Build1 publisher2 min readPublished
ElevenLabs' CEO wants AI phone agents to announce themselves while callers still expect a human
ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski, whose agents handle Klarna's first-line support for 35 million U.S. customers, says callers should be told when AI answers. He limits the norm to a period when callers still expect a person, and his suggested version makes disclosure a routing choice at the top of the call.
The Engineer · Build desk
What happened
- ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski told TechCrunch, in an interview published September 24, that businesses should tell customers when an AI agent answers their call.
- He tied the advice to a period when callers still expect a person, and expects the norm to change as people get used to using agents of their own.
- His suggested form of disclosure is a choice, such as letting a caller skip a 30-minute wait for a human and speak with an agent instead.
- TechCrunch reported that Klarna uses ElevenLabs for first-line phone support serving 35 million U.S. customers, with Deutsche Telekom, Cisco and Adobe among other customers.
Compiled by The EngineerSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- decision Putting the disclosure at the top of the call turns it into a routing choice, so the greeting script and the queue logic have to be designed and tested together.
- constraint The pitch Staniszewski describes depends on a slow human queue; a support line that already answers quickly gets the disclosure without the incentive that makes callers accept the agent.
- precedent A supplier's CEO endorsing disclosure makes it a reasonable procurement question, and buyers can ask each voice-agent vendor how its agents identify themselves on a call.
In Staniszewski's 30-minute example, the agent says what it is and offers to take the call now [4]. I like this design, because the disclosure comes attached to something the caller wants. A long hold is a strong argument for almost anything. He said callers often take the agent and come away surprised by the experience [5].
Treat that as a claim about someone else's queue. It carries over to another support line only if two things hold there. The human wait has to be long enough to make the offer worth taking, and the agent has to resolve the calls people actually make. Staniszewski did not put a figure on how often callers choose the agent, according to RuntimeWire's account of the TechCrunch interview [5].
The disclosure has to be a spoken line in the script, because the product is built to sound natural. RuntimeWire's reading is that natural-sounding speech makes automated support easier to use and also makes it harder for callers to know who, or what, is responding [11].
The expiry he put on the norm is a forecast from the company that sells the agents [3]. I think the right build today is a disclosure line and a human-queue option in the default greeting, with the deploying business able to edit both. Adding them after callers complain means changing the greeting and the queue logic on a live line. Large enterprise deployments, in RuntimeWire's description, depend on integrations, testing and oversight [12]. I'd expect a small business to use whatever greeting the product ships with. That puts the most weight on the defaults in Reception, ElevenLabs' $29-a-month AI receptionist, which RuntimeWire reported earlier this month [10].
The advice also fits the business model. An agent that identifies itself and still wins the caller's choice is a product demonstration. ElevenLabs says it is pacing $600 million in annual recurring revenue, with more than 55% from what Staniszewski called classic enterprise. Those figures are company-reported and unaudited [7]. The company said it ended 2025 at $350 million [8], so the pacing figure is about 71% higher on its own numbers [1]. Staniszewski declined to give detailed gross margins. He said ElevenLabs is willing to let margins fall if passing savings to customers helps prove the product's value [9].
What to watch
- Whether Reception ships with an AI-disclosure greeting switched on by default, and whether buyers can turn it off.
- Any figure from ElevenLabs or Klarna on the share of callers who choose the agent when offered, and how many of those calls end without a human.