The Phone Call AI Still Can't Replace
Jared Aron compares how fast the US and UK actually adopt healthcare innovation, and makes the case that a real human phone call still beats an AI voice agent at the moment that matters most.
Jared Aron
“We had several patients upon being contacted that said, 'is this a person?' And the answer was of course, yes. And they couldn't believe it.”— Jared Aron
Show notes
Jared Aron contrasts the pace of healthcare innovation in the US, where a large commercial market and clinical leaders comfortable with commerciality drive fast adoption, against the UK, where a legacy of national provision makes even private clinics slower to adopt new tools. He points to specific vendors doing it well: Third Way Health's end-to-end model, Voca's early work in agentic communication, and medical scribes as one of the first AI categories clinicians have actually embraced at scale.
He draws a sharp line between where AI already works and where it doesn't. AI scribes succeed because they operate inside a clinical, contextually bound workflow; voice AI receptionists are a much harder problem because the valuable part of a patient call isn't answering it, it's a uniquely human discovery conversation. He tells a story of patients responding to a real human call with disbelief, asking outright 'is this a person?' — proof of how rare and valuable that moment has become.
Pushed for his single hottest take, Jared names the UK's cultural discomfort with commerciality as the real innovation blocker. Then, asked how he'd spend a hypothetical £100k clinic budget, he says he would rebuild the entire front-of-house function rather than buy new equipment or spend more on marketing, arguing that most clinics are already leaking value they haven't optimized before chasing anything new.
Key takeaways
- The US healthcare market adopts new technology faster than the UK largely because its clinical leaders are more comfortable thinking commercially.
- AI scribes succeeded because they operate inside a well-defined clinical workflow — a much easier problem than open-ended patient communication.
- The most valuable moment in a patient call is the human discovery conversation, not the act of answering the phone, which is why voice AI receptionists are a harder problem than they look.
- Patients have become so unaccustomed to real human outreach that some respond to a live phone call by asking, in disbelief, whether they're speaking to an actual person.
- Handed a hypothetical £100k, Jared would rebuild the front-of-house function itself before spending more on marketing or equipment.
- A cultural discomfort with commerciality, not a lack of good tools, is what Jared calls the UK clinic sector's biggest blocker to innovation.
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