Keep Your Number and PBX, Add an AI Phone Assistant with Cortex Call

November 1, 2026 · Cortex Solutions

You need not replace your number or phones to modernize calls. See how Cortex Call links to your Yeastar, Asterisk or FreePBX and adds an AI assistant and browser phone.

Many Saudi business owners know their phone setup needs an upgrade. Calls are missed after hours, a customer repeats their story to every employee, and promises to call back vanish once the line closes. Yet the decision keeps being postponed for one reasonable fear: a new call system seems to mean a new number, new devices and a disruptive transition.

That number is printed on your signage, invoices and website, and your customers have known it for years. The PBX is paid for and working. So the fair question is not how to replace everything, but how to add what is missing to what you already have.

Why does replacing everything feel risky?

The hesitation is justified, and it usually comes from three concerns:

• The number: it is your address with customers, and changing it means updating everything that carries it.
• The investment: the devices and the PBX were bought and set up, and throwing them away feels wasteful.
• Continuity: any interruption during the move means lost calls, and the phone is often where customers book, ask and complain.

But what is usually missing is not the phone line itself. What is missing is the intelligence around the call: who is calling, who should take the call, what happens outside working hours, and what happens after the line closes.

The practical solution: a layer on top of your PBX

The sensible approach is to treat the PBX as the base that stays, and to add a smart layer on top of it. The number stays, the transfers and queues stay, and the layer adds what was absent. Before choosing a system, ask four questions:

• Does it connect to my current PBX, or does it require replacing it?
• Can my team answer away from the desk without a new device?
• What happens to a call that arrives after working hours?
• Who follows up on what was agreed in the call?

How does Cortex Call do this?

Cortex Call is a cloud contact center with an AI assistant from Cortex Solutions, and its promise on this point is clear: do not change your numbers or your devices. It works with your current PBX or with a number on its own PBX, in these ways:

• Yeastar: S-Series, the connection the Cortex office itself runs on every day.
• Asterisk: any PBX built on it, with the appropriate dial plan.
• FreePBX: a direct connection to your existing extensions and queues.
• SIP: a SIP trunk from your provider, or a number that the team requests and prepares for you.

If you have no PBX at all, a number is provided on the Cortex PBX. Once connected, this is what your phone gains:

• An AI greeting agent that answers every call in your business's name, in Arabic, around the clock.
• Knowledge of the caller: it matches the number to your customers, greets them by name, and knows their account owner and open opportunities.
• Answers from your data: hours, branches, services and items, and it does not promise what is not in them. It transfers the call when needed.
• Routing rules: the customer's owner first, VIPs without waiting, blocked callers never get through, and after-hours calls go to the assistant, set up by drag and drop.
• A phone in the browser: your team answers and calls from a computer or mobile, inside and outside the office, without a device or an app.
• After the call: a summary, a callback, an appointment in the calendar or a sales opportunity. A call me at nine request becomes a callback with an alert ten minutes before it.

Compliance from the start

Call recording raises understandable questions, and here it is off until you turn it on. Enabling it requires acknowledging that the caller is told first and may refuse, through an announcement from the PBX before answering or read by the employee, in line with the Personal Data Protection Law. You set the retention period in the settings, 90 days by default, and listening is based on permissions.

How to start without risk

You do not have to decide today. Follow these steps:

• Try the assistant yourself: call 011 491 6092 and talk as you would to a receptionist. If you hear the menu, press 2.
• Start the 14-day free trial, with no card required. The assistant works on the trial number from day one.
• Prepare the PBX connection with the team during the trial, by telling them your PBX type and the number of your employees.
• Decide after seeing your own calls in the dashboard. You can cancel any time.

Your number has earned your customers' trust over the years, and there is no need to give it up to serve them better. If you have a PBX and want the team to look at it with you, tell them its type and the number of your employees, and the connection is prepared with you.

Learn more about Cortex Call and request it here: https://cortex.sa/solutions/call-center