Olivier Pailhès returns as Aircall CEO to bet on AI voice agents

Olivier Pailhès has returned as chief executive of Aircall, less than three years after stepping away. The co-founder, who first ran the company for almost a decade, resumed full operational control this summer to steer it into the era of agentic AI.

After leaving at the end of 2023, Pailhès headed French Tech Madrid and founded Spark Island, an immersive games company. He kept a seat on Aircall's board, then led by Scott Chancellor, a former AWS executive. Watching the AI wave from the passenger seat, he says, became frustrating. In his view, a founder-CEO has the edge when the moment calls for intuition and an all-in bet rather than optimization.

A survival question as much as an opportunity

Aircall grew as a cloud-based business telephony SaaS. Pailhès argues that investors no longer want plain SaaS, citing the talk of a "SaaSpocalypse", and that the company would have been hit hard without a rapid change of course.

Two months after his return, he says Aircall is growing 30% a month. The team initially shipped three AI agents in two weeks and is now releasing 15 in a single week. "I feel like I'm restarting a startup," he says, adding that it is exciting and sometimes a little scary.

Targets and acquisitions

Aircall has more than 25,000 customers, mostly small and mid-sized businesses, and more than $250 million in annual recurring revenue. Pailhès gives himself a few years to reach $1 billion and wants to make Aircall a reference in B2B AI voice agents. He notes that voice has to work in real time and in every language, which makes it hard.

To speed up the shift, the company made its first two acquisitions: Spain's Piper AI, which builds AI agents for sales interactions, and the US-based Vogent, which specializes in agentic voice AI. The unicorn has 700 employees.

Asked whether he could follow Hugging Face, which Nvidia bought this summer for $12.9 billion, Pailhès said that was a moonshot, while Aircall is more of a tractor. He says the company is profitable and not for sale.