bOnline is set to expand its existing, 50,000 strong customer base with the launch of a new AI Receptionist service.
Picture a hairdresser mid-haircut, a soaked plumber under a sink, or a pizza maker elbow-deep in dough. The phone rings, and it cannot be reached in time. By the time they can call back, the prospective client has already booked an alternative.
That small, familiar moment of loss is the problem Anthony Karibian has spent the past decade trying to solve. Because studies show that about 80% of missed calls will end up with a competitor, and that’s a very high cost to pay for small business owners..
Karibian is the founder of , a London-based communications company used by around 50,000 small and growing businesses across the UK, and later this month he is rolling out what he calls a professional first point of contact that never sleeps: an AI Receptionist, launching September, that answers calls naturally, captures the caller’s details and follow-up actions, and hands the conversation to a real person when required.
It is easy to hear “AI receptionist” and picture something cold and scripted, a barrier between a business and the people trying to reach it. Karibian argues the opposite is true. “AI should not become a barrier between businesses and their customers,” he said. “It should remove friction while making the human experience even better.”
That distinction sits at the centre of how bOnline thinks about artificial intelligence altogether. Across many industries, businesses have used AI to push customers towards chatbots and self-service, cutting costs at the expense of the conversation. Karibian has built bOnline around the opposite instinct: that when something really matters to a small business owner, they still want to speak to someone who understands their problem, and AI’s job is to buy them the time to do that well, not to get in the way of it.
The company already offers AI-powered call transcription, summaries and sentiment scores for £19.95 a month, quietly capturing everything said on a call so a business owner can stay present in the conversation instead of scribbling notes. Roughly half of bOnline’s new customers are choosing to switch AI on, which is, by small-business standards, a remarkably fast embrace of new technology.
And that is really the point Karibian keeps returning to. Big companies, he argues, might save a department a few hours a week with AI. A small business owner gets those hours back personally, as an evening that belongs to their family instead of their inbox. “That is time they can spend winning customers, growing their business, or simply getting home earlier,” he said.
Karibian has built and sold businesses before this one, including a telecoms company that grew to around 130,000 small business customers before it was sold to a private equity firm. What is different this time, he says, is the scale of what a small operator can now do without hiring anyone at all. Not a bigger team. A smarter one, on call at any hour, that hands off to a human exactly when a human is what the moment needs.
Somewhere this September, a business owner will miss a call, but thanks to Bonline, it will not matter.
