ElevenLabs deploys AI agents across sales, recruiting and internal operations
ElevenLabs CTO Alex Holt says the voice AI startup now relies on AI agents for sales qualification, recruiting and internal questions, and expects bigger efficiency gains ahead.
ElevenLabs is putting AI agents to work across its own operations, and its chief technology officer, Alex Holt, says the company expects bigger efficiency gains from them ahead. The voice AI startup has moved beyond testing, using agents for sales, recruiting, onboarding and internal support.
The clearest example is an inbound sales development agent that has handled more than 3,000 leads this year. The agent qualifies over 90 percent of those leads without human involvement and works in 32 languages. Elsewhere in the company, a sales coaching agent is helping speed the onboarding of new hires, and a recruiting agent conducts first-round candidate interviews. Nearly all candidates are now screened first by the AI recruiter. Internal Slack agents answer employees' questions about company processes, and most staff have built their own agents to handle repetitive tasks.
Holt joined ElevenLabs in 2023 after working at Palantir and has served as chief technology officer since June 2026. His approach to the rollout is organizational as well as technical. An engineer is embedded on every team, and teams are kept under 10 people. For recruiting, two forward-deployed engineers work alongside the HR team. The company's business metrics, including revenue pace and customer satisfaction scores, have so far remained unchanged, and some of the AI impact is slow to show up in the numbers.
The push comes at a time of rapid growth for the company. Its valuation doubled to $22 billion, a figure announced three months after the earlier round. Chief executive Mati Staniszewski has mentioned a possible initial public offering in 2028. The move toward agents also reflects a broader industry trend. Boston Consulting Group estimates that the agentic share of AI value will rise from 17 percent in 2025 to 22 percent in 2026, and projects it could reach 39 percent by 2030. Surveys, however, suggest many firms are not yet ready to orchestrate multiple agents working together.
ElevenLabs has also acknowledged problems. It remains unclear whether the recruiting agent is hiring the right people, and the company has not confirmed whether AI is improving customer service scores. In one case, an agent wrongly issued a refund of less than $30 without escalating the request. In response, the company built a human-led monitoring layer for its agents. The failing call was replayed, and the prompts and guardrails were updated to prevent a repeat.
Looking ahead, the company is developing multi-agent handoffs for sales leads. In one case, a customer completed a sale through two agents with no human involvement. Holt's view is that the largest efficiency gains are still to come as these systems are connected more deeply.
Source: fortune.com
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