By Charles Lorin, Country Manager France at telli
We have never needed an instruction manual to talk. But to reach a company, you have to press 1, fill out an endless form, then repeat your request to every person you have the rare good fortune to reach. Today, AI makes a more direct path possible: speak, be understood, move forward.
Every customer deserves to express themselves in their own words and get a useful answer when they need it. Every company deserves a voice that reflects who it is, one that can listen, answer and act, while handing off to a person when the situation calls for it.
Today, telli is coming to France. I am taking on the job of building our presence in this market, and I am convinced of one thing: France can become a leader in tomorrow’s best practices in customer relations.
In real estate, insurance, energy or education, a call is often tied to an important decision. The person calling wants to explain their situation, understand their options and know what happens next. If their request comes in at 7 p.m., it is no less valuable just because the teams are on their way to pick up their children from school. French companies have the chance to turn this attentiveness to customers into a promise they keep, one that is ambitious and effective, even as requests multiply.
France also has the means to back this ambition. The French Directorate General for Enterprise counted 1,000 French AI startups in 2025. This pool of research, talent and companies is a strength. The challenge now is to turn technical advances into experiences whose value customers can feel. That is the mission we have set for ourselves at telli.
France’s 2026 Digital Barometer reports that 52% of people surveyed in France distrust AI in general. I am well aware that voice AI in particular has an especially bad reputation. This shows how high the bar is for any company that uses AI.
A customer must know when they are speaking with an AI. Once that is clear, the question becomes very concrete: does this answer help me? Did the agent understand my request, do what it could and pass the rest on to the right person? That is how AI can make some customer interactions more attentive than rigid phone menus and the level of service customers have grown used to. France can lead the way if it makes this quality a condition for deployment, rather than just a marketing promise.
telli builds voice agents for conversations between companies and their customers. Depending on the flow defined with each team, the agents answer an incoming call, call back someone who asked to be contacted, understand what they need, arrange the next step or pass the context on to an advisor. Our platform lets teams monitor their calls and improve these flows.
In France, we want to start with one question: which conversations do your customers expect today that they cannot get? It might be a callback after a quote request, or an answer to a call that comes in outside business hours. Then comes the organizational question: who takes over a complex request, with what context, and what do we learn from the conversations to improve the service?
Some of the most ambitious brands have already started to redesign their customer experience. I want to do this work with every company that wants to build an AI for its customers, one worthy of representing its product, its message and its values.
We are convinced that AI will make the customer experience more human. If this is your challenge too, and you share this ambition, let’s talk.
Charles Lorin