Harvard Business Review's canonical study: contacting a lead within 5 minutes is 21× more effective at qualification than 30 minutes; 100× more effective than 24 hours.
Most B2B teams take 42 hours to first response. The bottleneck is human availability. No SDR is at their desk at 11pm Singapore time.
AI voice qualification agents collapse speed-to-lead to under 2 minutes, 24/7. The conversion lift is typically 30–50%.