AI Receptionists Enter the Digital WorkforceAI Receptionists Enter the Digital Workforce
Since the beginning of the year, at least seven AI receptionist products debuted; they serve as use cases in the emerging category of “digital labor.”
In the first quarter of 2025, seven different UCaaS/CCaaS vendors including RingCentral, Zoom, Webex and Talkdesk released generative AI-powered virtual receptionists essentially eliminate the need for a human to answer the phone and manage customer interactions such as rescheduling appointments, answering and transferring calls, providing information to callers and sending confirmation of requested customer changes. According to the AI receptionist vendors, virtual receptionists can understand natural speech and respond naturally and vocally thanks to generative AI. Although these products are geared toward businesses of all sizes, those intended for enterprises feature integrations with contact center platforms.
“That these companies all launched AI receptionists at the same time isn’t a coincidence. It reflects a perfect storm of market drivers, technological maturity, and shifting business priorities,” said Mila D’Antonio, Principal Analyst, Customer Engagement with Omdia. “Today’s customers expect immediate, 24x7 service. Additionally, businesses are pressured to do more with less as hiring and training frontline staff has become increasingly expensive.”
Unlike phone system auto-attendants which are rules-based and often offer pre-recorded menus, or even the comparatively more sophisticated IVRs which are both rules- and script-based, D’Antonio said that AI receptionists are context-aware thanks to advances in natural language understanding and processing (NLU/NLP) and large language models (LLMs) which allow AI to understand a customer’s conversational intent, and handle conversations in a human-like fashion. Moreover, some of the virtual receptionists have “agentic AI” capabilities which allow them to take multistep actions, such as rescheduling appointments.
Common capabilities across the various generative AI-powered receptionists include:
Training the AI on information relevant to the company via its website, FAQs, knowledge bases, product/service documentation and related policies, employee directory, etc., so that the virtual receptionist can respond with relevant, business-specific information.
Contextually generated responses produced after listening to or reading the customer queries. These responses are not scripted in advance; the receptionist generates the response based on the context of interaction and what it has been trained on – within guardrails.
Answering customer questions about business hours, physical location, order status, rescheduling appointments, sending email or text responses. Some of this this functionality may require integration into specific systems such as CRM, email, scheduling/calendaring, ordering, SMS, which is facilitated by the virtual assistant platform.
Support for multiple languages.
24x7 availability.
And, because they are digital labor, virtual receptionists can theoretically scale to answer as many calls as the business has phone lines.
Some vendors, such as GoTo, RingCentral and Verizon, offer virtual receptionists targeted at small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). These organizations may find it difficult to provide a 24x7 phone presence or be able to afford employing a human receptionist during business hours. These organizations may also lack IT resources which can make it challenging to choose, deploy and maintain a technology solution.
GoTo’s AI Receptionist, for example, does not connect directly to external systems via application programming interfaces (APIs). Instead, users “ensure the receptionist is grounded in business data by manually transferring or copying relevant information from these systems into the AI Receptionist’s knowledge base,” said David McGlennon, Product Manager at GoTo. “This process is straightforward and does not require advanced technical expertise.”
Moreover, McGlennon said that users define the rules for the GoTo AI Receptionist in plain language; they do not need to use a low-code/no-code builder. The AI Receptionist will then follow those instructions, and if it encounters an issue it doesn’t know how to handle it will transfer the interaction down a defined escalation path. “These paths are [created] during the behavior setup process and [are] based on the context of the problem reported by the caller,” McGlennon said.
Other vendors, such as Talkdesk and Webex offer contact center integrations that are geared more toward large companies.
“In our Webex Contact Center Assistant product, we're doing things like next best response [and/or] action, suggested responses, etc. The same knowledge management that goes into that is surfaced in our Webex AI Agent studio for our virtual agent,” said Jay Patel, SVP & GM of Cisco's Webex Customer Experience Solutions Group. “We target enterprises because we're providing the tools and integration frameworks needed to integrate with knowledge management sources, like SharePoint and other data sources, that larger enterprises would have.”
One shared constraint, regardless of company size, is the dearth of individuals interested in receptionist jobs. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), there are multiple occupations whose job responsibilities overlap with the stereotypical “receptionist” – answering phones, email, greeting visitors, etc. – though there is some task variation depending on the particular sector (e.g., financial, medical, etc.).
In 2024 there were about one million receptionist jobs, 1.27 million financial clerks, 2.7 million general office clerks, approximately 1 million information clerks, and about 3.4 million secretaries and administrative assistants. The BLS projects low single-digit negative employment change in all those occupations by 2033 – e.g., employment in the general office clerk occupation will decline by 6 percent by 2033. The only exception is the “secretaries and administrative assistants” occupation which is forecast to grow by one percent through 2033. Moreover, the BLS analysis found that job openings that do occur will likely result from replacing workers who transfer to other occupations or exit the labor force (e.g., retire).
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has argued that the digital labor provided by the Agentforce AI agent platform can help alleviate the pressure of a stagnating or even shrinking human workforce. (ServiceNow refers to its AI Agent capabilities as a digital workforce.) In these occupations, at least, it does appear that the digital labor provided by virtual receptionists could indeed relieve some staffing pressure while also enabling those organizations to invest in upskilling and/or hiring individuals who can focus on higher-value tasks.
“What we’re seeing now is not just a product launch,” D’Antonio said, “but rather a strategic shift toward AI-powered service models.”
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The following are examples of the virtual receptionists launched in Q1 2025:
CallRail’s Voice Assist and the Glia Virtual Assistant.
GoTo’s offering, the GoTo Connect AI Receptionist.
RingCentral debuts its AI Receptionist (AIR).
Webex AI Agent, also covered here.
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