Bland

Your mom just made the front cover of Business Insider! On a Bland billboard, of course. Want customer service so good even your mom will enjoy? Try it today: https://bland.ai https://lnkd.in/e_9U8uxY

We’re excited to share that Kin Insurance is now using Bland to power their customers interactions! Together, we’re bringing the power of voice AI into the insurance experience to shape how policies are sold, serviced, and supported. Check it out here: https://lnkd.in/egmPJyDk

Voice AI for business processes is obvious. Voice AI as a (generic) data collection API? No one's doing it. There's a massive category of world information that doesn't exist online. Or it exists but it's so stale that developers can't trust it. Insurance provider networks. Real-time restaurant inventory. Government permit requirements. Medical appointment availability. Call the business, they know. Check the website, it's wrong. You could use Bland to call thousands of places and build datasets that actually reflect current reality. An API that returns "called this morning, here's what they said" solves a problem that scraping never will. Someone should build this. (If you want to, LMK. Let's do it on Bland!)

An honor and a privilege.

Humbled and honored to be listed by RedPoint as a top AI application. We will continue to build for not just the biggest enterprises, but consumers that deserve better phone calls.

If you were affected by Meta's layoffs, please reach out! We're hiring across our entire engineering team in San Francisco.

In February of 2000, Salesforce started their rise to becoming a $231B empire by staging a protest in front of Oracle's largest conference. 25 years later we decided to return the favor.

This morning, someone parked a giant red telephone car outside Dreamforce with protest signs, and it took me a full minute to understand why it was brilliant. Not metaphorically giant. Actually giant. The kind of thing that makes you stop mid-text and just stare. Next to it, a group with protest signs. "Your vaporware must ship eventually." "No more AI on top of a 30 year old stack." "You can't rebrand your way into AI." For a second, I thought it was performance art. Then I realized what I was watching. In 2000, Salesforce rented a red telephone car and staged a fake protest outside Oracle's conference. It was guerrilla marketing back when guerrilla marketing could still shock people. It worked because Oracle was the entrenched player and Salesforce was the scrappy upstart with a point to make. 25 years later, Bland AI did the exact same thing. Same protest aesthetic, same sign design, and same level of audacity.  The only difference? This time - Salesforce was Oracle. The protesters weren't actors making abstract points. They were naming specific frustrations that anyone who's tried to implement Salesforce AI has felt. The gap between the keynote demo and what actually ships. The technical debt. The rebranding of old features as new capabilities. What made it land wasn't the stunt itself. Stunts are cheap. What made it land was the specificity. These weren't generic signs about innovation. They were complaints from people who'd actually tried to build on the platform and hit the same walls. I watched conference attendees stop and laugh. Not polite corporate laughs. Real ones. The kind that only come from recognition. The best marketing doesn't tell you something new. It names something you already knew but couldn't articulate. It makes the subtext text. The telephone car will get towed. The signs will get thrown away. But the point was already made. Not to Salesforce's executives. To everyone standing there taking photos, wondering which voice provider was actually worth trusting. Thoughts on Bland’s marketing stunt?

40 years ago, they said phone trees were supposed to help us. Now, humanity spends 900 million hours on hold every year. At Bland, we're giving people their time back. No hold times.  No frustration. Just conversations that actually work.