If you call plene.ai, Katie answers. She is an AI assistant, she says so in her first sentence, and she can do more than take a name and number. She can also do less than some people fear.
What Katie can do
- Explain what we do. Ask her about the company assessment, the tender pipeline report, RFP support or the bench and she will describe them, answer follow-up questions and tell you what we would need from you to start.
- Take a message. If you would rather leave details than talk it through, she takes your name, company, number and the reason for calling.
- Arrange a callback. She can book a time for someone on the team to ring you back, and it lands in that person’s diary.
- Put you through. During working hours, if the person you need is available, she transfers the call.
Whatever the route, the team is notified the moment the call ends, with the transcript and her notes. That is how a call at 11pm on a Sunday gets a reply first thing on Monday from someone who already knows what it was about.
What Katie does not do
She does not decide anything. She does not qualify you in or out, prioritise one caller over another, or give advice about your accounts or your bids. Every message she takes is read by a person, and every callback is made by a person. If she is unsure, she says so and takes a message rather than guessing.
She also does not replace anyone. We built her because a small firm cannot staff a phone line around the clock, not because we wanted fewer people. Every message, callback and transfer she hands over is progressed by a human member of our team.
Where she runs
Katie is our own software. She runs on our own servers in the United Kingdom, using large language models we host locally. Calls are transcribed as they happen; no audio is recorded. Transcripts and notes stay in the UK, are kept for twelve months and are then deleted. No third party operates her or transcribes the calls, and nothing you say leaves the UK.
The one thing that does is her voice. The sentences she speaks are generated as text on our servers and voiced by a speech synthesis service; only the text of her own replies is sent, and only for sentences she has not said before, since common phrases are cached locally. Your words and the transcript are never sent to it. That flow is set out in our privacy notice.
What you are told, and what you can choose
Katie tells you at the start of every call that she is an AI and that the call is transcribed. That is the standard the EU AI Act sets for systems that interact with the public, and it is also what UK data protection law requires when personal data is collected. If you would rather not talk to her, hang up and email us; a person replies the next working day either way.
Why we are proud of her, and careful about it
Katie is a small example of how we use AI everywhere else: it does the reading, the first draft and the routing, and a named person is responsible for what goes out. If that discipline holds for a phone call, it holds for a report.
Sources
- The transparency duty for AI systems that interact with people: EU Artificial Intelligence Act, Article 50.
- What people must be told when their data is collected: ICO, Right to be informed.
- How we handle call data: our privacy notice, sections 2, 5 and 9.