This is the question we get asked more than any other, and the honest answer is more nuanced than either “nobody minds” or “everyone hates it.”
Some customers will mind. In our experience, it’s a small minority — single-digit percentages — but they exist and their preference is real. Most customers won’t mind. And a few, particularly people who’ve had bad experiences with voicemail or phone tag, actively prefer it.
The thing that determines which group someone falls into isn’t really about AI. It’s about what they were expecting and what the alternative would have been.
Do customers actually mind talking to an AI?
Brad, who runs a mobile mechanic business, expected customers to hang up when they heard an AI. They didn’t. “I thought people would hang up. They don’t. I think they’d rather talk to something than talk to nothing.”
His observation matches what Invoca found about voicemail: less than 3% of callers leave a message when they reach one. People don’t engage with voicemail because voicemail doesn’t engage with them. It’s a one-directional recording prompt with no feedback, no acknowledgement, no sense that anything will happen as a result. Clara is a conversation, which is a fundamentally different experience even though both are automated.
Across the UK, this is already more common than most people realise. Moneypenny’s 2025 AI adoption research found that 34% of UK businesses now use AI to support telephone answering. Many of your customers have already had the experience — they just may not have known what they were talking to.
Jess, who runs a cleaning company, noticed something more specific. Her existing clients, the ones who already knew her personally, sometimes preferred to call her directly. New customers were different. “New customers don’t seem to mind at all — they just want an answer.” She ended up giving her direct number to regulars while routing new enquiries through Clara. Both groups got the experience they wanted.
Which customers are most likely to object to AI?
We don’t want to paper over this. Some people hear an AI voice and are immediately put off. They want a human, period, and no amount of helpful question-asking will change that.
The question worth asking about these callers is: what was happening to them before? If they were reaching the business owner directly every time, then Clara is a step down for them, no question. If they were reaching voicemail — which, statistically, is what happens about a quarter of the time — then they were already having an experience they didn’t like. They just weren’t telling anyone because they hung up and called someone else.
Clara doesn’t need to be better than the business owner picking up the phone. It needs to be better than silence.
Does being upfront about AI make a difference?
Clara says what it is at the start of every call. No attempt to pass as human, no ambiguity. This turns out to matter more than we initially expected, and the reason is trust.
The automated systems that people hate — the “press 1 for sales” phone trees, chatbots that claim to be called Sophie — are dishonest. They pretend to be something they’re not, and callers can tell. That dishonesty, as much as the actual experience, is what generates hostility.
When something tells you upfront that it’s an AI and then proceeds to ask relevant questions and actually listen to the answers, the reaction is different. Not enthusiastic, necessarily. But not hostile either. There’s no moment of feeling deceived because nobody tried to deceive them.
This also protects the business’s reputation. A customer who discovers later that they were talking to an AI when they thought they were talking to a person will feel lied to. A customer who was told at the start and had a useful conversation will feel served. That distinction matters more than whether they’d theoretically prefer a human.
What should Clara be compared to?
Most business owners frame this as Clara versus themselves. “Would my customer rather talk to me, or to an AI?” Of course the answer is the business owner. Nobody is disputing that.
But that’s not the real comparison. Clara answers when the business owner can’t. It’s 2pm, they’re on a job, the phone buzzes. The choice isn’t between Clara and a personal conversation. It’s between Clara and whatever would have happened otherwise — which, for most small businesses, is a voicemail that 97% of callers will ignore.
Mark, a plumber, put it well: “They’re not choosing between me and Clara. They’re choosing between Clara and my voicemail. And nobody likes my voicemail.”
