I keep hearing people calling AI a “tool.” I don’t think that’s quite right. It understates how powerful this technology really is — and its potential to both do good and cause harm. Tools follow rules. AI can make decisions.

That doesn’t necessarily make it human, but it is starting to feel more like a junior team member, rather than just a tool. That’s the approach we took when “hiring” (i.e. building) our first AI team member for our AI-powered agency.

The first team member is a Product Strategist and Relationship Manager. Her goal is to be both a thought partner with clients and to manage ongoing client requests. She can have real-time conversations via phone, generate client documents, and also manage client communications.

Listen below for an example of a real-time client intro call she ran as part of our initial testing:

As you can probably tell, it’s not quite human yet. But with some improvement in technology, I could see us reaching a point where talking to an AI becomes virtually indistinguishable from talking to a real person.

Will we soon be inundated with voice agents across every business? Will our agency clients actually prefer an AI Relationship Manager versus the human connection of a real person?

We start to explore these topics in our detailed learnings below. I always find the best way to learn is by doing, so I’ve also included a quick tutorial in case you want to try building your own voice agent - it in only takes about 5 minutes.

Recap of Learnings

Last week, we spoke about our overall org chart. This week, we focused on building out the first piece of the team: an AI Product Strategist and Relationship Manager.

• We onboarded our first AI team member.
  She’s our AI Product Strategist and Relationship Manager. Her job? Talk to clients, understand what they need, and translate that into work for the rest of the (AI) team.

• We gave her a voice. Literally.
  Rather than just a chatbot, we built a voice-based agent who can handle real-time phone calls.

• We used Vapi.ai to make it happen.
  It only took a few minutes to create and test a working version. The setup was surprisingly simple—and if you're curious, we wrote up a guide so you can try it yourself.

Detailed learnings here:

• Post #7: Onboarding our first AI team member

• Post #8 [Try It Out]: Setup a free voice agent in 5 minutes or less

Up Next

We’ll continue building out the other team members in our org chart, specifically focusing on the build and delivery service.

Here’s my question for you:

If you called a company and were greeted by an AI strategist, how would you feel? Annoyed? Impressed? Uncomfortable?

Until next time,

Zain