We run our floor from Madrid and our leads are in the US. When a business owner texts back at 8pm his time, it's 3am for us. By morning he has talked to someone else.
So at the end of September we put an AI on the replies. It isn't a bot that says "a rep will reach out shortly". It holds the conversation, asks for what we need and hands the lead to one of us when it should.
In its first six weeks it held 911 conversations. The median reply took under two minutes. About one in five of its replies answered a text that came in at night or on a Sunday. About 1% of the people it texted said stop. The whole AI bill was about $110.
A few things made it work.
It only works warm leads. It picks up once someone has replied or talked to one of us. Cold outreach stays with us.
It waits a minute or two before answering. People text in bursts, and almost 1 in 10 send a second message right after the first. Answer the first one instantly and you answer the wrong question.
It isn't allowed to make up numbers. Every number in a text is checked against what the lead said or sent before it goes out. If it fails twice, a person gets the conversation.
It knows when to say nothing. 355 times it looked at a conversation and decided not to reply.
It hands off fast. 532 times it gave the lead to a person. A good AI isn't one that never needs a human. It's one that knows when to get one.
It never pretends to be a person. Asked "is this a bot?", it says yes.
And it got things wrong. We added one sentence to its instructions about follow-ups, and that one sentence changed hundreds of conversations the same night. Now every change is replayed on old conversations before it goes live. It also once sent a calendar invite to the email on our list instead of the lead's own address.
The full post has the whole setup and every mistake:
https://talalevel.com/blog/ai-answered-900-sales-conversations/