Just in time for the holiday shopping season, Google unveiled an agentic calling feature that lets customers use A.I. to call local businesses for them. Google began the rollout for searches for toys, health and beauty products, and electronics in the U.S.A..
The Five Most-Key Takeaways from This Blog Post
- This feature seems to have evolved from the Ask for Me feature available in Google Search Labs earlier this year. However, Ask for Me had more agentic options, such as making a reservation, while this broader rollout of agentic calling is all about collecting information to be relayed back to customers. Google has also been rolling out automated calling for booking appointments, making reservations, and making other requests.
- Customers need to include the keywords “near me” or “nearby” to activate the option of agentic calling. Before calling, the A.I. asks some questions of the user to get some guidance for the call.
- Customers can choose between a text or email summary of the information. This will also include local inventory info from competing stores nearby.
- For now, this broad rollout of agentic calling has to do with information collection, but business owners should expect agentic calling to expand into making reservations and, one day, even making purchases outright for customers.
- Even if your business is not in the current industries that Google’s agentic-calling feature will contact, it is worth learning about it because it will likely be available for your business sooner or later.
The Significance for Business Owners
Google claims that this feature could lead to “giving merchants a new way to drive foot traffic,”an implication here being that the customer may not be making the call on their own if this feature were not available.
So, this feature could actually lead to more sales for businesses.
What If Your Business Gets Called?
Your business may be offering toys, health and beauty products, or electronics, and so may be getting calls.
Google has a page offering information about this feature.
If you need guidance for how to respond if you are a business owner, consider that you should give the A.I. clear and simple answers.
You ultimately want to lower the risk of any A.I. hallucination, which could lead to wrong information getting back to customers.
Also, if you have no interest in receiving automated phone calls from Google, then you can go ahead and opt out through your Google My Business profile.
The Convenience Factor Is Hard to Deny
Google’s claim that this could bring more foot traffic into local businesses may partly be because of the convenience factor.
Especially during the holiday season, having to wait on hold to ask about a product’s availability or certain features can be enough to send you to another business.
Or, just rethink buying the product in the first place.
So, the convenience factor may be one of the top draws of Google’s agentic calling, as it lets shoppers keep scrolling and perhaps looking for other products instead of having to disrupt the online-shopping experience with a phone call.
Sustaining the Shopper’s Interest
That convenience outlined in the section above connects to another important factor of this feature, which is that it can sustain shoppers’ interest in a product.
By making it easier to fetch information you would have the time to call for yourself, you may very well stay on the path to a sales conversion instead of going astray.
After all, the thing about online shopping is that you can very quickly exit out of a tab or do a fresh Google search. On a sudden impulse you may suddenly reject a product you were otherwise moments away from purchasing.
Agentic calling can keep you on the hook here by allowing you to open another tab, do some more browser-window shopping, then get a text or email about that product you were just looking at.
Reading the text or email, you are suddenly back on track to making a purchase.
Is There a Downside for Business Owners?
There could be, especially in the case of customers who would otherwise be calling your business if this feature was not available.
In those cases, you may be losing out on the chance to upsell or just make a good impression on a customer with a good customer-service interaction.
The Last (But Not Least) Key Takeaway from This Blog Post
Business owners and their employees should prepare for a coming wave of A.I. interactions over the phone and through other communication channels, and be aware of the benefits and downsides of this.
Other Great GO AI Blog Posts
GO AI the blog offers a combination of information about, analysis of, and editorializing on A.I. technologies of interest to business owners, with especial focus on the impact this tech will have on commerce as a whole.
On a usual week, there are multiple GO AI blog posts going out. Here are some notable recent articles:
- For Businesses and Other Organizations, What Makes a Successful Chatbot?
- IBM Watson vs. ChatGPT vs. Gemini: How Will Each Affect Search Engines?
- Using A.I. to Find Resources for Business Owners
- How Would Restricting Open-Source A.I. Affect Business Owners?
- The EU’s A.I. Act Has Become Law: The Implications for Business Owners (Especially American)
In addition to our GO AI blog, we also have a blog that offers important updates in the world of search engine optimization (SEO), with blog posts like “Google Ends Its Plan to End Third-Party Cookies”.
GO Deeper on Substack!
If you want to get a bigger-picture view on where A.I. is and is headed, then check out our Substack to learn about emerging and dominant themes in the A.I. industry that affect all kinds of businesses!
