Dispatch automation that starts at the phone.
AVA automates the intake layer of dispatch — answering every call, capturing the whole trip, quoting from your own rate rules, and handing over a structured ticket. It does not automate the decisions. Your dispatcher still assigns the vehicle, confirms the trip, and runs the operation, exactly as they do now.
Last updated 7 August 2026
Dispatch is two jobs. Only one of them is typing.
Most of what gets sold as dispatch automation tries to automate the decisions. This automates the typing, the answering and the asking — and leaves the decisions where they belong.
Watch a dispatcher for an hour and the work splits cleanly in half. One half is intake: pick up, ask the same nine questions, write the answers down, quote a range, and get it in front of somebody. The other half is judgement — which car, which driver, what to do when a flight moves, whether this one goes to an affiliate.
The first half is identical on every call and it is where the hours go. The second half is why you hired the person. Automating the first does not touch the second, and any product that claims to automate both is describing a business that does not have exceptions in it.
The same five moments, with and without the intake layer.
The baseline here is an unanswered dispatch line, because that is the real alternative at 2 AM — not a competitor, and not a second dispatcher you are not going to hire for the night shift.
| The moment | An unanswered dispatch line | AVA on the intake layer |
|---|---|---|
| The phone rings at 2 AM | Voicemail, or it rings out. The caller has the next operator's number open already. | Answers on the first ring. |
| Two callers at once | One of them waits, and waiting is where callers go to hang up. | Concurrent calls, no hold queue. |
| What dispatch receives | A voicemail to replay, and every field re-keyed from memory. | Structured ticket into your dispatch workflow; direct write-back configured per account. |
| Quoting the caller | Whatever the person who picked up happens to remember about the rate sheet. | A range from your own configured rate rules, or nothing at all until they are configured. |
| Who confirms the trip | Your dispatcher — on the calls that got through. | Your dispatcher, on every trip. That part does not change. |
Scroll the table sideways for the right-hand column.
The last row is the one worth reading twice. Nothing above it moves a decision away from your team. Where the ticket lands — an inbox, or a record created for you — depends on your platform and is set out in the integration status table.
A dispatcher is expensive. So is a phone nobody answers.
A full-time dispatcher runs roughly $45,000 to $60,000 a year in most US markets once payroll taxes and benefits are counted — the loaded cost of the seat, not the number on the offer letter. That is a general market range for the role, not a quote and not a figure from anybody's books.
The seat is worth it. What it does not do is cover 168 hours a week, and the hours it cannot cover are the ones where the calls are hardest to replace: a Friday at 11 PM, a Sunday morning, the forty minutes your dispatcher is on another line.
AVA covers the intake layer of that job around the clock. This is not a headcount argument. AVA does not replace a dispatcher, and nothing on this site will tell you it does — it takes the repetitive half of the work off the seat so the person in it spends their shift on the half that needs a person. What that is worth to your operation depends on your call volume and your close rate, and neither of those is a number we are going to invent for you.
The output of the automated half, in one object.
A Saturday 11:40 PM call out of Madison. Nobody was going to pick this one up, and it is not a complicated trip — it is just one that has to be taken down correctly while the caller is still on the line.
Your dispatcher opens the morning with that already written. The automated half happened at 11:41 PM; the half that needs a person happens when a person is there. More on the night shift specifically in after-hours limo dispatch.
Automate one call before you automate anything.
Call the line at whatever hour you are reading this and book a trip the way a customer would. What comes back is the whole automated half of a dispatcher's job, running once, for you to judge.
