Bland

This morning, someone parked a giant red telephone car outside Dreamforce with protest signs, and it took me a full minute to understand why it was brilliant. Not metaphorically giant. Actually giant. The kind of thing that makes you stop mid-text and just stare. Next to it, a group with protest signs. "Your vaporware must ship eventually." "No more AI on top of a 30 year old stack." "You can't rebrand your way into AI." For a second, I thought it was performance art. Then I realized what I was watching. In 2000, Salesforce rented a red telephone car and staged a fake protest outside Oracle's conference. It was guerrilla marketing back when guerrilla marketing could still shock people. It worked because Oracle was the entrenched player and Salesforce was the scrappy upstart with a point to make. 25 years later, Bland AI did the exact same thing. Same protest aesthetic, same sign design, and same level of audacity.  The only difference? This time - Salesforce was Oracle. The protesters weren't actors making abstract points. They were naming specific frustrations that anyone who's tried to implement Salesforce AI has felt. The gap between the keynote demo and what actually ships. The technical debt. The rebranding of old features as new capabilities. What made it land wasn't the stunt itself. Stunts are cheap. What made it land was the specificity. These weren't generic signs about innovation. They were complaints from people who'd actually tried to build on the platform and hit the same walls. I watched conference attendees stop and laugh. Not polite corporate laughs. Real ones. The kind that only come from recognition. The best marketing doesn't tell you something new. It names something you already knew but couldn't articulate. It makes the subtext text. The telephone car will get towed. The signs will get thrown away. But the point was already made. Not to Salesforce's executives. To everyone standing there taking photos, wondering which voice provider was actually worth trusting. Thoughts on Bland’s marketing stunt?

40 years ago, they said phone trees were supposed to help us. Now, humanity spends 900 million hours on hold every year. At Bland, we're giving people their time back. No hold times.  No frustration. Just conversations that actually work.

Today, we're excited to announce Personas: Your company's voice, across every channel. With full memory across every interaction, one Persona can handle web chat, SMS, voice, and phone calls in ways that are not only realistic, but truly omnichannel. With Personas: - Support teams can deploy a single agent that remembers everything that's happened in a conversation across all channels. - Enterprises can create agents that sound and act exactly like their best reps, scaling your best customer interactions company wide. - Developers can build conversational pathways once and connect them across every modality, with full access to your company's knowledge and tools in a secure and safe way. Businesses, developers, or anyone curious can try Personas themselves on our site for free immediately at Bland.com For enterprises, you can grab a custom demo directly at Bland.com/enterprise

Yesterday we received 1600 Apple TV remotes that nobody at Bland ordered or paid for. We have confirmed with Apple, our freight company, our finance team, and everyone on our staff. Nobody ordered these. Nobody paid for them. They just showed up from Apple’s distribution center with our address on the manifest. Apple will not take them back. There are no charges on any of our accounts. We now have approximately $64,000 worth of Apple TV remotes sitting in our office and no explanation for how they got here. This is not a marketing stunt. We build AI phone calling infrastructure. We have no use for Apple TV remotes at scale. We are currently considering our options, which include: giving away 100 of them to people who book demos with us over the next month, building some kind of sculpture, or continuing to store them until we figure out what actually happened. If anyone has dealt with phantom enterprise shipments before or knows who we should contact at Apple beyond their standard support line, we would genuinely appreciate the guidance. Otherwise, if you want to learn about AI phone agents and potentially receive an Apple TV remote nobody asked for, you can book time with us at bland.ai. We’re still trying to understand how this happened.

We let college students interview live with AI. Pass the interview → Get a job Today, AI is handling things only humans used to be able to do. Qualifying leads. Collecting payments. And now? Doing interviews. It won't be long before companies all around the world are using Bland to handle things like customer support calls, appointment booking through text messages, and even customer reengagement. Want to hear what it mind sound like for your business? Give Bland a call here: https://www.bland.ai/ P.S. we’re still hiring - so if you want a job, comment “job” and we’ll take a look 👀☎️

We are so lucky to have such amazing partners! Big shoutout to Build Club and our amazing customer Lendi Group

Bland is engineering phone calls that you actually enjoy. Here’s how we do it: Think about the last time you met someone and the conversation just flowed. You weren’t thinking about what to say next. You weren’t counting seconds of silence. You just clicked. That wasn’t luck. It was rhythm. And rhythm can be engineered. Every person speaks with a conversational rhythm that’s shaped by family, friends, and environment. When two rhythms align, you feel instant connection. When they clash, you get interruptions, awkward pauses, or people talking over each other. Science proves this further: one of the strongest predictors of whether you’ll actually become friends with someone is how well your rhythms sync. At Bland, we bake this into every call. Because we believe that when you call a company, you should enjoy that experience. With Bland, the agent listens not just to what you say, but how you say it. It learns your pacing, your pauses, your timing – then matches you. This is how we help businesses provide great customer service. Service with fewer cut-offs, more perfect cut-ins, and conversations that feel seamless. Most AI still sounds robotic because it ignores rhythm. We changed that. Try it yourself at bland.com

We love working with Lendi and Build Club!

Bland lets your AI speak any language. Now, we’re enabling your team to do the same. Introducing Live Translate. Any language, any accent, handled by Bland. Ready to build your agent? Visit: app.bland.ai Taking your enterprise to the next level? Talk to us: bland.com/enterprise