Summary
Most businesses don’t realize how many calls they’re missing until they look at the data. In this first session of Ana in the Labs, Ana joins CloudTalk’s CPTO, Josef Lapka, to understand what an AI Receptionist actually is, what problems it can solve, and who it’s built for.
We’ve all been in this situation before. You call a restaurant to book a table, but it’s still early, so no one is there. You call when they’re open, but it’s rush hour, so no one will pick up. Next thing you know, it’s 3 pm, you still don’t have a reservation, and the sound of the dial tone is now haunting you.
That’s exactly the type of issue an AI Receptionist can help you with.
And if you’ve never heard of that before, don’t worry, neither had I. That is, until I sat down with Josef Lapka, CPTO at CloudTalk, who told me all about AI Receptionist, what they can do, and what businesses could best benefit from having one (spoiler alert: in 2026, a lot of them would).
This is the first episode of our new video series, Ana in the Labs, where we’ll learn all about the basics of AI Receptionist. Basic skills, the importance of a knowledge base, and even how you can personalize it to you and your business.
Check out the biggest takeaway from episode 1, “What is an AI Receptionist?”, and follow along for the next session.
What is an AI Receptionist?
The clue is in the name. A receptionist at a small business doesn’t need deep knowledge of every product or process. They need to answer basic questions, book appointments, take messages, and route calls to the right person. That’s the job.
This role is designed to provide a gateway into the business, to the outside world. And that’s exactly what the AI receptionist is designed to do.
So an AI Receptionist isn’t trying to replace your support team or your sales team. It’s a digital front desk that picks up the phone, figures out who’s calling and why, and gets them where they need to go.
IVR? That’s in the past
My first instinct was that this sounded like a fancier IVR. Josef pushed back on that pretty quickly.
“An IVR cannot book appointments. An IVR cannot send SMSs. It can put you into a queue, but that’s the only thing that it can do. It basically forces the customer to make a choice.”
A good example of this is insurance companies. Imagine you’re calling because you want to renew your policy, and you also want to check a few details before you do. With an IVR, you have to pick: renewals or details. With an AI Receptionist, you say what you need in your own words and it routes you to the right person on the first try.
The bigger problem with IVRs, Josef said, is the handoff that happens after you make the wrong choice. You pick billing, you reach a person who can’t help, you get transferred, you repeat the whole story to someone new. It’s just a frustrating and bad experience for the customer, and wasted time for the business.
Calls outside business hours? Solved
Most receptionists work from nine to five. Most customers also work from nine to five. So, the people who need to call businesses can almost never actually reach them.
To add to this, if you manage to actually make the call, there’s no way to predict how that will go.
You don’t know how long the call is going to take. Is it going to take five minutes or is it going to take 30 minutes? So you have to take a chunk out of your day.
Then there’s the case of small businesses that, in most cases, don’t have a dedicated receptionist. The role gets fulfilled by someone who’s also doing another job. In a hair salon, the person cutting your hair is usually the one answering the phone. In restaurants, waiters or hosts have to leave their posts. “They have to stop halfway through, or make a choice to let that lead go,” Josef explained.
An AI Receptionist removes that double duty, so business owners can rest assured they don’t lose leads outside business hours and can focus on their work instead of worrying about the phone. “It’s just a simple use case where AI can really help hospitality become also more hospitable.”
How do I know my business needs one?
Josef answered the question most people will be asking. Your business needs an AI Receptionist if:
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If you’re getting a lot of missed calls outside working hours
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If you’re hiring staff to handle a few phone calls a day
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If your sales team is stuck answering simple questions because the support line is hard to reach.
However, there are lines the AI Receptionist won’t cross. “It is a receptionist. It’s simple questions, simple answers, routing, forwarding, making smart choices about who can help you,” Josef warns.
Anything that needs technical troubleshooting or deep product knowledge is a different conversation, which is where the AI Specialist comes in.
AI Receptionist vs. AI Specialist
Two types of AI Agents, both on the phone. What’s the actual difference? The answer is simple:
The Receptionist routes. The Specialist resolves.
The AI Specialist concentrates on resolution, not just forwarding. So while the principle of AI plus human still holds, the Specialist is designed for resolutions.
The Specialist is for businesses with a high volume of support tickets, technical products, or services that need access to internal systems. Think banking, where someone calls to check the status of a loan application. The Specialist can authenticate them, look up the records, and either resolve or hand the call to a human with full context attached.
The Receptionist is the front door. The Specialist is the person at the desk who can actually help you fix your problem. And you can run them together. The AI Receptionist greets the caller, gets the context, and passes it on to the right Specialist AI Voice Agent, along with all the information it needs. The caller doesn’t have to repeat themselves, and they didn’t have to press 1 to get there.
How easy is it to set up?
The million-dollar question. Can someone with little to no AI background set one up? Yes, they can, in under 10 minutes.
CloudTalk’s AI Receptionist setup is designed to be as simple as possible.
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01
Add a name, pick a language, voice and add a greeting
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02
Add a knowledge base (you can even scrap it from a URL)
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03
Select the skills you need — take a message, extract information, forward to a human, etc.
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04
Set guardrails for topics it shouldn’t handle on its own
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05
Do a test call
That’s it, you’re done.
“We are kind of detaching all the technical stuff away so everyone is able to use it,” Josef explained.
What customers are seeing
The early results Josef shared were the part I wasn’t expecting. The obvious metric is missed calls going down, which is happening.
The more interesting result, for me, was what happened to the calls that humans still take.
People are actually spending less time with customers, but they’re spending it in the right way, because they’re getting all the information ahead. They have more meaningful calls.
The AI handles the start of the call. By the time a human picks up, the context is there. Calls are shorter and more useful, queues move faster, and the same team handles more customers without adding headcount.
What’s next
Now, it’s time to start building. In episode 2, I’ll join Senior Product Manager Nazarii Ovcharchyn, who will tell me all about the basic skills of the AI Receptionist. We created a fake business and will start setting it up together, going through step by step, on camera.
Want to follow along?
Stay tuned.
