Fancy an AI receptionist? BT Business will sell your company one
Communications and broadband provider BT Business has today announced the launch of their new AI Receptionist tool, which as the name suggests is a new service that is designed to help small and medium-sized UK businesses to manage customer calls around the clock.
According to BT, phone calls remain the number one preferred way to contact a business, but failing to answer them due to limited resources can have a big impact. The operator itself claims that 67% of businesses, on an average day, allegedly miss at least one call that they believe results in losing business. BT claims this could be worth a predicted £3.7bn in UK revenue being lost annually due to not being able to answer the phone.
The new tool is being launched alongside BT’s free AI Adoption Hub. The Hub is designed to provide practical guides, prompt packs, expert insights, and real-world examples of businesses using AI, “giving businesses the confidence to unlock the value of AI and work smarter and safer“.
Advertisement
Jon James, CEO, BT Business, said:
“AI has the potential to be a huge boost to small businesses and to drive the UK’s growth, but many businesses are struggling to know how to begin and how to adopt simply and securely. That’s why BT – the UK’s most trusted network for business – has created AI from BT: a portfolio of practical, secure AI solutions backed by BT’s expertise and support.
AI Receptionist is the first step in the journey, helping businesses capture every opportunity, reduce admin and deliver responsive, personalised service around the clock, while keeping their customer data protected.”
BT said their AI Receptionist, which is designed to works across any UK fixed or mobile network (businesses don’t need to change their existing number or phone system), will be available on flexible contracts and can be set up quickly through a self-service portal. Customer data will also remain private and not be used to train AI models.
However, consumer sentiment toward the use of AI agents tends to be quite mixed, with many viewing it as being more of a negative (i.e. a way of reducing the number of actual humans that are available to provide support). Suffice to say, making too much use of AI could also risk discouraging customers, so it’s important to be careful with such tools.
AI Receptionist provides a range of services to help organisations concentrate on growing their business:
➤ Always-on service: Answers calls 24/7 and handles routine enquiries
➤ Simpler appointment management: Schedules appointments, sends confirmations and integrates with Outlook and Google Calendar
➤ Better follow-up: Captures and transcribes conversations and generates insights from customer interactions
➤ A tailored customer experience: Learns from business information and offers customisable voice and accent options
It is designed for sectors where incoming calls are an important route to bookings or new work, including:
➤ Trades and field-based businesses: capturing enquiries and arranging appointments while people are on-site
➤ Estate agents: qualifying enquiries, routing callers and helping arrange viewings
➤ Healthcare and professional practices: handling routine appointment requests and directing callers to the appropriate team
➤ Legal and financial services: capturing initial information and connecting clients to the right specialist
➤ Retailers: answering product, availability and promotion questions while employees support customers in-store
➤ Pubs, restaurants and hospitality businesses: answering booking and opening-hours enquiries while staff serve customers
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
« Virgin Media UK gives TV customers free access to kids channels for Oct 2026
Advertisement
Leave a Reply
Privacy Notice: Please note that news comments are anonymous, which means that we do NOT require you to enter any real personal details to post a message and display names can be almost anything you like (provided they do not contain offensive language or impersonate a real person's legal name). By clicking to submit a post you agree to storing your entries for comment content, display name, IP and email in our database, for as long as the post remains live.
Only the submitted name and comment will be displayed in public, while the rest will be kept private (we will never share this outside of ISPreview, regardless of whether the data is real or fake). This comment system uses submitted IP, email and website address data to spot abuse and spammers. All data is transferred via an encrypted (https secure) session.
Hope the AI bubble bursts sooner rather than later!
I don’t think it will
Question is, what do you hope or think will happen if that happens?
If you were to ask me what I think would happen, I’d say advancements in frontier models will stagnate for several years afterwards should a company such as OpenAI or Anthropic effectively collapse. Maybe inference becomes much more expensive because money isn’t being thrown around. But will it mean these multi-modal models will go away, or that agents or chatbots go the way of the dodo – no. Not when there’s hundreds of open models, and harnesses, that I could download and run right now*
The AI receptionist won’t go away. Those ai drive throughs you may have seen won’t go away. The art generators won’t go away. There’ll still be generated songs & videos
*Anyone here want to buy me a powerful PC please. Ideally 64GB of RAM + 12GB VRAM minimum
It does not matter if chatgpt or anthropic collapses at this point (with their IPOs failing), the amount of companies rolling out strong frontier models is too great at this point
Talking to people who actually use these things and there are already many preferences. Some prefer claude, some prefer grok, some even gemini.
Also for several of the main players, super intelligence is literally just a portion of the business like Google, SpaceX, Meta
The beauty of the free market
When I contacted BT by webchat about my failing router and faulty broadband line I wasn’t aware until much later that I was chatting with FRAUDBOTS – Artificial Incompetence systems made to appear human by deception, lies, fraud. They repeatedly promised that Openreach would fix everything, so it was very annoying when – after fixing the line – Openreach said (quite correctly) that BT routers are BT’s problem for them to fix and nothing to do with Openreach.
I had to contact BT again. The FRAUDBOTS (at the time I thought that they were just stupid, ignorant, moronic, grossly incompetent staff) persistently REFUSED to accept the fact that there had been TWO faults, with the line and router. They wasted HOURS of my time before finally agreeing to send a replacement router, then hours more by insisting on referring me to “complaints handlers” – more fraudbots of course which did nothing but waste even more of my time.
They TWICE sent Openreach to fix the line fault they’d already fixed, ignored instructions from me (and presumably also from Openreach) not to. The fraudbots made a nuisance robotic call saying they’d arranged an Openreach visit and to press a digit to cancel, so of course I did. But this was the wrong answer. Within minutes the Robo-fraudbot called again to say it had arranged an Openreach visit, this time giving NO OPTION to cancel. It was determined to protect the delusion that there can only ever be ONE fault at any time. They repeatedly LIED that they only use automated systems to route victims’ communication to the correct “person”, and refused to answer any questions or explain how any human could possibly have acted as their fraudbots did, and much more. Check out the Data Protection Act and GDPR and try to figure out all of BT’s criminal offences.
If you’re thinking of paying BT to run your business with their fraudbots then you might want to consider if you want to destroy your reputation, severely aggravate customers (and likely drive them away), and make yourself liable to criminal prosecution and fines. Then again, almost all companies seem to be just as deluded as the fraudbots and will think this is a great idea.
If the AI is that good the receptionist will be as unhelpful as my GP’s.
The photographer has a sense of humour: The boss has left the BT AI in charge (on the PC), has come down from the office (upstairs), has drunk most of the Highlands (top shelf), all of the Islay (middle), and now has goggly eyes (directly below the gap where the Islay was).
I would recommend this service to all of my competitors!