The BPO call centre model is hitting a wall for Irish SMEs. Here's why, and what the alternative looks like from a technical perspective.
The Cost Model Problem
Traditional BPO pricing for Irish SMEs:
- Shared agents: €1,500–€3,000/month
- Dedicated agents: €3,000–€5,000/month
- Per-call pricing: €1.50–€4.00/call
AI phone agent pricing:
- Flat rate: €200–€500/month
- Unlimited concurrent calls
- 24/7/365 coverage included
That's a 70–90% cost reduction. But cost alone doesn't tell the whole story.
The Technical Architecture
Modern AI phone agents use a pipeline:
- Telephony layer — SIP trunking with local number provisioning (+353 for Ireland)
- ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) — Real-time transcription optimised for accent variants (Irish English is notably different from US English in phoneme distribution)
- NLU + Dialog Management — Intent classification, entity extraction, context tracking across multi-turn conversations
- TTS (Text-to-Speech) — Natural voice synthesis with appropriate prosody
- Integration layer — Webhooks/APIs to POS (Flipdish), practice management (Dentally), booking systems
The key technical challenge is latency. The entire ASR→NLU→TTS pipeline needs to complete in <500ms to feel natural. Modern implementations achieve 200–350ms consistently.
Where It Actually Works
Routine, structured calls — bookings, orders, hours, directions, FAQs — are perfect for AI. That's 70–80% of inbound calls for most SMEs.
Complex, emotional, or highly novel conversations still need humans. The smart architecture is hybrid: AI as first responder, human escalation for edge cases.
The Irish Context
GDPR compliance is non-negotiable. Any AI phone system must:
- Process call data within the EU
- Provide call recording consent mechanisms
- Support data deletion requests
- Maintain audit trails
This is where US-based solutions fall short. VoiceFleet was built EU-first, with data residency and GDPR baked in.
Interested in the technical details? Happy to discuss in the comments.
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