Your AI Agent Can Now Pick Up the Phone. Here's What That Actually Means for Small Business Owners.
By Warren Schuitema, Founder | Matchless Marketing | The AI Dad
Two AI agents made the same announcement this week, and the timing is not a coincidence.
Instinct and Meta's Muse, two rival text-based AI assistant apps, have both added calling features that let their agents phone businesses on a user's behalf. We're talking about real phone calls. Voice. Dialing. Waiting on hold so you don't have to.
That's the headline. But the headline isn't the story I want to talk about today.
The story is what this signals for every small business owner who's been watching AI from the sideline, wondering when it gets real. This is when it gets real.
What Instinct Concierge and Meta's Muse Actually Do
Let's be specific, because vague AI news does nobody any good.
Instinct's founder Noah Shinn announced on X that the startup's new calling feature, Instinct Concierge, can do things like book restaurants that don't take online reservations, get on your dentist's cancellation list, or sort out problems with your cable bill.
The feature is rolling out in early access to some users, with plans to expand to all users in time.
Meta's Muse just gained the ability to place calls to U.S. businesses as well. The tech giant said the feature will first roll out to users who ask Muse to make a call. That's actually a clever mechanism: if you ask Muse to make a call before the feature is live for you, it logs that as a feature request and moves you up the queue.
Instinct has also rolled out email addresses to let the agent handle account sign-up and management. The company additionally now allows users' assistants to contact other people's assistants for managing certain tasks, by adding those users to a trusted network.
Read that last part again. Agents talking to agents. That's not a chatbot. That's infrastructure.
Why This Week Matters More Than the Feature Itself
Here's my honest read on this: the calling feature is useful, but it's not the point.
The point is that two major AI platforms shipped the same capability in the same week because neither could afford not to. These calling features arrived as a number of rivals had been touting their ability to make calls as an advantage over Instinct. With Instinct's Concierge rollout, they're all now in parity on this front.
That's a feature arms race. And feature arms races in consumer tech only end one way: the features get cheaper, then free, then table stakes.
San Francisco-based Instinct is one of the most popular of the lot, attracting huge investor interest at what is reportedly a $10 billion valuation. Instinct raised $350 million last month at a $2.5 billion valuation. That's not a startup playing around. That's a company betting its entire thesis on the idea that people will hand over phone-call-level trust to an AI agent.
Muse garnered over 730,000 downloads in the U.S. in its first few days. Muse even briefly reached the No. 2 position on the U.S. app store top charts.
Consumers are already voting with their fingers. The question for small business owners is whether you're positioned to benefit, or positioned to be disrupted.
What This Means If You Run a Small Business
Let me put on my operations hat here, because I spent 16 years in manufacturing before I started doing this AI work, and I know what "someone's waiting on hold for you" actually costs a business.
On the customer side: If your customers are using agents that call on their behalf, those calls are going to be more efficient, more direct, and more patient than a human caller. The agent won't get frustrated. It won't forget what it was calling about. It'll follow up without being asked.
That's actually good news for you, if you're set up to handle it.
On the operations side: The same capability that books a restaurant reservation can, with the right setup, handle appointment scheduling, vendor calls, supplier follow-ups, and intake calls that eat hours every week. We're not there in a plug-and-play way yet. But we're close enough that you should be thinking about it now.
On the trust side: Meta's Muse wants access to users' email, calendars, payments, health services, and more, making this the company's biggest consumer AI bet and a major test of whether people still trust Meta with their data. That trust question is real. Don't skip it. Any AI agent that makes calls on behalf of your customers needs to be one your customers actually trust to represent them.
The Practical Takeaway for Right Now
You don't need Instinct or Muse to act on this today. Here's what you can do right now with tools you already have.
Step 1: Map your incoming calls. Open a doc and list the five most common reasons someone calls your business. Don't overthink it. Just write them down.
Step 2: Pick the most repetitive one. Which of those call types asks the same questions every time? That's your first candidate for an AI-assisted intake or response flow.
Step 3: Build a ChatGPT or Claude prompt for it. Write a prompt that mirrors how you'd want that call handled. Include your business name, what you offer, and how you want the outcome documented. Test it by pasting in a sample request and see what it produces.
Step 4: Watch the Instinct and Muse rollout closely. If you use these as personal productivity tools, request early access now. Muse's queue-based rollout means asking gets you in sooner.
The calling feature itself is early access, consumer-facing, and limited in scope right now. But the underlying shift, from AI that advises to AI that acts, is not early. It's here.
I've been building toward this kind of agentic infrastructure in my own business for the last year. The Summit Command Center, the automated research and outreach workflows, the content pipeline you're reading right now: all of it is designed around the assumption that AI agents don't just help you think, they do the work.
This week's news confirms that assumption is becoming the mainstream reality, not just a small business operator's build-it-yourself experiment.
The businesses that understand what's shifting right now will be the ones that look like geniuses in 18 months. The ones that wait for it to be "ready" will be scrambling to catch up.
Get familiar with these tools now. The phone calls are just the beginning.
If you want a step-by-step walkthrough of how I'm setting up agentic workflows in my own business using tools that don't require a dev team, that's exactly what I cover inside A Better Way to Do S#*t. Come find us.