An AI agent that places phone calls for me

Phone calls are the part of running a small business that never shrinks. Follow-ups, cold intros, callbacks. Each one is only a few minutes, but they add up, and they tend to land at the worst time.

So I set up an AI agent to place some of those calls for me. I use Grok Bot, which places the calls through a voice-calling service called Bland AI. Here's how it works, the guardrails I put on it, and what's actually happened.

How a call gets made

I tell the agent who to call and what the call is for, in plain language, from chat or while I'm on the phone with it. The agent turns that into a call plan:

• The opening line, word for word. For one outreach call, it opened with "Hey, it's Tristan. How you doing?", waited for an answer, then said who I was with and offered a free two-minute look at their processing statement.

• The tone, such as warm and friendly.

• What to do if it reaches voicemail, including the exact message to leave and a callback number.

• Whether to record the call.

• A time limit. I've used a five-minute cap.

Then it queues the call, watches it, and reports back when it ends.

It sounds like me

The calls use a cloned version of my own voice. That was a deliberate choice. If a call is going out under my name, I want it to sound like me, and I want the person on the other end talking to the same Tristan they'd get if they called back.

That also means I hold it to the same standard I'd hold myself to. The script is mine. The offer is mine. If I wouldn't say it, the agent doesn't either.

The guardrails

Before any outreach call, the agent checks the number against a do-not-call list I keep. If the number's on it, the call doesn't go out.

Every call has a time cap, so a call can't run on.

Recording is a choice I make per call. When it's off, there's no recording, but I still get a transcript and a summary afterward.

And I test before I trust. The first call I had it make was a practice call to my own phone. It didn't come through the first time, and we sorted that out before any real call went out. That's exactly the kind of thing you want to find on your own phone, not a prospect's.

What I get back

When a call ends, the agent tells me what happened: whether a person or a voicemail answered, how long the call ran, a summary, and the transcript.

Here's a real example. One call reached a voicemail. The agent told me so and showed me the transcript, and I could see it had left my message but played it twice. I asked it to redial, and the second time the voicemail message included my callback number. A small fix, but I only caught it because the agent showed me exactly what happened instead of just saying "done."

What it's good for, and what it isn't

It's good for the calls that follow a script: a short intro, a follow-up, a voicemail you'd otherwise put off. It frees up the minutes I'd spend dialing and lets me spend them on the conversations that need me.

It isn't a replacement for a real relationship. When someone wants to talk, they're going to talk to me. The agent gets the call started. I take it from there.

If you want to try this

• Write the opening line yourself. Don't let anything improvise your first impression.

• Keep a do-not-call list and have the agent check it every time.

• Put a time cap on every call.

• Read the transcripts, at least at first. That's where you catch the small mistakes.

• Make your first call to yourself.

None of this is complicated. It's the same care you'd take if you hired someone to make calls for you. The difference is that this assistant reports back on every call, every time.