I almost missed the boat on AI voice.
I’ve built my career on spotting trends before they go mainstream. It’s how I got into angel investing and how I managed to have two successful exits with my own companies, RemoteTeam and MovieLaLa. But when AI voice first started making noise a few years back, I was skeptical. It sounded clunky, robotic, and a million miles away from being genuinely useful. I remember trying out an early version of a voice assistant and asking it to play a song. It gave me a weather report for a city I’d never been to. I figured it was another overhyped tech that would fizzle out.
I was wrong. Dead wrong.
My “aha” moment came about a year ago. We were struggling with customer support at one of my portfolio startups. They’re a small e-commerce company, and they were getting absolutely swamped with calls. We’re talking 500 calls a day, with a team of just five support agents. The wait times were getting ridiculous, sometimes up to 30 minutes. Our customer satisfaction scores were in the toilet, and our agents were on the verge of burnout. They were spending most of their day answering the same basic questions: “Where’s my order?”, “How do I make a return?”, “Do you ship to Canada?”. It was a nightmare.
We decided to run an experiment. We set up a simple AI voice agent to handle the most common questions. I wasn’t expecting much. I thought maybe it would deflect 10-15% of the calls. Within a month, our AI agent was handling 60% of our inbound calls. That’s 300 calls a day that never even reached a human agent. Our average wait time dropped to under two minutes. Our customer satisfaction scores went up by 15%, and we freed up our human agents to focus on the complex issues that actually required their expertise. The numbers were staggering. We were saving over $15,000 a month in what would have been additional hiring costs. That’s when it hit me: AI voice wasn’t just a gimmick. It was a fundamental shift in how businesses could operate.
The Game Has Changed
So what’s different now? A few things. First, the technology has gotten exponentially better. The robotic, monotone voices of the past are gone, replaced by AI that can understand context, detect emotion, and even replicate human speech patterns with terrifying accuracy. The latency has dropped from several seconds to a few hundred milliseconds, which means you can have a real-time conversation with an AI without those awkward, painful pauses. Companies like ElevenLabs and Cartesia are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible, creating voices that are virtually indistinguishable from humans.
Second, it’s become incredibly cheap. Just a couple of years ago, building a decent AI voice application would have cost a fortune and required a team of PhDs. Now, with APIs from companies like OpenAI, you can get started for pennies. The cost of GPT-4o's realtime API has dropped by over 80%, making it a no-brainer for any startup looking to get an edge. This isn't just an incremental improvement; it's a complete democratization of the technology.
We’re at a tipping point. The infrastructure is mature, the costs are low, and the potential applications are endless. If you’re an entrepreneur and you’re not thinking about how to use AI voice in your business, you’re already falling behind. This is not a trend to watch from the sidelines.
Practical Ways to Use AI Voice Right Now
This isn’t some far-off future. You can start using AI voice to make a real impact on your business today. Here are a few ideas, with some real-world examples:
Supercharge Your Customer Support: This is the most obvious one, but it’s also the most powerful. Think beyond just answering simple questions. One of my portfolio companies in the travel space is using an AI voice agent to help customers rebook flights and hotels when there are cancellations. The AI can access the airline and hotel booking systems, find available options, and confirm the changes with the customer, all without any human intervention. This has been a lifesaver for them during storm seasons and has turned a potential customer service disaster into a surprisingly positive experience.
Revolutionize Your Sales Process: Imagine having an AI sales rep that can make thousands of calls a day, qualify leads, and even schedule demos. It’s not science fiction. I know a B2B SaaS startup that has an AI agent call every new user who signs up for a free trial. The AI asks them about their goals, answers their initial questions, and then schedules a demo with a human salesperson if they’re a good fit. Their sales team now spends all their time talking to highly qualified leads, and their conversion rate has doubled.
Automate Your Internal Operations: Think about all the time you and your team spend on repetitive, administrative tasks. One of the companies I advise has implemented an internal AI voice assistant. Their employees can just talk to it to schedule meetings, book conference rooms, and even file expense reports. They just say, “Book a meeting with John for tomorrow at 2 pm to discuss the Q3 budget,” and the AI takes care of the rest. It’s like having a personal assistant for every employee in your company. The amount of time and mental energy this frees up is incredible.
The Future is Voice-to-Voice
As powerful as AI voice is today, we’re still just scratching the surface. The next big leap will be when AI agents start talking to each other. Imagine your AI assistant scheduling a meeting with a potential investor’s AI assistant, or your support agent automatically escalating an issue to an engineer’s AI, which then diagnoses the problem and deploys a fix. This is where things get really interesting. We’re moving towards a world where a significant portion of business communication will happen between AI agents, operating on our behalf, creating a kind of autonomous economic network.
We’re also going to see a rise in hyper-personalized, multimodal experiences. Your AI will know your preferences, your history, and your context. It will be able to anticipate your needs and provide you with information and services before you even ask. And it won't just be voice. It will combine voice with text, images, and video to create a rich, interactive experience. The research coming out of places like AI Fund shows that combining voice with other data types is the next frontier. Emotion detection from voice is another area that's about to explode, especially in fields like mental health and coaching.
Don’t Get Left Behind
I know it can be daunting to jump into a new technology, especially one that’s evolving as quickly as AI voice. But you don’t need to be a machine learning expert to get started. The best advice I can give you is to just start experimenting. Pick a small, low-risk problem in your business and see if you can solve it with an off-the-shelf AI voice tool. As Ankur Jain, the CEO of Jivi AI, says, “Over-engineering from day one is not recommended. Buy, learn, then build your own.”
The barrier to entry has never been lower, and the potential rewards have never been higher. The entrepreneurs who embrace AI voice will be the ones who build the next generation of great companies. The ones who don’t will be left wondering what happened. I’ve seen this movie before with the rise of the internet and mobile. There are always the skeptics who wait too long, and they always get left behind.
Don’t be one of them.
Frequently Asked Questions
What's the most common pushback you get on this?
People often push back by citing exceptions or edge cases. And they're usually right that exceptions exist. But building a strategy around exceptions rather than patterns is a losing game for most founders.
How can I apply this thinking to my own situation?
Start by identifying the core principle behind the opinion, not the specific example. Then ask yourself: does this principle apply to my context? If yes, test it in a small, low-risk way before going all in.
What experience informs this perspective?
This perspective comes from over a decade of building companies in Silicon Valley, two successful exits (RemoteTeam to Gusto, MovieLaLa to Gfycat), and investing in 200+ startups including Anthropic, OpenAI, and Scale AI. I write about what I've lived.
Do all experts agree with this view?
No, and that's fine. The best ideas in business are often contrarian. I share my perspective based on my experience and data, but I encourage you to seek out opposing viewpoints and form your own conclusions.