A hands-on workshop · Built and run by Olive
Your phone system is already an API. Nobody told your org chart.
Every enterprise already has the hard part: a number customers dial, a trunk carrying the audio, and a system of record on the other side. What's missing is the six inches between them. This is a working session about that gap — SIP trunking, voice agents, and wiring one of them into a real workflow that actually moves money.
The whole workshop, in one line
Six hops between a customer's thumb and your database. We spend the day on each one — what it costs, what it breaks, and who in your building owns it.
Why this room exists
The pilot isn't the hard part. The last three feet are.
Most enterprise voice-AI projects die in the same place. The demo works. The model is fine. Then someone asks who owns the phone number, whether the trunk can be re-pointed without a change-control window, and what happens to the ERP when the agent gets a pickup time wrong. Nobody in the room owns all three answers, so the project becomes a chatbot on the website instead.
The teams that get past it treat voice as plumbing they already own. The number stays where it is. The carrier stays where it is. What changes is where the trunk terminates — and what that endpoint is allowed to do to your systems while a human is still on the line.
This workshop is deliberately unglamorous about that. We spend the morning on the wire and the afternoon on the workflow, and you leave with a routed number, a working agent, and one real process it can complete end to end. Not a proof of concept. A thing that runs on Monday.
Roughly one in four customer calls goes unanswered — and fewer than 3 in 100 callers sent to voicemail leave a message.
That's not a staffing problem you can hire your way out of at $17.90/hr median plus 30% loaded cost. It's a routing problem wearing a staffing problem's clothes.
Invoca call-tracking data · BLS OOH, May 2024 · BLS ECEC, Dec 2025The curriculum
Eight modules. Each one ends with something running.
Split into a morning on the transport layer and an afternoon on the workflow. Every module has a hands-on gate — you don't move on until yours works.
What a SIP trunk actually is
The five-minute version of forty years of telecom, aimed at people who have to make a decision this quarter. INVITE, 200 OK, RTP, and why your carrier contract is less binding than you think.
- DID vs. toll-free vs. ported — and the one you must never release
- Where the audio actually flows (hint: not through your carrier's PBX)
- Registration, credentials, and the FQDN connection model
- Failover: what happens to a live call when your endpoint dies
→ You point a real trunk at an endpoint you control.
Latency is the product
Why a 1,400ms agent feels broken and an 800ms agent feels like a person. We measure the budget hop by hop on a live call and find where yours is being spent.
- The transcribe → infer → synthesize relay, and why speech-to-speech skips it
- Codec choice, comfort noise, and the static that isn't your model's fault
- Barge-in and interruption sensitivity as a real tuning knob
- Reading a latency trace: p50 vs. p95 and which one your customer feels
→ You cut 300ms off a call in front of the room.
The agent as a caller, not a chatbot
Prompting for a medium where nobody can scroll back. Turn-taking, confirmation discipline, and the read-back rule that makes an agent trustworthy to an operations team.
- Why an agent must state what it changed before it hangs up
- Caller ID as identity: skipping "who is this?" entirely
- Warm transfer to a human, with a ring cap so voicemail never answers
- Multi-agent routing: a front desk that hands off to a specialist mid-call
→ You build the agent that answers your number.
Cost, honestly
Per-minute economics with real invoices on screen, against the fully-loaded cost of the seat you are actually comparing it to. Including the parts that get worse at scale.
- Cents per minute: model, media, carrier, and the one everyone forgets
- Regional quota limits that cap you before your budget does
- Build vs. buy at 500 minutes/month and at 500,000
- The cost of a wrong answer, which is the only number that matters
→ You leave with your own per-minute model, filled in.
Pick the workflow that pays
The afternoon's whole premise: most teams automate the wrong call first. We rank your candidate workflows by a blunt test — volume × ticket × how badly it fails today.
- Why after-hours and overflow beat "replace the front desk" every time
- Reading your own call logs for the repeated question you didn't know you had
- The hostile-vertical problem: where automation reads as an insult
- Choosing a workflow with a system of record, not just a conversation
→ You commit to one workflow. Out loud, to the room.
Tools: letting it touch the database
The line between a nice conversation and an agent that does work. Tool calls mid-call, the stall line that covers a slow lookup, and how to fail without lying to the caller.
- Designing a tool the model can't misuse: narrow args, boring returns
- The stall line — what the agent says when your API takes 1.5 seconds
- Idempotency, because a caller will repeat themselves
- Signed webhooks + a delivery ledger, so ops can audit the write
→ Your agent writes to a real system and reads it back.
The gate: where a human must stay
Every serious deployment has a place the automation stops. We design yours explicitly, instead of discovering it during an incident.
- Approval-gated actions: the agent proposes, a person commits
- The note-review gate, worked through: an unread instruction blocks the next stage
- Policy as a deterministic layer, not a paragraph in the prompt
- Kill switches that a non-engineer can find at 6pm on a Friday
→ You define the one action yours may never take alone.
Rollout without a change-control war
How this ships in a real enterprise: percentage splits, per-site provider flags, and a rollback that is one boolean rather than a redeploy.
- Routing a slice of traffic — one site, one shift, one number
- Simulation mode: a full copy of the operation, safe to break
- What to instrument on day one so month two isn't an argument
- The rollback plan you write before the launch, not after
→ You write the rollback line for your own pilot.
The worked example
We take one real deployment apart on stage.
Rather than a hypothetical, the afternoon is anchored to a will-call desk at a food distributor — the least glamorous, most instructive workflow we run. Drivers arrive, a dock has ten spots, and every minute of confusion costs a truck. Every claim below is something we open the console and show.
Will-call: three distribution centers, one board, one phone number
Nine beats · Live console · Bring questionsA text becomes a card
A driver texts the dock number in plain English. A pickup card appears on the board the same second, parsed into structure — no app, no login, no portal to train anyone on.
Caller ID does the introductions
The same person calls instead. The agent already knows the account, the open order, and the truck. The call opens where a human call would open at minute three.
The board moves mid-call
An invoice is called in by voice. The card lands on the board while the caller is still talking, and the agent reads back exactly what it changed before it hangs up.
The note-review gate
A special instruction arrives on an order. Until a human opens and reads it, the order physically cannot advance to picking. The automation refuses to skip the person.
One brain, three channels
Text, voice, and a login-less web link all hit the same logic. Adding a channel does not mean re-implementing the rules, which is where most integrations quietly rot.
Multi-site on one number
Three DCs in three states behind a single dialed number, routed by who is calling rather than by an eight-option phone tree nobody finishes.
Intelligence from its own history
Dwell time, time-to-ready, on-time within fifteen minutes, spot utilization. Computed from the operation's own records — the metrics an ops director already argues about in Monday's meeting.
A signed write, with a receipt
When a pickup completes, the ERP gets a signed artifact and the delivery is logged. A voice call becomes an auditable write, indistinguishable from any other integration.
Everyone gets a private copy
The whole operation is cloneable and resettable per person. You will each get your own, break it during the module, and reset it before the next one. That is the deployment story too.
Run of show
In order. No panel. No fireside chat.
The only slot with slides is the first one, and it is the shortest. Everything after it has your hands on something.
You are provisioned before you sit down
Everyone gets a live number, a trunk, and a private copy of the will-call operation to break for the rest of the session.
The only slides of the day
Where voice sits in the stack, why this seam opened up in the last eighteen months, and the decisions each of you has to make regardless of vendor.
M1 + M2 — the wire
Trunking and latency, back to back, because they are the same conversation. Ends with everyone's number ringing an endpoint they control.
M3 + M4 — the caller and the invoice
Build the agent that answers your number, then price it honestly against the seat it is compared to. The room usually gets quiet during the second half.
The hallway conversation that is the actual point
A room of people from different industries with the same routing problem. We seat you next to someone whose failure mode is instructive for yours.
The teardown — will-call, live, nine beats
One real operation opened up on stage, with the console visible. Interrupt whenever. The good questions in this slot usually rewrite someone's afternoon plan.
M5 + M6 — your workflow, wired
Pick the workflow that pays, then give the agent the tools to actually complete it. This is the longest working block and the one people stay late in.
M7 + M8 — the gate and the rollout
Where the human stays, and how this survives your change-control process. You write your own rollback line before you leave the room.
Everyone calls everyone else's agent
Every attendee's number, live at once. Try to break the agent belonging to the person next to you. Nothing teaches confirmation discipline faster than a stranger attacking your prompt.
You keep the number
Your trunk, agent, and workspace stay up after the session so you can show it internally instead of describing it. No sales call attached.
The room
A small room, deliberately mixed.
We keep it small and cap how many come from any one company. The pairing that works best is one person who owns the workflow and one who can change the system behind it.
The operations owner
You run the desk, the dock, the branch, or the service line. You know exactly which call repeats forty times a day and what it costs when it goes wrong. You do not need to write code here.
The systems person
Business applications, integrations, IT. You own the seam between the phone system and the record that has to change. Most of the day's hands-on work lands with you.
The one who has to approve it
You are the reason a working pilot did not ship last year. Come and interrogate the governance module. The gate section is genuinely built for your objections.
People looking for a vendor overview, an AI strategy deck, or a keynote about the future of work. You will be bored early and you will have taken a seat from someone with a phone number and a problem. There are better rooms for that conversation, and we will happily point you at one.
Prerequisites
Bring four things.
Now boarding
Take a seat.
One email, one line about the workflow you would bring. We reply to everyone, including the ones we turn down for the room — usually with the reason, because the reason is often useful.
A seat
One person, one workflow, one number that stays live after the session. Tell us what your phone does badly and who inside your building would have to approve fixing it.
reeremote@gmail.com →Bring your team
Run it inside your company with your own trunk, your own systems, and your workflows instead of the will-call example. Same eight modules, your call logs on screen.
reeremote@gmail.com →Host the room
You have the space and a room of people who would come. We bring the trunks, the numbers, and the working operation. You bring the coffee and the wifi password.
reeremote@gmail.com →