Pailhès returns to the $250M ARR business and commits to extending Aircall’s lead in B2B AI Voice Agents.
Aircall, the customer communication and engagement platform, announced that co-founder Olivier Pailhès has returned as Chief Executive Officer, succeeding Scott Chancellor. Pailhès served as Aircall’s CEO from its founding in 2014 until 2023, and has remained on the Board of Directors since.
Pailhès returns to a company larger than the one he handed over. Aircall now serves more than 24,000 customers and has reached $250 million in annual recurring revenue. It started in 2014 with four founders and a conviction that business phone systems were overdue for a rebuild.
Pailhès’ return signals his ardor for a new entrepreneurial endeavor, and simultaneously returns Aircall to its founding impulse; build what the market isn’t. Aircall has moved beyond call management into voice agents for growing business. The founder’s original thesis remains unchanged—that phone conversations are where customer relationships are won—but the opportunity has shifted. Today, AI voice agents handle the repetitive work while people focus on the relationships that need them, and with voice at its core, Aircall is best-positioned to lead AI-human collaboration in customer communications.
“Twelve years after we started Aircall, AI has handed us a rare opportunity; to bring voice back to the centre of customer conversations,” said Pailhès. “Smart voice agents take the repetitive work. People get more time to engage with customers who need them. It’s time to build.”
Having developed on a foundation of AI call transcription into live conversation agents, voice remains at Aircall’s core, now wrapped in omnichannel capabilities. Customers reach AI voice agents via phone, messaging, or chat, and the agent carries context across channels. Across these many formats, Pailhès is committed to keeping Aircall leading in AI voice agent development, with reliability as the non-negotiable constraint.
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Aircall remains focused on voice quality as the centerpoint of its product. A voice agent that drops a call, misinterprets an address, or hands a customer to the wrong queue ends up costing a business more than it saves. Pailhès maintains that connectivity, reliability, and call quality are what make an AI voice agent deployable at all.
“Customers hand us their phone number, which means they hand us their reputation,” said Pailhès. “Quality and reliability are not features we market; they’re a given, and a foundation that we must maintain as we develop our AI.”
Pailhès began his career at The Boston Consulting Group and ArcelorMittal. He went on to co-found Aircall in 2014 alongside Jonathan Anguelov, Pierre-Baptiste Béchu and Xavier Durand, leading it through its expansion across Europe, the United States, and Asia-Pacific. Pailhès holds an MBA from HEC Paris, and is an accomplished pianist. The Aircall team in Paris has learned that an unscheduled jazz performance usually means the founder is in the building.
