Just Now Possible From Prototype to Production: How Perk Built a Voice AI Agent That Makes 10,000 Calls a Week
Dec 4, 2025
Steven Payne, Product Manager at Perk, Gabriel Stock, Senior Engineering Manager, and Philipe Steiff, Senior Software Engineer, dive into the world of voice AI. They discuss how they automated over 10,000 weekly calls to ensure hotels charge virtual cards, overcoming challenges with prompt engineering and text-to-speech. The team shares their surprising findings from hotel interactions, refining conversational stages, and the importance of manual call reviews despite advanced metrics. Their innovative journey uncovered operational issues, paving the way for future AI applications.
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Virtual Card Failures Cause Nightmarish Check‑Ins
- Perk's booking system sometimes sends virtual cards that hotels miss, leaving travelers stranded at check-in.
- Steven described making proactive calls to avoid catastrophic check-in failures for exhausted travelers.
Hackathon Prototype Turned Production Fast
- The team prototyped a voice-calling AI in a company hackathon using Make.com and Twilio.
- Gabriel and the team had a working hotel-calling prototype within about a week or week and a half.
Calls Were Verbose Until Prompts Got Tighter
- Early calls were verbose and sometimes derailed because prompts lacked off‑ramps, leading to 'please charge the card now' loops.
- One hotel employee even asked the agent if it was an AI and said they preferred speaking to an AI.