How KPN is bringing voice AI to the Netherlands' entrepreneurs with Mobiel AI
- Written by
- Jess Day
- Published
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KPN, the largest telecommunications provider in the Netherlands, partnered with ElevenLabs to bring natural, human-sounding voice AI into services used daily by millions of Dutch consumers and businesses. What started as an exploration of voice-accessible content and smarter customer support has grown into an agentic customer care engine and Mobiel AI, a dedicated AI assistant built for the country's small business owners. The partnership has now expanded to customer service, internal tools, and product development across the company.
Reachable and productive at the same time
For a tradesperson, hairdresser, or plumber, the phone is the business. Every missed call could be a missed job. But answering every call means putting down the work in front of you. 53% of entrepreneurs indicate that being available by phone comes at the expense of employees' concentration. At the same time, 69% cite customer satisfaction as one of the most important business challenges.
Most entrepreneurs want to be reachable at all times, but at the same time, they want to be productive. Between accessibility and productivity is a tender balance.
What Mobiel AI does
Mobiel AI is an add-on to KPN EEN MKB mobile subscriptions, delivered within KPN’s existing mobile app. Entrepreneurs keep their number and their plan. They get:
- Voicemail transcription, so missed calls can be read and prioritized at a glance
- A summary and transcript of every call, with follow-up actions captured automatically
- A call menu that routes callers to a colleague or department, and a status setting that controls when the entrepreneur is reachable
Why KPN chose ElevenLabs
KPN evaluated voice AI providers before selecting a partner. ElevenLabs stood out for speech quality and conversational AI, which matter in Dutch, a language dense with compound words and regional accents. By gathering more Dutch-language data and fine-tuning the underlying transcription model for short, high-stakes sequences, the two teams took verification accuracy from roughly 50% to 90% (an improvement that now benefits every Dutch-language deployment on the platform, not just KPN's).
At KPN, we really believe in combining our expertise with the expertise of specialized technology partners. ElevenLabs really stood out in their depth of speech and their conversational AI.
Built by KPN teams, run in the Netherlands
The two teams ran a design sprint with KPN's developers and business owners in one room in order to build their first working AI voicemail. Now, Mobiel AI runs on KPN's network and in KPN's own data centers. Voice data stays in the Netherlands, with ElevenLabs processing speech in real time and returning results to KPN. Customer data is not used to train AI models and is not shared with third parties.
Together, we make a product that is stable and secure. The network of KPN is in our own data centers. All the voice stays in the Netherlands, and ElevenLabs is processing in real time and gets the information back to us.
Looking forward
Mobiel AI is live for KPN's business customers, and the two companies are already scoping what comes next.
We really like the entrepreneurial spirit of ElevenLabs, and together we can bring meaningful innovation to the market. I really believe that this technology can help entrepreneurs across the Netherlands work more efficiently.
