Desk openWe let an AI answer our own phone line. What we learned.
Where it earned its keep, where a person still has to be, and the rules we set before switching it on.
Letting an AI answer our own line
Takeaways first, then the detail, then the sources.
- An AI assistant answers every call on the first ring, takes the details, opens a ticket and hands urgent calls to a person.
- It is good at the first minute of a call, and at the ones that come in at 7pm. It is not the engineer.
- Set the rules first: what it may say, what it must hand over, what it never does with the caller's details.
The desk answers questions about this for free, 08:00 to 18:00.
0113 216 6777AI · 6 min · written 30 October 2026 · by the IT-360 team · sources at the end
Why we tried it on ourselves
Before offering an AI phone assistant to clients we let an AI answer our own number for six months. If it annoyed our clients we would hear about it fast, and we did not want to sell something we had not lived with.
What it does well
The AI answers immediately, every time, including at 7pm on a Friday. It asks the questions a good receptionist asks: who you are, which company, what is wrong, how urgent. It opens the ticket with those details filled in, so the engineer starts with the facts. For an urgent call it hands over to the on-call engineer and stays on the line until a person picks up. Callers who expected a queue were pleasantly surprised; callers who wanted a person were told how to get one.
What it does not do
It does not fix anything, and we did not want it to try. It does not pretend to be a person; it says what it is at the start of the call. It does not make promises about timescales beyond the ones in the contract. And it does not take payment details, passwords or anything else that should never be said aloud on a phone.
The rules we set first
- A written script of what it may and may not say, reviewed by a director.
- A hand-over rule: urgent, upset, or asks for a person twice, and it transfers.
- Recordings and transcripts kept inside our own systems, covered by the privacy notice, deleted on the same schedule as tickets.
- A monthly review of the calls it handled badly, with the script changed as a result.
Before we let the AI answer a single call we set three rules: it says it is an AI, it hands urgent calls to a person, and it never takes payment details or passwords. The AI Phone Assistant page describes the service we built from it. The Private AI Assistants page covers the same approach for internal tools.
Further reading on Insights: Copilot for small businesses and The PSTN switch-off.
Sources
- IT-360: our own call records and ticket data, April to October 2026.
- ICO: guidance on AI and data protection.
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