On June 30, a New York startup called Pie stepped out of stealth with a $19.5 million Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, taking its total funding to $23.7 million. The product it launched alongside the raise is the interesting part: Front Desk, an AI receptionist that answers a business’s phone around the clock, books appointments and reservations, and handles routine customer questions. Backers include Capital One Ventures and Max Levchin’s SciFi VC.
Pie was founded by former Square and Toast operators, and its pitch is aimed squarely at businesses that agencies have priced out. Traditional marketing agencies typically charge $2,500 to $5,000 a month on long contracts. Pie sells software that helps a local business get found in AI search tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity, then captures the resulting demand with an AI that picks up on the first ring. The company says it has already driven more than 100,000 phone calls to its customers.
The same week brought a useful reality check on the fear that AI means fewer jobs. A study by financial platform Ramp covering 21,599 organizations found that companies with the highest AI adoption actually increased hiring by roughly 10 percent. Santander, meanwhile, is rolling AI tools out to 185,000 employees to augment its staff rather than replace them, and reported returns above €35 million from AI in the first quarter of 2026 alone.
What is an AI receptionist and how does it work?
An AI receptionist is a voice agent that answers your business phone line. It greets the caller, answers common questions from a knowledge base you approve, books appointments directly into your calendar, and passes anything complicated to a human. Unlike voicemail, it converts the call while the caller is still interested. Unlike a call center, it costs a fraction of a salary and never takes a day off.
One practical note from this week’s coverage: several US states now require businesses to disclose to callers that they are speaking with an AI. That is a configuration detail, not a blocker, but it is why setup should be done properly rather than out of the box.
Do small businesses actually see results from AI?
The early numbers say yes, when the AI is pointed at a real bottleneck. Pie reports that its customers typically see sales grow 15 to 20 percent year over year, largely because previously missed calls become booked business. The Ramp data points the same direction at a larger scale: the organizations using AI most heavily are growing headcount, not cutting it, because the technology absorbs the repetitive work and the humans handle more customers.
The pattern that matters for a small business is simple. The wins are not coming from replacing people. They are coming from capturing demand that was previously leaking away: the 6 pm call, the busy-hour call, the weekend inquiry.
What should a clinic, freight office, or agency do first?
Start by measuring your leak. Take a walk-in clinic as a concrete example. The front desk answers phones from nine to five, between checking in patients. Calls that arrive during a rush, at lunch, or after hours hit voicemail, and a large share of those callers simply book with the next clinic on their list. If the clinic misses ten calls a week and even three of them would have become appointments worth $75 each, that is over $11,000 a year walking out the door, before counting repeat visits.
An AI receptionist fixes that specific leak: it answers instantly, checks the schedule, books the slot, and answers the routine “do you accept this insurance?” questions. The same logic applies to a freight office fielding endless shipment-status calls, or an agency whose team is in client meetings all day. In each case the first step is the same: list the calls and messages your team misses or repeats, then automate the top two or three.
This is exactly the category of work we build at FuzeForth. Our AI receptionist and business automation solutions are designed for clinics, logistics offices, and agencies that want the outcome without hiring a tech team, and this week’s funding news confirms the direction: answering your phone well is no longer a staffing problem, it is a software decision.
Book your free 2-week consultation and we will map where an AI receptionist would pay for itself in your business.