Fifteen for One

Six months ago, the provider's support desk employed fifteen people. Then the power outages came to the city — and the ability to pick up the phone vanished along with the electricity. This is the story of how our agent was born out of that hole, what it can already do, and where we are still falling short.

Six months ago, the provider's support desk employed fifteen people. Not because there were few calls, but because there were a great many: plans, dropped connections, repairs, account balances. The ordinary load of an ordinary technical support line. And then the power outages came to the city.

Shelling and blackouts are not an abstract line in the news but a very literal thing: the electricity dies, the router goes dark, the computer falls asleep, and the operator who was answering calls from home an hour ago simply vanishes from the line. Not because they don't want to work — because they physically can't. The laptop shut down. The SIP line dropped. Their home is dark, and right now they have far more pressing worries than someone else's internet contract.

The dashboards were in place. The people were in place. The ability to pick up the phone was not.

Our agent was born out of exactly that hole. Not as an experiment, not as a demo for investors — as an emergency patch on a live support line, because the alternative was simply not answering calls at all. We configured it carefully, step by step — not "replace all the people," but "answer while the people are gone." And it answered. Fifteen human beings who physically could not hold the line were replaced by one voice agent.

Frankly, on its own that sounds like a beautiful story about technology saving the day. But we promised to show everything as it is, not just the beautiful part — so here is the less beautiful one.

Handoff to a live operator already works. But it works slowly and is still rough in places — this is a classic startup at its earliest stage, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. On the live support line right now there are not the two or three people there should be, but in practice one. Sometimes less than one, if you count available hours. The agent copes with the flow, but the moments of handing a call to a human are the rawest spot in the entire system — and that is exactly what we will be writing about here in the coming dispatches: what specifically breaks at the seam between AI and human, and how we are fixing it.

There is also a flip side to this story — an encouraging one. A result achieved in extreme conditions — under shelling, with real people sitting in the dark — simply scales in normal conditions: more agents, more compute, the very same architecture. Nothing fundamentally new needs to be built; you only need to do the arithmetic. And the blueprint is universal — not just for an internet provider: the same thing can be deployed for an insurance company, a bank, a security agency, a marketplace, a hotel booking network. Anyone with a phone number and a stream of calls.

Separately — not as the main point, but as something that can already be switched on: the agent can not only take calls but also make them — outbound callback, communication in both directions. Not today's topic, but worth keeping in mind.

That is what the glass is for: to show this without retouching. There used to be fifteen people — now we're down to one and a half. The handoff is raw. We know it, and we are working on it — in plain sight.