05-08-2025
AI Is Making Cold Calling Cool Again
If you're anything like me, your phone rings all day with one persistent caller: a shady character named 'Scam Likely.' Seriously, telephone spamming has become a modern plague. Our phones incessantly buzz with endless sales calls. In fact, YouMail's Robocall Index estimated 'U.S. consumers received over 4.8 Billion robocalls' in May alone, per Cloud Communications Alliance.
Is it therefore any wonder that older generations complain about how Gen Zers and Millennials won't pick up the darn phone? The public is incessantly spammed so often, nearly everyone has been conditioned to ignore calls from someone they don't know.
Or from that dastardly 'Scam Likely' character.
This is a big problem for companies that rely on tele-sales. But just how prevalent is cold calling in 2025 anyway? Let's check the numbers.
Is Cold Calling Still Alive in 2025?
Lead generation company recently performed a 'data driven' report to assess cold-calling's business utility. It produced two key takeaways: 'Over 50% of B2B leads still originate from cold calling in 2025, making it a foundational channel in outbound strategies' and '49% of B2B buyers prefer to be contacted via phone first, and 82% accept meetings from cold outreach, confirming buyer openness to calls.'
is not alone in its positive assessment of telemarketing's effectiveness. A leading provider of business research and data, IBISWorld, estimates there are now nearly 50,000 telemarketing and call center businesses in the U.S. These grew at a 4.9% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between 2020 to 2025. And Cognitive Market Research projects 'the global outbound telemarketing market size will be USD 11524.8 million in 2025.'
These numbers are nothing to sneeze at.
Even so, it's worth asking: if so many businesses still depend on phone sales, what if there was a better way to get people to actually pick up? This is the problem a company named TitanX set out to solve using artificial intelligence.
Cold Calling Reimagined with AI
Recently, I had a chance to sit down with TitanX's CEO Joey Gilkey to discuss this issue. While so many companies are investing in AI agents to improve call center interactions, his organization is focused on another application: helping businesses discern who is most likely to answer a sales call.
To this end, he and his team have established something called a Phone Intent Platform. 'Most spam calls happen because reps are operating in the dark,' says Gilkey. 'They're dialing through lists without knowing who's actually interested, ready to buy, or receptive to even being called in the first place. TitanX solves this by leveraging AI models trained on behavioral signals at the phone level, like phone activity patterns, consumer and business activity correlation at the person level, and technographic shifts to score prospects based on true intent.'
One way to think of such precision filtering with real-time data is triage, a concept well-known to the medical world. An ER must decide who to care for in order of priority. If it treated every person who came in off the street with the same urgency, it would be a disaster. For instance, an expectant mother going into labor requires more immediate intervention than the person who comes in presenting flu-like symptoms. Certainly, both individuals require medical attention, but the former patient needs assistance right away versus the sick person who can certainly wait longer to be treated.
The AI Caller Filter Difference
Returning to TitanX, the platform is similarly filtering, making decisions about who to call—and more importantly—who not to call. But the AI assists sales reps in other helpful ways. The platform flags when someone is demonstrating reachability signals, so reps can reach out at the exact moment a conversation is most welcomed.
Here's another way to think about it.
'Imagine your sales list is a haystack. Inside that haystack are a few needles,' says Gilkey. 'These are the people who will actually pick up the phone. Today's sales reps go straw by straw, dial by dial, hoping to find a needle. TitanX's AI sifts through the haystack first to hand you all those valuable needles.'
From a technical standpoint, the platform draws from 12 proprietary signals, triangulating telecom data, consumer behavior and B2B attributes among other factors to answer three core questions. These queries can boost the sales conversion process:
Armed with these insights, TitanX distills the data into a single actionable score: High Intent. This is the number sales reps need to know to better triage who would be most receptive to a sales overture.
Personalization: Sales' Secret Weapon
The Phone Intent Platform is but the latest installment of a broader trend toward personalization. Perhaps the most obvious example of this can be found in marketing. Before social media's arrival, businesses would apply more of a 'spray and pray approach' to raise awareness of their offerings.
Think about newspaper advertising. Years ago, a studio might take out a full-page ad to promote their new movie. Although the marketing agency might have some vague idea about the newspaper's circulation and readership, they could come nowhere close to the type of precision now available to social platforms like Facebook that can zero in on highly targeted audiences.
Today marketers can design highly tailored campaigns that more effectively connect with particular demographics in jaw-dropping ways. That's not all. They can use sophisticated A/B testing and even lookalike audiences to drill down further. With increasing sophistication, they can even track ad engagement through metrics such as click-through rates and impressions, ensuring a given company's marketing efforts are not based on guesswork or gut feeling, but rather quantitative factors to optimize conversion.
The Future of Sales Calls
Returning to the value proposition of the Phone Intent Platform, what companies like TitanX are engaged in may be thought of as not some one-off gambit to find those prospects most willing to answer a cold call. Rather, it may be viewed in a wider context, as an evolution in how tomorrow's sales organizations improve outbound communication. All those people (myself included) who choose to ignore what they perceive as phone spam are wittingly or unwittingly sending marketing companies a not-so-subtle message: your sales pitch isn't working for me.
Rather than continue to inundate the public with their own version of 'spray and pray' cold calls, tomorrow's businesses would do well to up their game, to learn from the move to personalization.
Why? Because it works as evidenced by how many companies now use social media marketing over bygone blanket techniques like direct mailers. Such general appeals aren't just ineffective and wasteful, they're brand-damaging.
At the end of the day, AI is reimagining how sales calls function. By pinpointing prospects most likely to pick up calls from the general population, businesses can better connect with people most likely to buy—rather than shooting in the dark. Moreover, AI-advances such as the Phone Intent Program reveal what's possible when we use increasingly sophisticated technology to enhance the human experience. By scaling personalization in unprecedented ways, tele-sales companies can stop frustrating the masses and instead seek out that gleaming needle in the haystack. With any luck, the person at the other end of the line they worked so hard to reach will say yes.
