AI phone assistant for small businesses: what it handles, where it files things, when it hands over

Who it's for

Owners of businesses with up to 50 staff whose phone rings while nobody can pick up: trades, practices, property managers, law firms, service providers.

What you'll be able to do

Know what an AI phone assistant handles, where the request has to end up afterwards and at which points it should hand over to a person.

As of

October 2026

What an AI phone assistant is — and what it isn't

An AI phone assistant takes the call when nobody at your business can pick up. It asks what the call is about and records the request. An answering machine only records; the assistant holds a conversation.

In September 2026, two telephone providers made announcements in this area. On 22 September 2026 sipgate launched “sona”, an AI phone agent for small and medium-sized businesses. The basic version is permanently free, with 500 included minutes a month.¹ An agent, sipgate says, should be “as much a matter of course as an answering machine used to be” (translated from German).¹

On 8 September 2026 Telekom announced that, from 5 October 2026, it would summarise phone calls with AI in its business tariffs, and only with the prior consent of the people on the call.² Summarising calls is not the same as answering them. I still read both as moves in the same direction: AI is arriving on small firms' phone lines.

Picking up is the easy part. The difference lies in what happens after the caller hangs up. That is what the next sections are about, and wherever no source is given, what follows is my assessment and recommendation.

Calls: take down, sort, file

On the phone, an AI assistant takes down four things: the name, the callback number, the request and how urgent it is. Then it sorts the call: an emergency, an appointment request, a query or something else.

The announcement in the first step is, as a rule, required under Article 50 of the AI Act.³ What exactly is required is covered in the post on the labelling duty under Article 50.

Whether and how a call may be transcribed or recorded is a separate question. Settle it before the assistant takes its first call.

A call is only dealt with once the request sits where someone will work on it. An assistant that picks up politely and leaves nothing behind has only spared the caller the engaged tone.

Email: the same work, a different way in

With email, an assistant does the same as on the phone. It reads the incoming enquiry and sorts it: order, query, invoice or advertising. For standard cases it writes a draft for you to approve; everything else it files where it will be dealt with.

The Bitkom study “KI in der Wirtschaft” asked where businesses use AI today. It surveyed 603 companies with 20 or more employees. There, AI is used most often in customer contact, “for example in handling enquiries (72 per cent)” (translated from German).⁴ The study did not survey smaller businesses.

A draft for approval instead of an automatic reply: with email, a person has the last look. At the start I wouldn't let an assistant send any email itself. A draft that you only have to approve takes the writing off your hands. And you see where it gets things wrong.

Appointments: suggest, yes — confirm only with rules

An appointment request arrives the same way by phone as it does by email. For the assistant to do more than note it down, it needs fixed rules: which types of appointment it may book, in which time slots and with whom.

To suggest a time, it only needs to read the calendar. To make an entry it needs write access, and I would limit that access to exactly the agreed types of appointment. Which permissions an assistant should get in the first place is covered in the post Securing AI agents: four questions.

What it doesn't do along the way: quote prices or promise anything beyond the appointment. Anything no rule covers, it only suggests or passes on.

The assistant only enters what you have given it as a rule beforehand.

Where the request ends up: calendar, inbox, industry software

This is the point that decides whether the assistant takes work off you or just moves it. A summary in the inbox that someone has to read and type into the software is a second answering machine with better spelling.

Three cases show the difference. With a callback request, either an email with the text of the conversation sits in the inbox, or there is a task in the industry software with name, number and request. With an appointment request, either someone has to call back and find a time, or the appointment is already in the calendar under the agreed rules. And an urgent case either waits among all the other messages or goes to a person straight away.

The Bitkom study also suggests that connecting things up is the laborious part. Companies that use AI were asked about their major cost items.⁴

use AI

57%⁴

companies with 20 or more employees

Integration

41%⁴

into existing systems, a major cost item

Licences

21%⁴

a major cost item

Token usage

8%⁴

a major cost item

Two caveats. The question was about AI in general, not about phone assistants, and the survey covered 603 companies with 20 or more employees. The companies name infrastructure (51%) and data preparation (50%) even more often than integration.⁴

This is how I read the figures: the work is in connecting things up, not in the licence. For a phone assistant that means settling first which software it should write to, and only then which provider picks up.

When it hands over to a person

I consider an assistant that tries to answer everything itself a bigger risk than one that hands over too often. The Higher Regional Court of Hamm attributed a chatbot's false answers to the company running it.⁵ The judgment rests on German unfair competition law and concerns a chatbot on a website, not a phone assistant. The details are in the post When your chatbot gets it wrong, you said it.

That is why I would write the handover down as fixed rules before the start, rather than leave it to the assistant.

Part of handing over is saying so: “I can't decide that, I'll pass it on.” It also has to be clear who receives the handover and how quickly.

A good assistant recognises what it isn't allowed to decide, and says so.

What it costs — and what isn't in the tariff

The assistant itself doesn't have to cost anything. sipgate offers the basic version of “sona” permanently free, with 500 included minutes a month.¹ What the basic version includes in detail I know only from the provider's announcement.

What isn't in the tariff is the work around it: teaching the assistant what it may say, setting the handover rules and connecting it to the calendar, the inbox or the industry software. The Bitkom figures above point the same way: 41% name integration as a major cost item, 21% licences.⁴

The tariff tells you what picking up costs. What filing costs depends on your software. There is deliberately no price list for phone assistants here: I don't have one that I have checked myself on the providers' pages.

Before you start: five questions for your business

What follows is my recommendation. The five questions can be answered without any technology, and whoever sets up the assistant needs the answers.

1. Which calls come in most often?
2. Where are they noted down today?
3. Which software does the assistant have to write to?
4. What must it never decide itself?
5. Who receives the handover, and how quickly?

With these five answers you know what the assistant is meant to do before you choose a provider.