(This column originally appeared in Forbes)
People still use the phone. They still make calls. And I’m not talking about ordering takeout. Business people call and get calls from customers, suppliers, prospects and job candidates every day.
There’s only so much you can learn about an industrial product from a website or a spec sheet. You need to speak to a human, give the particulars, get a quote. Or, if there’s a problem, you need to speak to service and better explain the situation.
This is core to Daryna Kulya’s company.
“My dad, his whole life, has been an entrepreneur, and I grew up knowing that when his phone rang, it didn’t matter what was happening — family dinner, vacation — he was always the one to pick it up right away because every customer matters,” she said. “For small businesses, every customer is not a number. Every customer is the difference between making payroll, being able to pay for your team’s health insurance, et cetera.”
Consolidating Communications With AI
Kulya is a co-founder and chief operating officer of Quo, an AI-powered business communications platform that brings calls, texts, voicemail, recordings and transcripts into one shared system, while using AI to answer calls, summarize conversations and generate insights from customer interactions. She is in the business of making sure that — with AI and other technology — nothing falls through the cracks. It’s not an easy job, especially at a small business where all communications matter disproportionately because an unanswered or missed call can turn into a potentially significant loss of revenue.
For Kulya, it’s all about consolidation.
“At the very core, we have this idea of a phone number, and a really unique concept that we’ve created is that we treat every phone number as an inbox that can support calling, messaging and a lot more capabilities,” she said.
Kulya believes that the practical advantage is that calls, texts, voicemail, transcripts and recordings can all become part of the same customer record instead of living in separate systems.
Transcription And Integration
AI has already had a significant impact on business communications platforms like Quo. And one of its first applications wasn’t particularly complicated: transcription. Like popular online meeting platforms like Zoom and Teams, this was one of those low-hanging-fruit AI features that was rolled out fairly early, and Quo jumped on the opportunity. Like a growing number of AI solutions, it now runs unobtrusively in the background.
“You’re literally doing nothing,” said Kulya. “You’re just having conversations, and you’re getting some helpful summaries. It’s one of those things where you don’t understand how valuable it is until you have it, and then you don’t have it anymore.”
But that’s just the start. Transcribing a conversation is one thing. But analyzing hundreds of conversations and then either taking action or telling owners what to do? That’s the key value of AI in communications.
To that end, Quo integrates with ChatGPT and Claude so businesses can interrogate their communications data. Kulya sees this as a major step because small companies can obtain forms of analysis that previously required technical personnel or significant manual work.
According to Kulya, you can say things like “look through my last hundred calls on the sales number. Why are we not closing deals? What is stopping deals from proceeding to the next stage?” You’re able to have AI actually give you insights from the calls that normally you would not have, or you would have to have an engineer helping you figure this out.
Like An Employee, AI Needs Training
So what job is most at risk here? It’s not receptionists. It’s voicemail. That’s an important distinction. Why leave a message when an agent can understand the call, take action and notify the people involved?
Which raises the biggest issue I hear from my clients: can businesses trust an AI agent to speak and do things on their behalf?
Many of my clients aren’t there yet. They’re spooked by stories of “hallucinations” and errors and are still a long way from allowing a bot to perform actions on its own. But Kulya has another take.
For Kulya, the bigger problem isn’t necessarily the technology. It’s how businesses train it. Kulya argues that many AI failures aren’t really failures of the technology. They’re failures of training. She says her best customers lean into AI assistants like Claude to help them build a knowledge base of questions and best answers and then train their communications platform.
“So many businesses don’t have standard operating procedures or training docs, and if they’re thinking about implementing a voice AI agent without it, they’re starting on hard mode,” she said. “But if you have this call data, and you give the best calls from this call data to the AI agent, your AI agent can have a real shot.”
She says that AI agents should be treated like a newly hired employee rather than some kind of “magical software” that will automatically know everything about your business.
“When you hire an employee, you don’t expect immediately that person on day one to be up and running and know everything,” she said. “But somehow people expect AI to be able to get things right without any mistakes right away when the reality is that if it is your AI assistant, it needs input as well.”
Kulya has built an intriguing platform. But her company faces stiff competition from the likes of RingCentral, DialPad, Nextiva and others. As an implementer of customer relationship management applications, I can see a big convergence coming, and it’ll be interesting to see who shakes out. I have little doubt that AI-leveraged platforms like Quo will ultimately be the communications and information backbone behind most businesses. Whatever happens, one thing’s for sure: say goodbye to voicemail.
