Like many people I’m sure, I’ve found myself gripped by the TV series Landman - (don’t worry, this piece is spoiler free) and it has had me thinking about the current Comms landscape and how enormous value has sat untouched for years. Not because it isn’t there, but because the economics and infrastructure to unlock it simply didn’t exist until recently.

For an extremely long time, Voice has been one of the most abundant and information-rich assets in business. Every day, organisations handle countless customer conversations across sales, service, and support. These interactions are full of intent, context, and signal and yet, over time, many businesses have come to see Voice as something to avoid, which we’ll touch on slightly later.

When Voice Became a Drain on the Business

For years, voice was viewed primarily through the lens of cost, interruption and even opportunity cost in some cases. 

At different ends of the spectrum, we have had customer-facing teams who were pulled away from other work to answer calls and Contact Centres who struggled with unpredictable demand. 

Many stakeholders across the business felt that voice “zapped” time rather than created value. The response, in many cases, was extreme: businesses hid their phone numbers,
websites pushed customers toward forms and FAQs and Voice became the channel of last resort rather than their first port of call, irrespective of their customer’s preference.

This wasn’t necessarily because Voice lacked importance, it was arguably more so that voice didn’t scale economically in the sense that every interaction required a human and every minute consumed time that felt increasingly scarce which resulted in many organisations trying to suppress it.

The Cost-Centre Mindset Around Voice

Once Voice is framed as a drain on human time, the position and strategy for many becomes defensive by default.

Success is measured by:

• Fewer calls

• Shorter conversations

• Lower average handling times

• Increased deflection to digital channels

When we follow this approach all the way through, it becomes apparent that voice is not something to learn from or invest in but something to minimise, even if organisations were quietly accumulating vast reserves of voice data in the background.

Years of Voice Data, Largely Untapped

For decades, businesses have been recording calls, storing transcripts, and archiving conversations. In many cases, this data was retained for compliance, training, or quality assurance purposes and was rarely used strategically.

Even through the most optimistic of lenses, only a small sample of calls might be reviewed and insights shared with the wider team are often anecdotal, filtered through individual experience and/or bias, or summarised in reports that struggled to reflect what customers were really asking day to day.

The irony is that voice contained some of the richest customer insight available, but there was no practical way to extract value from it at scale but with the advent of Voice AI, this is now changing.

The Wider Voice AI Ecosystem Changes the Equation

Whilst much of the current focus is on deploying agentic solutions across customer engagement channels, with voice at the centre and meaningful support across email, web, and messaging, the true remit of Voice AI extends well beyond automating individual touchpoints.

Technologies such as semantic analysis, intent detection, and conversation analytics now allow organisations to process voice data at a scale that was previously impossible. As a result, years of accumulated call recordings and transcripts are no longer dormant artefacts of compliance or quality assurance, but usable and valuable assets that can inform how customer engagement is designed, delivered, and continuously improved.

Patterns emerge:

• What customers actually ask most often

• Where confusion or friction repeatedly occurs

• Which issues escalate and why

• How language, sentiment, and intent shift over time

This moves organisations beyond anecdotal feedback and into evidence-based understanding that can be shared across the business.

From Suppressing Voice to Refining It

For many of our partners and their customers, this is where the discussion around Voice AI becomes even more interesting. When AI agents are informed by aggregated, real-world voice data, they stop being generic interfaces and start reflecting how customers actually behave. They can be designed to address the questions customers ask day in and day out, rather than the questions organisations assume they ask or the edge cases remembered from a particularly difficult call.

When we take this into consideration, voice is no longer a blunt instrument, cost centre or red line on a P&L. It becomes a system that improves over time, shaped by historical interactions, continuously informed by new data, and refined through human oversight. AI agents learn from patterns in demand, human teams provide context and judgement, and insights flow naturally across product, service, and commercial functions.

Essentially, through closing the loop we are looking beyond straight automation of repetitive tasks and delivering considered customer engagement through our Agents.

A Positive-Sum Outcome for the Organisation

I firmly believe that the renaissance of Voice (through Voice AI) inside of companies is a positive-sum outcome rather than a zero-sum one. Here’s why:

Customers get:

• Faster access to answers

• Always-on availability

• More consistent experiences

Teams get:

• Fewer repetitive interruptions

• Better context when humans are needed

• Insight into what customers actually care about

The organisation gets:

• Scalable customer engagement

• A new source of insight

• A way to reconnect voice with value that delivers tangible, measurable output

When all of this is taken into consideration, we can build a picture for our end users around the positive impact we are delivering. Simply put, Voice is no longer solely something that drains time - in many ways, it creates it by giving time back to their workforce to focus on higher value tasks.

Re-Monetising an Underused Asset

Voice was always valuable and the data was always there, but without the infrastructure to refine it and apply it economically, its potential remained largely untapped, a gap that Voice AI now fills. The end result here is that organisations no longer need to hide their phone numbers and instead can reintroduce voice confidently, knowing it no longer scales linearly with human effort.

Voice should never have become a channel we tried to avoid, but the economics made it so, and now that those economics have changed through the emergence of a wider Voice AI ecosystem that is cost-effective and truly moves the needle, Voice can move from a cost centre to a source of insight, alignment, and shared organisational intelligence.

Voice is the new oil. Voice AI is the refinery.

And for the first time in quite some time, the industry is in a position to unlock what has been there all along.