Posts by Ian Dooley

Missed calls mean empty tables. The reality is that people don’t wait for you to be quiet to book a table. It might be early morning, later at night or when you’re in the throws of a busy service – because it’s when it suits them. And those are the calls you need to catch.…

If they can’t get through, will they ever call you back? Would you? When someone can’t get through to a business, they usually try the next number on the list. If that company answers their question, solves their problem or takes their order, the search is over. You never got the chance to show them…

As businesses grow, it’s easy for everyday admin to become “just the way we’ve always done it.” Most business owners want to work efficiently, getting their team to work on value-adding tasks, rather than just admin. Here are 5 tasks that you can remove with an AI system like Clear Virtual Assistant… 👉 Answering common…

What would your team do with an extra 90 minutes? Every customer who implements Clear Virtual Assistant finds they free up time they didn’t even expect. It’s the time that builds up from all those hidden, repetitive tasks that they no longer need to do. Inbound call handling, taking bookings, answering FAQs, rerouting calls, and…

The platform that underpins our Clear Virtual Assistant just won Best Customer Service Solution at the 2026 Stevie Awards! PolyAI, which powers part of our Clear Virtual Assistant, won one of the most recognised benchmarks in the industry, and announced they’d raised $86 million last year and now work with over 200 enterprise clients across…

Your business is leaking revenue, and you don’t even realise it. It’s a Tuesday afternoon and you’re in a meeting. Your phone rings, but you can’t answer, so you let it go to voicemail. Later on, you check – but there was no message left. That’s almost certainly a potential customer who decided not to…

A new Irish SME study found that 80% of businesses believe AI could benefit them…. but 1 in 5 businesses still aren’t using it at all. The main reasons? Lack of skills, concern about getting it wrong, and uncertainty around where to even begin. It marries up to what we hear a lot – because…

Most businesses are looking at AI all wrong. A business decides it “needs to use AI” and then the conversation becomes… where can we put it? That usually leads to forcing it into places it doesn’t belong, or solving problems that don’t really exist. The better starting point is much simpler… Where are things not…

CIOs and CEOs don’t always agree… but on this, they do. According to a global survey of over 4,000 business leaders, 46% of CIOs and 43% of CEOs say their top priority over the next five years is increased automation and AI adoption. Not a project, or an investigation, or a nice-to-have… a top priority.…

The call might be over, but the work isn’t. Every conversation with a customer triggers a ripple of tasks. Summaries to write, outcomes to log, actions to follow up. But when your team’s under pressure, do things get missed? Clear Virtual Assistant can listen, understand, and take action on what’s next – doing much of…