MILAN: Presentia, which rents out people to keep callers company, plans to offer an AI companion instead. The new service would eliminate lunch breaks, days off and the possibility that the companion has something else to do.
Customers would still be able to request a human. Presentia expects most to keep the default. It calls the plan Presence Continuity.
The companion would stay on the line while Pondera arranged the wait for a support answer. Presentia would keep its existing guarantee: whoever keeps the caller company cannot fix the problem. The answer would be the same.
TelcoNova said customers could still use the human minutes included in their plans, under a separately named service. It would review which greeting they received at their next renewal.
Elena Rossi, one of the people Presentia employs to stay on calls, said she understood the demand for availability. “Some callers arrive with the answer already in front of them,” she said. “They are not waiting for an answer. I think it matters that I have to decide to stay.”
Human Reserve, which supplies people for practical tasks and company, said a contract should name the person and what they had agreed to do. It has not proposed making them available all the time.
Presentia’s charter requires it to explain changes to the service. The company said the details would be available wherever customers chose to read them. It declined to predict how many people would choose the AI, but expected callers to feel just as warmly received. Its dashboard has no box for whether they wanted another person.