Coval Voice AI Report 2026
Jan 13, 2026
In early 2024, enterprise conversations about voice AI centered on demos and surface-level capabilities. Questions like: How human does it sound? Can it really handle interruptions? Is it better than traditional IVR systems?
By late 2025, those conversations fundamentally shifted to business outcomes.
The question every executive asks: Are customers actually willing to talk to bots? The answer from production data is definitively yes.
Enterprises have measured this directly in their deployments: "Drop-offs have decreased dramatically when the experience is good. People are getting used to voice bots and are pleasantly surprised."
This isn't aspirational — it's happening now in production. Bot recognition drop-off rate (the percentage of users who hang up when they realize they're talking to AI) has become a canonical KPI that enterprises track, and it's declining sharply across the industry.