phone numbers your integration can access during the OAuth flow.

Then you build. It helps to know the two shapes an app can take:

• A public app is designed for many Aircall customers, uses OAuth, and goes through review. 

• A private app is a single-account integration that can use API keys and needs no review. 

For the AI ecosystem, the MCP work is deliberately light: expose your actions as tools, keep schemas and descriptions clean, and let the agents do the rest. There’s no brittle glue to maintain, because the integration is declarative. When a workflow changes, you update the schema, not a pile of code.

Aircall asks that integrations reach completion within about six months of receiving credentials, with a short progress update at least once every couple of months. That cadence keeps momentum and keeps your credentials active.

Step 3: Publish your app

Publishing is how your integration becomes discoverable to Aircall's customers. Our how to publish an app guide sets out the requirements and the assets you will need.

To be eligible to publish a public app, you need a finished, live product with a company website, and an existing customer base using it. Meeting the bar doesn’t guarantee approval, since Aircall keeps a discretionary review, but it’s the baseline. You apply through the technology partner form, and applications are reviewed within about five business days.

When you’re ready to list, prepare four assets: a 5-10 minute demo that walks through the integration; at least two help center articles covering installation and your main features; a logo in SVG format using Aircall's template; and 3-5 screenshots that show the value of the integration. You submit these through the official form, then demo and asset review takes one to five business days, and publication follows in three to five.

There’s one more milestone worth planning for: new apps live in the Aircall Dashboard until they reach 10 customers. Once you cross that mark, you email Aircall to get listed in the public marketplace, and your developer account becomes permanent.

Why it’s worth building here

The economics favor building early. One MCP server works across every Aircall AI product at once, so you aren’t maintaining three integrations. Because MCP is becoming the interoperability standard, the same server you build for Aircall works with any other MCP-speaking platform, so your effort isn’t locked to one vendor. Your tool stops being a passive integration and becomes infrastructure that other companies' AI agents depend on mid-conversation.

Publishing adds the distribution. A marketplace listing brings discoverability and the credibility of a reviewed, maintained integration, plus access to co-marketing, technical guidance, and early API features. Partners who integrate now are visible to Aircall's customers from day one, while the ecosystem is still small enough to stand out in!

Start building

Everything begins in the Developer Portal, and the fastest path is to plan while your partner application is under review, so you can move quickly once approved.

• Plan your integration

• Build and launch

• How to publish an app

Apply as a technology partner, map your first use case to the capabilities above, and ship an integration that doesn’t just watch conversations, but helps resolve them.

The next advantage is a more connected AI

The next competitive advantage in sales and customer service isn't a better AI model, it's a more connected one. Most teams think they have an AI problem, but they don’t; they have a connection problem. Their AI stops at the edge of the conversation because it has nowhere to go.

A decade ago, Aircall built an ecosystem to connect customer conversations to the tools a team runs on: CRMs, helpdesks, and e-commerce platforms. Today, that ecosystem links 23,000 businesses through more than 250 integrations, built on one belief: connected tools outperform isolated ones. That ecosystem is now open to AI.

The integration era was built for people

Aircall's 250+ integrations were designed around a single assumption: that a person sits at the center of every conversation, reading the data and deciding the next step. Those integrations log calls, sync contacts, and update records after every conversation. They work, and they run in production across tens of thousands of businesses today.

AI changes the requirement. AI agents now handle a growing share of customer conversations, and every conversation produces something new: structured intelligence such as summaries, sentiment, and action items, generated automatically and at scale. That intelligence is valuable only if it reaches the rest of your stack. And an AI agent needs more than intelligence. It needs to act; look up an order, update a record, or book a meeting mid-conversation, without a handoff. That calls for a new kind of integration, one built for AI rather than for human teams alone.

Aircall: The most integrated AI platform

Aircall is opening its AI ecosystem to partners and developers, so its AI agents become the most connected customer communication agents in the market. Until now, the intelligence Aircall generated from every call flowed only to a handful of selected partners, and its agents could act only inside a fixed set of tools. Three releases change that.

AI Actions, live today, lets Aircall's AI agents connect to and act within external tools over MCP, including Shopify, HubSpot, and Zendesk. The Developer Portal is the public, documented entry point to the ecosystem, engineered so that building on Aircall is faster and easier. Partner MCP Registration lets external partners register their own MCP servers, so their tools surface as available AI Actions inside Aircall.

Three products are now openly buildable:

• AI Assist turns every call and message into structured intelligence, available through REST APIs and webhooks.

• AI Voice Agents run calls end to end, follow workflows, and take actions in connected systems.

• AI Messaging Agents bring the same capabilities to SMS and WhatsApp.

The connective layer is MCP, the emerging standard that lets AI agents discover and use external tools. The mechanics are deliberately simple: share an MCP URL, keep your schemas and descriptions clean, and Aircall's agents discover your tools automatically. 

Connect a system once, and every Aircall AI product can use it, that’s what makes Aircall the most integrated AI platform.

What a connected agent can do

Generic AI responds, but truly connected AI resolves. So, when an Aircall agent reads and acts across several systems at once, it stops being a responder and starts doing a job.

A retail business can configure an Order Concierge that pulls order details from Shopify, processes a refund through Stripe, and logs the outcome in your CRM, all inside a single call. A sales team can run a Lead Qualifier that answers inbound, qualifies the lead, enriches the record in HubSpot, and books a meeting in Calendly before the caller hangs up. The role is yours to define, and the more systems you connect, the more complete the job your agent can do.

Built on infrastructure that already works

This isn’t a rebuild; it’s a new AI layer on the same ecosystem Aircall has operated for ten years. The tools your team uses today, such as HubSpot, Shopify, and Zendesk, become accessible to your AI agents in a fundamentally different way; not just receiving data after a call, but being acted on during one. Your stack becomes AI-ready at every opportunity.

Open by default, and compounding

Attio, HelpScout, Front, HubSpot, and Calendly are the first partners to go live in the ecosystem. Attio, the AI-native CRM, is the first MCP-native CRM connected to AI Voice Agents at launch. Later this summer, any partner will be able to self-register their MCP and join them.

But the beauty is, that design compounds. Every partner that connects adds a capability every Aircall customer's agent can use, automatically, without the customer doing anything. Connect once, and reach every Aircall customer from day one. For customers, the shift is just as direct: technical teams can sync AI Assist outputs into any internal system, trigger AI Voice Agents and AI Messaging Agents from their own workflows, and build their own integrations to CRMs, helpdesks, and data warehouses, without filing a support ticket.

Why now?

The market is deciding which communication and CX tools will emerge as genuinely AI-native platforms rather than tools with AI bolted on. Opening the ecosystem is how we answer that question; not by adding more features, but by becoming the infrastructure that AI voice and messaging agents are built on and connected to.

For ten years, Aircall has connected human agents to the tools they need. The same ecosystem now does it for AI agents, and it’s open to everyone who wants to build.

Start building on the Aircall Developer Portal with AI Assist, AI Voice Agents, and AI Messaging Agents, or register your MCP to connect your tools to Aircall's AI agents.

It's here.

Outbound Campaigns is now live, giving sales, support, and success teams a single, structured way to run coordinated outreach directly from Aircall. And every campaign you build can be run by your reps, by your AI Voice Agent, with the option to hand off to a person mid-call, all from the same system.

From spreadsheets to a shared queue

Most outbound today is still stitched together by hand: a spreadsheet for the list, a Slack thread to divide it up, a shared doc to track who called whom. It works, until it doesn't. Contacts get double-dialed. Outcomes live in someone's notes instead of a dashboard. A manager can't tell what's working until the campaign is already over.

Outbound Campaigns replaces that with one workflow. A manager builds a campaign once: uploads a contact list, sets calling rules, decides who runs it, and launches. From there, contacts flow automatically into a shared, conflict-free queue, no duplicate calls, no manual coordination between reps, no switching between tools. Supervisors can watch progress in real time and adjust the campaign, mid-run, without stopping it.

That's the foundation: Campaign Orchestration. It's built and priced for teams that have outgrown ad hoc dialing, and it's now live for anyone on the Professional plan, at no extra cost.

One engine, two ways to run a campaign

Here's what's actually new. Until now, orchestration meant orchestrating reps. Now, when you build a campaign, you decide who works it: your team, your AI Voice Agent, or a mix across your outbound program.

Point a campaign at your AI Voice Agent and it handles the call end-to-end: lead follow-up while intent is still fresh, payment and billing reminders, appointment confirmations, renewal check-ins, service follow-ups tied to something a customer just did. Upload a list, set the rules, and launch, the same way you'd launch a rep-led campaign.

A single campaign is either AI-led or rep-led, not both at once, but both run through the same Campaign Orchestration and show up in the same Campaign Analytics. You can test, optimize, and compare how AI-led and human-led outreach perform instead of guessing which one to trust. And when an AI Voice Agent call needs a person, it hands off to your team with full context attached, so nothing gets repeated and nothing gets lost.

Neither mode drops a call to get there. A rep-led campaign only dials when a rep is on the line and ready, so a contact never answers to silence or a dead connection. An AI-led campaign works the same way in principle: the AI agent takes every call it connects, instead of placing more than it can handle and hoping someone's free. No abandoned calls, by design, whoever or whatever is on your end of the line. That's not a small detail: it's what keeps your numbers off spam lists, and it's the difference between a customer who feels handled and one who's left wondering why your company called and hung up on them.

If Outbound Campaigns turns your team's calling activity into a managed, measurable revenue engine, that's now just as true for the calls your team doesn't have the headcount to make. Reminders, renewals, and time-sensitive follow-ups stop competing with your reps' calendars, because they're not on it anymore.

What's included at launch

• Campaign Orchestration: build and schedule multi-step outreach sequences from the Aircall dashboard, and assign each one to reps or to your AI Voice Agent.

• Campaign Analytics: track call attempts, connection rates, and campaign-level outcomes in one view, including a live, real-time look at campaigns while they're still running.

• Local Presence: automatically matches your outbound number to the recipient's area code, so calls show up as local instead of unknown.

This is the same trust layer we described in April: a local-looking number by default, and number health that's monitored rather than left to chance. Outbound only works if the call gets answered, and none of that happens by accident.

Who this is built for

Outbound Campaigns was designed around teams that already feel the cost of fragmented outbound:

• SDR and BDR teams running coordinated cold and warm outreach, where a manager owns the list and reps focus entirely on the calls.

• Sales follow-up teams working post-webinar, post-demo, and pipeline re-engagement motions.

• Customer success and renewals teams running proactive, structured re-engagement with the same outcome tracking as a sales campaign.

• Support and operations teams running outbound callbacks, reminders, confirmations, and service follow-ups tied to a customer action.

If your team is already running outbound through Power Dialer, Salesloft, or Outreach and feels the limits of a per-rep list with no shared view, this is the upgrade path. If your team is already using AI Voice Agents inbound, this is what happens when that same agent starts making the first call, not just answering one.

For all of these except that first one, cold outreach still calls for a person, this is also a decision about who runs the campaign. Post-webinar follow-up, renewal check-ins, billing reminders, service confirmations: any of it can now run as an AI-led campaign instead of a rep-led one, without waiting on headcount to free up.

Orchestration was never about doing more. It's about doing it on purpose.

The conviction hasn't changed since April: outbound isn't a volume game anymore, it's a relevance test, and reputation is the thing standing between a dial and a real conversation. What's changed is that the system built to act on that conviction is no longer something we're describing. It's something you can turn on, and now it doesn't care whether the call is made by a person or an AI Voice Agent, only whether it's the right call to make.

Outbound Campaigns, human-led or AI-led, is live now on the Professional plan.

AI Voice Agents connect the dots between calls

Nobody likes having to repeat their name, issue, or account details every time they get transferred. It turns a simple handoff into starting over.

AI Voice Agent’s memory handoff now fixes that. Available by default for eligible agents, there’s nothing to set up or migrate. When one AI Voice Agent transfers a call, it passes along the full conversation: the facts the caller already shared and even the reason for the transfer. The receiving agent can open with that context as soon as they enter the conversation, so they can continue without going back to square one. Support, billing, and sales AI Agents now work as one team, and there’s no configuration needed as you expand multi-agent workflows.

AI Agents can now access knowledge bases directly from the source

No more manual documentation updates! AI Agents now connect to your existing knowledge base in Zendesk, Salesforce, and Document360 (with HubSpot on the way) to answer questions as accurately as your best rep across calls and messages. Update an article once, and AI Agents pick up the change automatically, without needing to re-sync.

Coming soon: Photo interpretation from AI Messaging Agents

Customers don't just type; they also send screenshots of errors, photos of damaged packages, pictures of receipts, and other visual evidence. Soon, your AI Messaging Agents will be able to read these types of attachments and more to resolve conversations on the spot or pass off to your team with full context. Stay tuned for more updates.

Learn how to launch your first Outbound Campaign

Outbound Campaigns gives sales and support teams a native way to run coordinated outreach right from Aircall. On September 8, we’re hosting a live webinar to show you how to set up your first campaign, step-by-step. 

Join us at 9 AM EDT to walk through the product, see how to build and launch a campaign from scratch, learn where to find your results in Campaign Analytics, and hear why teams are already loving it. Whether you're running cold outreach, following up on warm leads, or managing renewals, you'll leave knowing exactly how Outbound Campaigns can fit into your workflow.

What else is new at Aircall?

Save your filters, stop rebuilding your reports

Analytics dashboards now support preset filters. Save your most-used combinations, switch instantly between team or region views, and share a saved preset by link so every manager starts from the same numbers.

Try preset filters

Equip your AI Agents to send SMS

When a caller needs a booking link, tracking update, or form, your AI Voice Agent now sends it by SMS, right in the middle of the call. No pause, no handoff to a person, no extra tool to set up. Just set timing and messaging guidelines, and the agent takes care of the rest.

Learn more

AI Actions for Salesforce CTI

Your AI Agent identifies callers, reads their open cases, logs new ones, and updates records in real time, no transfer to a person needed. Customers get answers in the moment instead of waiting in a queue.

Learn more

Your Help Center and Support Portal, now in Italian

Aircall’s Help Center and Support Portal are now available in Italian, allowing Italian speakers to access knowledge base articles and submit support tickets directly in their language. 

See it here

Thanks for reading! If Aircall has helped your team work smarter, we'd love your support. Leave us a review on Trustpilot to spread the word, and add us as a Preferred Source on Google to see more of our content!

See you next month,

The Aircall Team

The problem your customers are facing

Every online shopper eventually asks the same thing: where is my order? It sounds small, but at scale it swamps retail teams and defines whether a customer buys again.

One question dominates the queue. Order status questions drive between 25 and 35% of contact center interactions, spiking to 50% during peak seasons. Each one asks the same thing, yet each one still takes an agent time to verify the caller, find the order, and read back the details.

Customers expect an answer now, at any hour. 43% of consumers expect 24/7 service from online retailers, and 80% have switched brands after a poor experience. A voicemail or a next-day callback isn’t an answer to "where is my package?", but a reason to shop elsewhere.

Manual lookups burn out the team. Answering the same question hundreds of times a day is draining work. Average contact center turnover sits at 38%, and a new hire takes six months or more to reach full productivity. A five-minute manual lookup for a 30-second answer is not a good use of anyone's time.

Aircall AI Voice Agents: Your new AI order agent

AI Voice Agents are the buffer between the hordes of simple customer calls and the human agents whose time you're trying to protect. They pick up instantly, find the order, and give the customer a real, accurate answer without a human ever needing to touch the call.

Automatic caller verification. The agent recognizes the caller by their phone number, so there is no security interrogation before it can help. The customer is already known before they start the conversation.

Real-time order lookup. Connected to Shopify, the AI agent retrieves live order details the moment the customer asks: status, items, shipping method, and tracking. It reads them back in plain language, so a five-minute interaction becomes a 30-second automated resolution.

Post-purchase journey, handled. Returns, exchanges, and product or stock questions end-to-end, so "where is my order?" and everything around it never reaches your team unless it’s particularly complex.

Payment reminders that land before the account goes overdue. AI Voice Agents call ahead of a due date, not after it's missed, so a payment issue gets caught and cleared without ever turning into a collections call.

Proactive customer contact. Outbound AI Voice Agents confirm orders, flag delivery issues proactively, and re-engage shoppers who left something in the cart, turning a support cost into a retention channel.

Works on every channel. The same AI order agent resolves order questions over voice, SMS, and WhatsApp, so customers get help wherever they reach out.

Capabilities

Our AI Voice Agents work out-of-the-box. Take a look at what you can do with your new AI order agent, immediately:

• Answer every order call instantly, 24/7, with no hold time

• Verify the caller automatically using their phone number

• Look up live order status, items, shipping, and tracking from Shopify

• Handle returns, exchanges, and product or stock questions end to end

• Send proactive order confirmations and delivery updates

• Re-engage shoppers who left items in their cart

• Resolve order questions across voice, SMS, and WhatsApp

• Escalate complex cases to a teammate with the full conversation attached

• Connect to Shopify, Magento, and 250+ integrations

Plus, it works with the tools you already sell on. Because the AI order agent runs on your existing Aircall number, connects straight to your store, and integrates with your CRM, there’s no separate bot to build or maintain.

Results in the numbers

Order status is the highest-volume, most repetitive request in retail, which makes it the fastest win for automation.

• Food Cycle Science cut time to first human response by 78%, from an average of 29 hours to 12.

• TripCity now handles 54% of its calls with AI Voice Agents, with 87% resolved without a live rep.

• 43% of consumers expect 24/7 service, which the agent delivers with zero added headcount.

When the AI order agent absorbs the "where is my order" wave, your team gets its time back for the conversations that actually need a person, and your customers get an instant answer at any hour.

Get started in your existing store

Point it at your store and go live. AI Voice Agents connect to Shopify or Magento, read live order data, and answer on your existing Aircall number, with no new system to run.

Every answer stays accurate. Because it pulls order details in real time rather than from a static script, customers always hear the current status, and complex cases pass to your team with the full context attached.

If "where is my order" is filling your queue, see how AI Voice Agents can answer it for you.

Built for support teams already running on Aircall, connected to whichever help desk they use.

The problem support teams face today

Queues grow faster than headcount. Ticket volume climbs with every new customer, but hiring never keeps pace, so tickets sit longer and customers wait longer for a reply.

Repetitive questions crowd out real problems. Employees switch between apps up to 1,200 times a day just to find the context behind one ticket, time that never goes toward the harder cases that actually need it.

After-hours coverage is expensive or absent. A customer with an urgent issue at 9pm either waits until morning, or gets routed to an on-call rep, and neither option feels like support.

From first contact to full resolution

Routine FAQ requests get resolved on the spot. AI Voice Agents answer from your knowledge base in real time; order status, account details, policy questions, so common issues never wait for a rep.

Support reaches out before the customer has to call in. AI Voice Agents place outbound calls too: a service update when something breaks, a delay notice before a customer notices, or a follow-up when a ticket has sat open too long.

Complex cases reach a rep with full context. When a request needs judgment, an AI Voice Agent escalates immediately and hands over the full transcript and case history, so the customer never repeats themselves.

The same resolution logic works over voice and messaging. AI Voice Agents apply the same knowledge base and escalation rules whether the customer calls, texts, or messages on WhatsApp.

Capabilities

Take a look at is what sets AI Voice Agents apart as a support tool, not just an AI bolt-on:

• Ticket creation and escalation: creates and updates tickets automatically, then escalates with full context

• Knowledge Base resolution: answers policy and how-it-works questions straight from your

• knowledge base

• Proactive outreach: places outbound calls for service updates, delay notices, and unresolved ticket follow-ups

• Full-context escalation: hands off complex cases to a rep with the full transcript and case history attached

• In-call text: sends a text during the call for a tracking link, portal link, or confirmation, no follow-up email required

Results in the numbers

Aircall's AI Voice Agents have already handled 1.7 million calls this year, measured on response time, resolution, and CSAT.

• Food Cycle Science cut time to first human response by 78%, from 29 hours to 12

• SJWD Water District resolved calls 65% faster, cutting average handling time from 150 seconds to 55

• TripCity absorbed 30% of total call volume within two and a half months, with 87% resolved without escalation

• Unbiased lifted its service level to about 93%, without adding headcount

• Ausmed held a 20% voluntary deflection rate steady for six months, covering staff leave without temporary hires

For example, a support team handling 5,000 calls a month with account lookups could save close to 190 hours of agent time a month and see a return of roughly 2.7 times its cost, based on Aircall's internal ROI modeling for this use case. This is an illustrative example, not a customer result, and actual returns vary by call volume, knowledge base coverage, and case complexity.

Set up your AI support agent in 3 steps

1. Pick the job. Choose the Support Resolution agent template and Aircall pre-fills it with sample account and order questions. Every plan already includes AI Voice Agents minutes, so there’s a working agent to review from day one, not a blank project.

2. Confirm what it answers and when it escalates. Connect your knowledge base and your external tools so the agent can pull real answers, and review the escalation triggers, laid out visually, including where it hands off to a rep.

3. Test it, then go live. Make a test call, connect your support number, and activate. Most teams go from template to a live, resolving agent in minutes.

Proactive outreach is the natural next step. Once your inbound agent is live and resolving, adding outbound service updates and ticket follow-ups turns it into a full support motion, the same way it went live the first time.

Get started with AI Agents: one system, multiple capabilities

Most AI support tools create a separate system to manage. Aircall's AI Voice Agents run on the same phone system and number your team already uses, not a bot bolted on from another vendor, so a resolved or escalated case never means switching tools to find it.

When AI Voice Agents escalate, reps see the full transcripts and the tickets already updated, so nobody has to ask the customer to start over. Nothing about the case gets lost in the handoff, whether it moves from resolution to escalation or from an inbound call to an outbound follow-up.

AI Voice Agents connect to your external system such as HubSpot or Help Scout, with more help desk integrations on the roadmap, so resolved and escalated cases land where your team already works.

If growing queues or after-hours gaps are costing you resolution time, let’s see how AI Voice Agents can handle it.

Aircall's AI Voice Agents don't just pass along information, they take action: qualifying, booking, and updating your CRM, so your reps focus on the conversations that need them.

Every lead you're too slow for is a lead you lose

Hot leads cool off fast. A prospect calls or fills out a form ready to talk. If nobody picks up in the first few minutes, that readiness is gone, and a competitor answers next.

Reps spend more time on process than pipeline. Sales reps spend up to 70% of their time on non-selling work: logging calls, updating records, qualifying leads that were never a fit. Gartner found that 41% of sellers already say AI has freed up exactly that kind of time. The question is what replaces it.

Qualification depends on who picks up the phone. Ask ten reps the same question and you'll get ten different answers logged, or none at all. The next rep inherits a lead with no reliable data behind it.

None of this is a headcount problem. It's a response-time problem.

AI Voice Agents: No lead waits. No question gets skipped

No lead is lost to inconsistent qualification. Every call asks the same questions, in the same order, whether it's the first call of the day or the five-hundredth, and logs the same clean data to the contact record, so pipeline quality never depends on which rep picked up or how their day is going.

Qualified leads turn into booked meetings, not follow-up tasks. The AI Voice Agent checks your rep's calendar and books the meeting before the call ends, so qualification converts to pipeline immediately, not a to-do for later.

No lead waits on rep availability. The moment a lead shows intent, whether from a form fill or a CRM trigger, the AI Voice Agent calls and hands a warm, qualified lead to a rep with full context attached.

Reps only spend time where it counts. Complex conversations still escalate immediately, with the full transcript and context attached, so reps step in only when a lead actually needs judgment.

Automate targeted outreach campaigns. Coming soon, AI Voice Agents will call your lead list directly inside Aircall — re-engaging warm leads, confirming meetings, and keeping every call compliant with built-in consent tracking and calling-hours enforcement.

What it actually does

Take a look at what sets AI Voice Agents apart as a sales tool, not just a phone line:

• Inbound lead qualification: qualifies every lead with the same questions, every time, and logs answers straight to the contact record

• Autonomous booking: checks rep availability, books the meeting into your CRM, and sends a confirmation by text before the call ends

• Follow-up and pipeline management: follows up on new leads the moment they show intent, and leaves a personalized voicemail if nobody picks up

• Objection handling and multilingual support: answers common objections from your knowledge base and speaks 23 languages, so no lead is lost to routine pushback or a language barrier

• AI Outbound Campaigns (coming soon): calls your lead list directly inside Aircall, with built-in consent tracking and calling-hours enforcement, re-engaging warm leads and confirming meetings before they go cold

Every call sharpens your pipeline data. Structured qualification answers and call outcomes write back to your CRM automatically, so it stays clean and your sales dashboards reflect what actually happened on the call, not what a rep remembered to type up afterward.

Set up your AI SDR in 3 steps

1. Pick the job. Choose the Lead Qualification agent template and Aircall pre-fills it with sample qualifying questions and contact fields. Every plan already includes AI Voice Agents minutes, so there's a working agent to review from day one, not a blank project.

2. Confirm what it asks and how it talks. Review the qualification questions, connect your CRM so the agent can check calendars and book meetings, and check the conversation flow, laid out visually, including where it escalates to a rep.

3. Test it, then go live. Make a test call, connect your sales number, and activate. Most teams go from template to a live qualifying agent in minutes.

Automatic follow-up is the natural next step. Once your inbound agent is live and qualifying, adding follow-up on new leads turns it into a full pipeline motion, the same way it went live the first time.

Get started today, with a single system

Most AI SDR tools speed up work your team already does. Aircall's AI Voice Agents do something different: they pick up the leads your team can't get to in time, the after-hours form fill, the inbound spike your reps can't answer fast enough, the lead that goes cold in the minutes before someone calls back. That's not automating an existing workflow, it's pipeline that would have been lost.

It works because it isn't a separate system to manage. Aircall is the phone system trusted by more than 23,000 businesses, and AI Voice Agents run on that same phone system, number, and CRM connection your reps already use, not a bot bolted on from another vendor. When a lead moves from qualification to booking, or from an inbound call to a follow-up, full context passes automatically, so nothing gets re-asked and no rep opens a conversation cold.

AI Voice Agents connect to HubSpot today, with Salesforce and more integrations on the roadmap, so qualified leads and booked meetings land exactly where your reps already work.

If slow follow-up or inconsistent qualification is costing you pipeline, let's see how AI Voice Agents can handle it!

A missed call is never free

Calls don’t wait for business hours. Customers call after your team logs off, during lunch, and in the middle of your busiest week of the year. A front desk or support queue can only handle so many calls at a time, so every extra call becomes a voicemail, a long hold, or an abandoned call.

Traditional phone trees make it worse. Callers press through menus that rarely match why they’re calling, then wait for a teammate who may already be on another line. The result is missed leads, slower support, and a team that spends its day repeating the same answers instead of solving harder problems.

The cost adds up fast. A missed sales call is a lead that goes to a competitor. A missed support call is a customer who calls back angrier the second time. And every minute your team spends on a routine question is a minute they’re not spending on the call that actually needs them.

Aircall AI Voice Agents: Your full-time AI receptionist

Every caller gets routed correctly, not just answered. An Aircall AI Voice Agent greets the caller in plain language, understands what they need, and either resolves it or routes it to the right teammate with full context. No phone tree, keypad, or hold music.

After-hours never means unanswered In healthcare alone, 42% of appointments get booked outside standard business hours. The AI Voice Agent answers at 11pm on a Sunday the same way it does at 11am on a Tuesday, so coverage doesn't stop when your team logs off.

Booking doesn't wait for a callback. The AI Voice Agent checks your calendar and books, reschedules, or cancels the appointment on the call itself, no hold, no callback, no double-booking.

Reminders happen before the no-show, not after. The AI Voice Agent calls ahead of a scheduled appointment to confirm attendance, and reschedules on the spot if someone can't make it. Phone reminders alone can cut missed appointments by up to 39%.

Complex calls still reach a person. The AI Voice Agent picks up on urgency or frustration in a caller's voice and hands off to a teammate the moment the call needs judgment, not just information.

Capabilities

Here's what sets Aircall's AI Voice Agents apart from voicemail, phone trees, and stand-alone answering services:

• Answers every call, including nights, weekends, and peak periods

• Understands natural, open-ended requests, no keypad, no menu

• Books, reschedules, and cancels appointments directly into your calendar, and calls ahead to confirm and reduce no-shows

• Resolves routine questions and hands off complex calls to a teammate who already has the context

• Speaks 23 languages, so a caller gets the same answer from a friendly voice, in their own language, with no wait

Every call sharpens your AI Voice Agent. The Agent Performance dashboard shows exactly which questions it should be handling better, so you fix the gap before it costs you the next caller.

Results in numbers

Call routing and reception is already Aircall's largest AI Voice Agent use case by volume: 346,000 calls handled across hundreds of companies.

• SJWD Water District resolves about 90% of after-hours calls with an AI Voice Agent, and cut average resolution time from 150 seconds to 55 seconds

• TripCity now handles 54% of its calls with their AI Voice Agent, resolving 87% of them without escalating to a live rep

• Unbiased grew service level by 23% without adding headcount

• Phone reminders alone can cut missed appointments by up to 39% (ZocDoc), an industry benchmark for what automated confirmation calls can recover

An AI Voice Agent works best on the calls that repeat: intake, triage, routing, and routine questions. Calls that need judgment or empathy still go to your team, and nothing about the call gets lost in the handoff. And the best part is, the setup is simple, so getting there takes less time than you would think!

Set up your AI receptionist in 3 steps

1. Pick the job. Head to your dashboard, and choose the Receptionist Agent template. Aircall pre-fills it with your business name, hours, and content. Every plan already includes AI Voice Agents minutes, so there’s a working agent to review from day one, not a blank project.

2. Confirm what it knows and how it talks. Review the profile, voice, and tone, confirm the knowledge sources it should answer from, and check the conversation flow, laid out visually, including where it branches.

3. Test it, then go live. Make a test call, connect your number, and activate. Most teams go from template to live agent in minutes.

Call routing is the natural next step. Once your receptionist is live and answering, adding intent-based routing turns it into a full front desk, the same way it went live the first time.

How long does setup actually take? Most teams go from template to live agent in minutes. Plus, call routing and appointment scheduling are both easy to add once the receptionist is live.

Get started today, with a single system

In most cases, AI answering services run separately from your phone. Aircall's AI Voice Agents are built into the same phone system, number, and interface your team already runs calls through, not a bot bolted on from another vendor.

The handoff carries the whole conversation. When the AI hands a call to a teammate, they see the full call history in the same tool, so the caller never has to repeat themselves.

It It fits into the tools you already use. AI Voice Agents connect to 250+ native integrations, including HubSpot, Salesforce, and Zendesk, so call outcomes land where your team already looks for them.

If missed calls, long queues, or a stretched front desk sound familiar, let's see how AI Voice Agents can handle your call volume: