How We Cut a Finance Broker's Lead Qualification Cost from $42 to $1.20

A voice AI agent rebuilt this finance broker's lead qualification flow end to end. Cost per qualified call dropped from $42 to $1.20. Here is exactly what changed, what it cost, and what did not work the first time. What was making lead qualification so expensive in the first place? The broker was running a standard setup for an Aussie SMB: a comparison site sending inbound enquiries, a BDC staff member calling those leads within a few hours, and a CRM entry made after each call. Clean enough on paper. Brutal in practice. The maths looked like this.