An AI receptionist or hiring someone?

Most comparisons of this go straight to monthly cost, conclude the software is cheaper, and stop. That is the least interesting part of the decision and the part most likely to mislead you.

What each is actually good at

A person and an assistant are not the same thing at different prices. They are good at different halves of the job.

A person handles the unanticipated. The upset customer, the unusual request, the negotiation, the thing that does not fit the pattern. They also do other work between calls — which is usually the real reason to hire, and never appears in a comparison table.

An assistant handles volume and hours. It answers the fortieth identical question as well as the first, at 11pm, on Sunday, in whichever language the caller used, without getting bored or leaving.

The failure mode of a person is capacity and coverage. The failure mode of an assistant is judgement. These are different problems, and which one you have should decide this.

The coverage arithmetic people skip

A full-time receptionist covers roughly a quarter of the week’s hours. That is not a criticism — it is what a job is. But it means:

• Evenings and Sundays are uncovered, and that is where a meaningful share of new enquiries arrive.
• One person is a single point of failure. Illness, leave and lunch are real, and on those days you are back to where you started.
• Two calls at once means one goes unanswered regardless.

So the comparison is rarely “person vs assistant”. It is “person, plus uncovered hours” versus “assistant, plus you handling the hard ones”.

Run the numbers both ways

Take your own figures and work out two things.

Cost per answered enquiry. Total monthly cost divided by enquiries handled. At low volume a person wins on quality and the assistant looks expensive per call; as volume climbs, the assistant’s cost per enquiry falls and the person’s does not, because they run out of hours before they run out of willingness.

The uncovered share. What fraction of your enquiries arrive outside the hours a hire would work? That fraction is what an assistant addresses and a hire structurally cannot.

For the second column, use our published prices — platform, usage and setup are each stated separately, with telephony in your own account at cost on top. In the first column put a real salary, plus employer costs, plus the cost of recruiting again in a year.

Better still, use the missed-call calculator and the cost calculator rather than doing it on paper — both read our live figures, so neither can quote you a stale number.

The answer that is usually right

For most businesses at the size where this question comes up, it is not either.

It is an assistant handling the repeated, high-volume and out-of-hours calls, and a person — often you, for now — handling the ones that need judgement. The assistant does not need to be better than a human at the hard calls. It needs to stop the easy ones from consuming the hours you would otherwise spend on them.

⚠️ Two limits that matter for this specific decision. The assistant never closes a deal — a person marks anything won or lost, always. And when something needs you, the notification is an email, not a WhatsApp or an SMS, so it is not a substitute for someone in the room.

When to hire instead

Be straightforward about this: if your enquiries mostly need judgement rather than answering, if your volume is low enough that you rarely miss a call, or if you need someone doing other work between calls — hire. An assistant will not help much, and we would rather tell you now.