Voice AI Is Still in Its First Inning: Bessemer's Mike Droesch on What Comes Next
Blog post from Coval
Voice AI is rapidly moving from an experimental technology to an enterprise priority, with its most reliable current applications involving high-volume, structured, measurable interactions such as appointment scheduling, intake, reservations, and missed-call handling. Mike Droesch of Bessemer Venture Partners and Brooke Hopkins of Coval argue that successful deployments require more than capable models: organizations must connect agents to core systems, define policies and success metrics, build evaluations, and use hands-on engineering to address real-world edge cases. Healthcare, financial services, insurance, logistics, home services, construction, and other deskless industries are adopting voice tools where screens are inconvenient or impractical, while noisy and fast-changing settings such as drive-through ordering remain difficult. The discussion identifies multimodal agents that combine voice with screen sharing, cameras, browser automation, robotics, and physical systems as a major next frontier, alongside speech-native models and lower-latency, lower-cost infrastructure. Voice-generated conversation data may also support sales coaching, customer research, and product decisions, shifting the technology’s role from cost reduction toward revenue generation, although outcome-based pricing remains constrained by ambiguous attribution and infrastructure expenses. Trust, transparent AI disclosure, clear action boundaries, and human escalation are presented as important elements of responsible enterprise adoption.
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