By: Anmol Oberoi, Co-founder and CEO of Emitrr
There’s no doubt that artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the greatest technological innovations of our era. When combined with A2P messaging, it has tremendous potential to fill in all-too-frequent staffing shortages and optimize business operations.
At Emitrr, we’ve combined AI with A2P messaging to fill the staffing gaps that plague many healthcare providers. By listening to our customers about what their biggest challenges are and approaching our solutions with an AI-first perspective, we’ve helped healthcare providers improve communications, workflows, and patient care.
While Emitrr’s solutions focus mainly on healthcare, our solutions have profound implications for a wide range of industries and organizations.
Here are four key ways A2P messaging can optimize business operations.
1. Bypass staffing bottlenecks
In many organizations, staffing shortages can cause a bottleneck in operations. For example, our healthcare clients often have the provider capacity to serve more patients, but staffing shortages in their offices cause bottlenecks. These bottlenecks cause a breakdown in operations; in fact, some statistics suggest that 40 to 50% of incoming calls to healthcare offices are lost, in part because patients aren’t willing to wait on hold.
Worker shortages aren’t just a problem in healthcare. A combination of factors suggests that employers will likely have difficulty filling open positions for some time. According to The Conference Board, the U.S. needs an additional 4.6 million workers per year “to maintain current levels of supply, demand, and population balance.”
An AI-powered A2P solution could help many industries bridge staffing gaps, optimize operations, and increase revenues. For example, incoming calls could be routed to an SMS agent, which could then convert the call to a text conversation with an AI agent to book appointments, close a sale, or resolve a question.
2. Streamline customer service
Healthcare office staffers don’t just book appointments; they also have to answer insurance questions, provide care clarification, call in prescription refills, and meet dozens of patient care needs.
Emitrr customers needed a solution that could assign incoming SMS messages to the right people. Other solutions might build an “if this, then this” solution that would essentially look for keywords. With the Emitrr solution, AI reads the incoming SMS message and assigns it to the right person.
A2P solutions can streamline operations in similar ways across industries. An A2P solution could handle simple requests without routing to a contact center, or it could route customer care questions to the right contact center agent for complex problems.
3. Meet customers where they are
One of the reasons A2P is so successful in the healthcare space is that it’s a commonly used, intuitive technology that’s familiar to most patients across all demographics. The barrier to entry is low; most adults in the United States have an SMS-enabled cell phone. As of 2024, SMS open rates remained at about 98% with response rates up to 8 times higher than e-mail.
The barrier to entry isn’t just low for consumers. With the wide variety of platforms and channels available now, even small businesses that depend on legacy communications systems such as landlines can enable SMS options to respond to customer texts.
Given the ubiquity of SMS technology, it’s safe to say that most organizations in most industries could benefit from employing A2P messaging options to meet their customers where they are.
4. Build trust
Trust is central to the healthcare industry—and, indeed, to most industries and organizations! When customers don’t have trust in businesses, it’s tough for businesses to keep meeting revenue goals—and, consequently, to fill those gaps in staffing.
With the right A2P messaging solutions, organizations can build trust with customers through timely responses that answer their questions and meet their needs. That kind of responsiveness results in improved trust—and improved revenue.
Emitrr is using AI and A2P messaging to solve the capacity question. Our AI receptionist is an employee that works 24/7 to increase booking efficiency, reduce dropped calls, and give patients—and healthcare providers—a better experience. Clinics that use Emitrr have seen a 23-28% higher response rate than traditional phone calls, and the first clinics to adopt the AI solution saw a 24% increase in monthly recurring revenue.
A2P messaging can use SMS/AI to help organizations across a variety of industries meet the metrics they’re struggling to meet on their own. With the right automations and AI solutions, A2P messaging is the key to maximizing operational efficiency.
Founded in 2021, Emitrr is using AI to drive connections between organizations and their customers. As one of the winners of Bandwidth’s 2025 Textie Awards, the company has demonstrated an innovative approach to meeting the needs of healthcare offices.
