Show Notes
Scott’s AI agent made a phone call. It lasted 11 seconds. It was a disaster.
The setup: Flying from Buffalo to South Carolina, Scott ordered a sandwich online from the cafe at the FBO so he could do a quick turn. Between frequency changes and air traffic control, he hit confirm — and realized he’d ordered a cheese sandwich. No turkey.
The attempt: From 8,000 feet on Starlink, he asked his AI agent to call the number on the receipt and fix the order.
The agent refused the number on the receipt — not the published business number
When it used the published number, its own guardrails blocked the call
It finally got through and asked which voice to use
The transcript:
“Hello, this is Sue.”
“Hi, this is Haley calling on behalf of Scott Todd. I’m transcribing our call for notes. Could you please check whether his online—”
Hung up.
Sue didn’t want to talk to an AI. It’s a robocall. When was the last time you stayed on the line for one?
Scott ended up making a Wi-Fi call himself. Sue was happy to help — she just didn’t want to talk to a machine.
The hype problem: X is full of people showcasing AI agents making outbound calls — cancel subscriptions, call the cable company, call the airline. Scott’s take: his cable company calls him every week. These are solutions to problems that don’t exist.
The urban legend: Earlier this year, a client told Scott about a technologist who had AI agents making outbound calls and buying properties with no humans involved. The client felt left behind. Scott told him not to worry about it.
In August, Scott sat next to that technologist at an event. He asked directly.
“Yeah, no. That’s not true.”
They ran thousands of calls. The results were terrible. Maybe a property or two. They killed it.
From a deal or two to “this is the way forward” is a big gap.
Where it does work: Scott’s land marketplace gets voicemails daily — “I’m looking for six acres in this area.” The team can’t help; they’re a marketplace, not an agency. Those calls used to be archived and forgotten.
Now AI calls back, explains how the marketplace works, and points the person to the right path. The calls last about a minute and they’re well received — because it’s a response to someone who reached out, and it’s help, not a pitch.
The principle: Know what tools exist. You don’t have to own the pressure washer — you just have to know there’s such a thing when the job calls for one. Then identify the real problem in your business, and bring the tool to that.
Not the other way around.
Link in the description to send Scott your business question.
📜 Full Transcript (Click to expand)
Scott Todd (00:00)
My AI agent failed at making a phone call. Let me explain. I was in a situation that I could not physically pick up the phone call phone and call someone. I had ordered a sandwich online. It looked like I had forgotten to put in turkey and I was only going to get a cheese sandwich. And I didn't want that. So I was like, hey, why don't we have AI do this for me? The call lasted 11 seconds. It was a disaster. Let me explain.
There's so much hype today around how AI agents are making calls. In fact, look at this. Let's look at this right here. And if you're on the audio version, on the video of this call, I'm showing you some screenshots. By the way, these slides were actually produced by Muse, which is a whole different story. But look at this situation. Throughout
X, for example, there's all kinds of people that are talking about how Grokbot or their agents are making outbound phone calls. And it's like, hey, you have all of these use cases. You can call and cancel subscriptions or ask for a refund or call the utility company, call the cable company. Now look, I don't know about you, but my cable company calls me about once a week, maybe once every two weeks, because they want me to upgrade. They want me to do something. If I want to cancel, all I have to do is wait for them to call me.
I don't know the last time I really had to call and wait on hold for a very long time. Call the airline. I don't know. Like I haven't done that in forever. Maybe I'm different, but there's all these people that are out there hyping the ability for the AI to make phone calls, which is cool, but I don't think that the use cases are there. What it reminds me of is it reminds me of people that are trying to find solutions to a problem that doesn't exist. They're
Chasing the tool, which I am anti-chasing tools. I love the tools. I love knowing that the tools exist. But the last thing I want to do is just like go buy a tool or start using a tool just because I can, because it's like, well, it's like finding a hammer and buying a hammer and then saying, okay, what am I going to do with this thing? What do I need to hammer next? There's nothing to hammer.
So I don't like this idea of trying to force a tool into practice, into your business.
Now, earlier this year, I think it was around March or April, one of the clients that I was working with was telling me about how they had heard through the grapevine that this guy, we'll call him the technologist, that this technologist guy, this forward-thinking guy, had basically wired up AI agents to make outbound calls trying to buy property. This was a real estate investor. He was making outbound calls.
Trying to buy properties from people. And the AI agent was doing it. And he was buying all of these properties without humans. And he had the whole system wired up, no humans, none. And he was having all of this great success. I was like, wow, that's pretty cool. That's really, really cool. And the client that I was working with was basically telling me, I feel like I'm being left behind. I feel like I need to figure out how to do this in my business. And I was like, no, you don't. No.
Stop. You don't need to worry about that today. What you need to worry about is the basics. You need to worry about the stuff that you can do. The technology will catch up to you. Trust me, the technology will catch up to you as it becomes more and more mainstream. But he was feeling like he was going to be at a competitive disadvantage to someone else who had a leg up on him. Now, funnily enough, in August, I was at an event and literally sat next to the technologist guy.
The guy that was so far ahead of everybody else. And I'm sitting there talking to him. I said, Hey, I heard all of this great stuff that you're doing with technology and AI. And he he smiled and I said, I heard that you have like a team of AI agents that are making outbound calls and buying properties like crazy and no humans involved. And he snickered. He's like, Yeah, no, that that's not true. And I'm like, what's the
Truth. And he told me. He said, the truth is that we tried it. We ran thousands and thousands of calls through this system. And basically the results were terrible. It didn't work. Maybe we bought a property or two, but it was not what the other guy had believed. And see, that's all the hearsay, right? Like it's the hype, it's the FOMO that's kicking in. When you go to the actual source,
He told me none of that's true. He's like, yeah, we spent a lot of money trying to test it out. We killed it. We killed it. So what was happening was you had these like urban legends, if you will, of some guy who was doing something and it sounds great. And then we go down this whole rabbit hole of trying to figure out how to use it in our business, just like these phone calls. Just like these phone calls, because these phone calls is just hype.
Let me give you an example. I actually had a situation to where I needed to put this into practice. And this just happened yesterday. What happened was I was flying from Buffalo to South Carolina. I'm a pilot. I fly myself, not all the time, but I do fly myself when I f when I want to. I know it's kind of a first world problem, but I'm flying into South Carolina and I really wanted to get home.
I didn't want to get to the airport and ask them to borrow a car and go into town and get lunch. I just wanted something that was fast. And I thought, well, I could Uber eats food. I could do that. I have Starlink in the plane. No problem. But there's a cafe on site. There's a cafe in the in the airport, the the FBO, as they call it, or fixed-based operator. I could land. My plan was I could land and get the food. The last time I was there.
It was slow. Not that they were slow. They were busy. It took them a minute. I wanted a quick turn. So using Starlink, I dialed in and I'm like, I can order the sandwich online. I did that. I make my sandwich order. I'm dealing with air traffic control. I'm changing frequencies. I go back to my order. I'm like confirming the time. I hit okay. I buy it. I look at the confirmation screen. And basically what I see is that I ordered myself.
A cheese sandwich on a subroll. I'm like, no, no, no, I want turkey. I want turkey. my gosh, how am I going to fix this? I'm looking for a modification. I'm looking for anything I could come up with. I couldn't find anything. So then I thought, well, hey, why not make a phone call? I can have my AI agent make a phone call. So from 8,000 feet using Starlink, I ask my AI Muse, hey.
Call this company. Call these people. Here's the phone number that I have for them. This is the phone number that's on the receipt. Call them and ask them, did I order a turkey sandwich? And if not, make it a turkey sandwich. Right? Like, I don't want just cheese. It sounds like a simple, simple task, simple job. But the AI resisted. The AI resisted. It pushed back on me.
It said, no, no, no, no, no, I can't call that number. It's not a published number for the business. Here's the published number for the business. I'm like, but this is the number on the receipt. Call my number. And if it's not a turkey sandwich, ask them to change it. And it asked me, hey, what voice do you want? I'm like, just choose Haley, the female voice.
And it then tells me, I try to call your number. I was blocked. Like blocked. It's like, yeah, it's blocked because it's not the number that's on file. My guardrails were blocking, the AI's agents' guardrails were blocking the phone call. I'm like, okay, okay, well, just call your number then. Just use what you can do. And I called. And it basically comes back to me and says, Hey, I talked to Sue.
She was not able to help you because she hung up on me. I'm like, pull the transcript. Let me see what happened. And this is what it says. Here's the transcript. Hello, this is Sue. Hi, this is Haley calling on behalf of it. Blurred out when Muse made these slides, it blurred out my name. Scott Todd. I'm transcribing our call for notes. Could you please check whether his online blank call hung up?
Sue didn't want to talk to an AI. Humans don't want to talk to an AI. It's a robocall. You and I would hang up on robocalls. Think about it. The last time you got a robocall, you're like, hang up, not interested, don't want it. And businesses are the same way. So now I'm reading this again at 8,000 feet. Like, what am I going to do now? I had nobody I could on the ground that I could actually.
Call and like phone text and say, Can you just call these people? I don't want a cheese sandwich. So then I had to go to another first world problem, which is to make a Wi-Fi call over Starlink to Sue. I get Sue on the phone. She's happy to talk to a human. She's happy to help me. The robocall, she didn't want to have any part of it. And that's the thing, is
In practice, it sounds good. I'm gonna go out and make all these calls. People are gonna talk to my AI agent. Well, the only people that are gonna talk to your robo AI agent are people that are bored or who don't know any better. Okay. And if they're bored, they're just wasting your time and money. If they don't know any better, isn't that kind of predatory? I'm just asking, like for my own opinion. Like I have my own opinion on it. But this is the this is the way I'm thinking about it, right? Like I'm thinking about it saying, hey,
I don't just want to roll out the technology. I need some plan, but I also need to test. Just like the technologist guy who told me we made tens of thousands of calls. It was terrible. It didn't work. He's like, Yeah, we got a deal or two out of it. But from a deal or two to like, this is the way forward is a big gap. It's a big gap. Now, this whole thing doesn't mean that I'm anti AI agents making phone calls.
I do think that there's a practical use case for it. I was working with a dentist, for example. Of course, they already use outbound AI, AI or robocalls to confirm your appointment. Cool. We handle that pro like humans handle that with no problem. Let me give you a use case that happens in one of my businesses. I own and operate a land marketplace. And almost on a daily basis, someone will call into our office.
And they will leave a message that says, Hi, I'm looking for six acres in this area. Hi, I'm looking for land in this area. And these calls, we have no use case for these calls. We have there's nothing really that we can do for them. We're not agents. We don't have realtors on standby. We're a marketplace. We're like a realtor.com or a Zillow. You go on there, you search for what you want, and then
You reach out to the to the agent or to the seller that has it listed. That's not us. We can't help you other than point you back to a page. But yet every day we have someone that calls at least one or two times that call and say, This is what I'm looking for. So my team, they used to kind of like archive the call. Like, what are we going to do with it? We can't necessarily help you. And nor were we capable from a staffing level to call back everybody, handle our.
Support tickets, handle our business growth. We couldn't do it. We would just archive the call and be like, nothing we can do. So we decided to change it up. What we decided to do was to have AI take those messages and call back out as an AI agent that basically says, Hey, I'm calling from the support team. We want to let you know that we are a marketplace. This is how we operate. And if you're having some difficulty, we can help you.
But this is the best path forward. And those calls are well received. They last about a minute. It's interactive because we're providing help and a solution to somebody. We're not trying to buy something from them. We're not trying to sell something from them to them. We are simply facilitating a response to their request in an automated way. And it's working well. We now have, we now have something to do.
With these calls that come in that before just got deleted. And I'm not even saying that's the right way to do it. We just didn't have a process in place that we could deal with it. So this is where we come to. How do we think about the business and understand what we're trying to do with the business or where we have gaps or weaknesses in our business? This is the thinking part. And we should know what the tools exist. We should know that there's this thing called a pressure washer in the world.
That we can go acquire when we have work that needs a pressure washer. Maybe you decide to buy the pressure washer, maybe you decide to rent the pressure washer. The most important thing is that you understand that there's this tool out there. And you're never going to know every tool. There's lots of tools that exist in the world that I don't know anything about. But AI can help me find those tools, surface those tools when I can identif identify and describe the problem. And that's our goal.
Is think about the problem that we're trying to solve, slow down on the technology, and then figure out how we can put the technology into practice so that now we can solve a problem in our world, a real problem in our business. I hope that helps you. I look forward to seeing you again in a future episode. If you have a business question, head over to ScottTodd.net/ask and we'll be sure to figure out how to address it.
within our show. See you next time.
My AI agent failed at making a phone call. Let me explain. I was in a situation that I could not physically pick up the phone call phone and call someone. I had ordered a sandwich online. It looked like I had forgotten to put in turkey and I was only going to get a cheese sandwich. And I didn't want that. So I was like, hey, why don't we have AI do this for me? The call lasted 11 seconds. It was a disaster. Let me explain.
There's so much hype today around how AI agents are making calls. In fact, look at this. Let's look at this right here. And if you're on the audio version, on the video of this call, I'm showing you some screenshots. By the way, these slides were actually produced by Muse, which is a whole different story. But look at this situation. Throughout
X, for example, there's all kinds of people that are talking about how Grokbot or their agents are making outbound phone calls. And it's like, hey, you have all of these use cases. You can call and cancel subscriptions or ask for a refund or call the utility company, call the cable company. Now look, I don't know about you, but my cable company calls me about once a week, maybe once every two weeks, because they want me to upgrade. They want me to do something. If I want to cancel, all I have to do is wait for them to call me.
I don't know the last time I really had to call and wait on hold for a very long time. Call the airline. I don't know. Like I haven't done that in forever. Maybe I'm different, but there's all these people that are out there hyping the ability for the AI to make phone calls, which is cool, but I don't think that the use cases are there. What it reminds me of is it reminds me of people that are trying to find solutions to a problem that doesn't exist. They're
Chasing the tool, which I am anti-chasing tools. I love the tools. I love knowing that the tools exist. But the last thing I want to do is just like go buy a tool or start using a tool just because I can, because it's like, well, it's like finding a hammer and buying a hammer and then saying, okay, what am I going to do with this thing? What do I need to hammer next? There's nothing to hammer.
So I don't like this idea of trying to force a tool into practice, into your business.
Now, earlier this year, I think it was around March or April, one of the clients that I was working with was telling me about how they had heard through the grapevine that this guy, we'll call him the technologist, that this technologist guy, this forward-thinking guy, had basically wired up AI agents to make outbound calls trying to buy property. This was a real estate investor. He was making outbound calls.
Trying to buy properties from people. And the AI agent was doing it. And he was buying all of these properties without humans. And he had the whole system wired up, no humans, none. And he was having all of this great success. I was like, wow, that's pretty cool. That's really, really cool. And the client that I was working with was basically telling me, I feel like I'm being left behind. I feel like I need to figure out how to do this in my business. And I was like, no, you don't. No.
Stop. You don't need to worry about that today. What you need to worry about is the basics. You need to worry about the stuff that you can do. The technology will catch up to you. Trust me, the technology will catch up to you as it becomes more and more mainstream. But he was feeling like he was going to be at a competitive disadvantage to someone else who had a leg up on him. Now, funnily enough, in August, I was at an event and literally sat next to the technologist guy.
The guy that was so far ahead of everybody else. And I'm sitting there talking to him. I said, Hey, I heard all of this great stuff that you're doing with technology and AI. And he he smiled and I said, I heard that you have like a team of AI agents that are making outbound calls and buying properties like crazy and no humans involved. And he snickered. He's like, Yeah, no, that that's not true. And I'm like, what's the
Truth. And he told me. He said, the truth is that we tried it. We ran thousands and thousands of calls through this system. And basically the results were terrible. It didn't work. Maybe we bought a property or two, but it was not what the other guy had believed. And see, that's all the hearsay, right? Like it's the hype, it's the FOMO that's kicking in. When you go to the actual source,
He told me none of that's true. He's like, yeah, we spent a lot of money trying to test it out. We killed it. We killed it. So what was happening was you had these like urban legends, if you will, of some guy who was doing something and it sounds great. And then we go down this whole rabbit hole of trying to figure out how to use it in our business, just like these phone calls. Just like these phone calls, because these phone calls is just hype.
Let me give you an example. I actually had a situation to where I needed to put this into practice. And this just happened yesterday. What happened was I was flying from Buffalo to South Carolina. I'm a pilot. I fly myself, not all the time, but I do fly myself when I f when I want to. I know it's kind of a first world problem, but I'm flying into South Carolina and I really wanted to get home.
I didn't want to get to the airport and ask them to borrow a car and go into town and get lunch. I just wanted something that was fast. And I thought, well, I could Uber eats food. I could do that. I have Starlink in the plane. No problem. But there's a cafe on site. There's a cafe in the in the airport, the the FBO, as they call it, or fixed-based operator. I could land. My plan was I could land and get the food. The last time I was there.
It was slow. Not that they were slow. They were busy. It took them a minute. I wanted a quick turn. So using Starlink, I dialed in and I'm like, I can order the sandwich online. I did that. I make my sandwich order. I'm dealing with air traffic control. I'm changing frequencies. I go back to my order. I'm like confirming the time. I hit okay. I buy it. I look at the confirmation screen. And basically what I see is that I ordered myself.
A cheese sandwich on a subroll. I'm like, no, no, no, I want turkey. I want turkey. my gosh, how am I going to fix this? I'm looking for a modification. I'm looking for anything I could come up with. I couldn't find anything. So then I thought, well, hey, why not make a phone call? I can have my AI agent make a phone call. So from 8,000 feet using Starlink, I ask my AI Muse, hey.
Call this company. Call these people. Here's the phone number that I have for them. This is the phone number that's on the receipt. Call them and ask them, did I order a turkey sandwich? And if not, make it a turkey sandwich. Right? Like, I don't want just cheese. It sounds like a simple, simple task, simple job. But the AI resisted. The AI resisted. It pushed back on me.
It said, no, no, no, no, no, I can't call that number. It's not a published number for the business. Here's the published number for the business. I'm like, but this is the number on the receipt. Call my number. And if it's not a turkey sandwich, ask them to change it. And it asked me, hey, what voice do you want? I'm like, just choose Haley, the female voice.
And it then tells me, I try to call your number. I was blocked. Like blocked. It's like, yeah, it's blocked because it's not the number that's on file. My guardrails were blocking, the AI's agents' guardrails were blocking the phone call. I'm like, okay, okay, well, just call your number then. Just use what you can do. And I called. And it basically comes back to me and says, Hey, I talked to Sue.
She was not able to help you because she hung up on me. I'm like, pull the transcript. Let me see what happened. And this is what it says. Here's the transcript. Hello, this is Sue. Hi, this is Haley calling on behalf of it. Blurred out when Muse made these slides, it blurred out my name. Scott Todd. I'm transcribing our call for notes. Could you please check whether his online blank call hung up?
Sue didn't want to talk to an AI. Humans don't want to talk to an AI. It's a robocall. You and I would hang up on robocalls. Think about it. The last time you got a robocall, you're like, hang up, not interested, don't want it. And businesses are the same way. So now I'm reading this again at 8,000 feet. Like, what am I going to do now? I had nobody I could on the ground that I could actually.
Call and like phone text and say, Can you just call these people? I don't want a cheese sandwich. So then I had to go to another first world problem, which is to make a Wi-Fi call over Starlink to Sue. I get Sue on the phone. She's happy to talk to a human. She's happy to help me. The robocall, she didn't want to have any part of it. And that's the thing, is
In practice, it sounds good. I'm gonna go out and make all these calls. People are gonna talk to my AI agent. Well, the only people that are gonna talk to your robo AI agent are people that are bored or who don't know any better. Okay. And if they're bored, they're just wasting your time and money. If they don't know any better, isn't that kind of predatory? I'm just asking, like for my own opinion. Like I have my own opinion on it. But this is the this is the way I'm thinking about it, right? Like I'm thinking about it saying, hey,
I don't just want to roll out the technology. I need some plan, but I also need to test. Just like the technologist guy who told me we made tens of thousands of calls. It was terrible. It didn't work. He's like, Yeah, we got a deal or two out of it. But from a deal or two to like, this is the way forward is a big gap. It's a big gap. Now, this whole thing doesn't mean that I'm anti AI agents making phone calls.
I do think that there's a practical use case for it. I was working with a dentist, for example. Of course, they already use outbound AI, AI or robocalls to confirm your appointment. Cool. We handle that pro like humans handle that with no problem. Let me give you a use case that happens in one of my businesses. I own and operate a land marketplace. And almost on a daily basis, someone will call into our office.
And they will leave a message that says, Hi, I'm looking for six acres in this area. Hi, I'm looking for land in this area. And these calls, we have no use case for these calls. We have there's nothing really that we can do for them. We're not agents. We don't have realtors on standby. We're a marketplace. We're like a realtor.com or a Zillow. You go on there, you search for what you want, and then
You reach out to the to the agent or to the seller that has it listed. That's not us. We can't help you other than point you back to a page. But yet every day we have someone that calls at least one or two times that call and say, This is what I'm looking for. So my team, they used to kind of like archive the call. Like, what are we going to do with it? We can't necessarily help you. And nor were we capable from a staffing level to call back everybody, handle our.
Support tickets, handle our business growth. We couldn't do it. We would just archive the call and be like, nothing we can do. So we decided to change it up. What we decided to do was to have AI take those messages and call back out as an AI agent that basically says, Hey, I'm calling from the support team. We want to let you know that we are a marketplace. This is how we operate. And if you're having some difficulty, we can help you.
But this is the best path forward. And those calls are well received. They last about a minute. It's interactive because we're providing help and a solution to somebody. We're not trying to buy something from them. We're not trying to sell something from them to them. We are simply facilitating a response to their request in an automated way. And it's working well. We now have, we now have something to do.
With these calls that come in that before just got deleted. And I'm not even saying that's the right way to do it. We just didn't have a process in place that we could deal with it. So this is where we come to. How do we think about the business and understand what we're trying to do with the business or where we have gaps or weaknesses in our business? This is the thinking part. And we should know what the tools exist. We should know that there's this thing called a pressure washer in the world.
That we can go acquire when we have work that needs a pressure washer. Maybe you decide to buy the pressure washer, maybe you decide to rent the pressure washer. The most important thing is that you understand that there's this tool out there. And you're never going to know every tool. There's lots of tools that exist in the world that I don't know anything about. But AI can help me find those tools, surface those tools when I can identif identify and describe the problem. And that's our goal.
Is think about the problem that we're trying to solve, slow down on the technology, and then figure out how we can put the technology into practice so that now we can solve a problem in our world, a real problem in our business. I hope that helps you. I look forward to seeing you again in a future episode. If you have a business question, head over to ScottTodd.net/ask and we'll be sure to figure out how to address it.
within our show. See you next time.