The experiment
We had a hunch. Most leads are lost not to a bad product but to slow follow-up. So for 90 days we handed our inbound enquiries to an AI agent and measured everything.
The results
Average response time fell from just over four hours to nine seconds. Qualified bookings rose 61%. The agent answered at 2am, handled the routine qualification questions, and only passed on the conversations that genuinely needed a person.
Speed of response mattered more than almost anything else in the funnel. The fastest reply usually won the work.
The two weeks it went wrong
It wasn't flawless. For a fortnight the agent was over-qualifying, politely talking good leads out of booking. The fix was a prompt and a guardrail, not a rebuild. But it's the honest part of the story: these systems need supervision, not blind trust. With that in place, the agent did the job of a very good first responder.
