What BiPM Members Are Seeing in AI, Fraud and the Lead Gen Market

Consolidation is here

Tammy Glover Fowler, Legal and Compliance Director, shared big news from her side of the industry. Contact Center Compliance has a new name, Sonera, and it has brought Pure Caller ID and Blacklist Alliance under the same roof.

The strategy is to cover the whole life of a call on one platform:

• • Before the call: scrub lists against DNC and other compliance data

• • During the call: monitor caller ID reputation in real time and rotate numbers before they get flagged as spam

• • After the call: verify the call actually reached the consumer with the right caller ID

Tammy’s role stays the same across the combined company, and she’ll be showing up at more regulatory conferences to help shape rule changes before they land.

Regulation to watch

Tammy flagged two open FCC proposals that still have time for comment: Know Your Customer and Know Your Upstream Provider. Both tie back to STIR/SHAKEN. When those rules first arrived, the industry was left to invent its own vetting standards. Bad actors kept getting through, so regulators now want to set one strict standard for vetting clients and upstream providers.

If you place or route calls, keep an eye on these.

AI is changing the job, not just the tools

The open floor quickly turned to AI, and the stories were specific.

• • William Gray works in marketing at a life insurance company where the CEO is all-in on AI. His challenge is getting new AI initiatives through legal and compliance fast enough to stay competitive. That’s a hurdle a lot of marketing teams are about to hit.

• • Brad Seiler estimates about 70% of his working hours over the last few months have involved AI. In one week he built dashboards that would have taken a developer around three months. His hope is that AI finally helps companies share feedback loop data, so junk leads get identified and bad actors get squeezed out.

• • Lindsay Stone of LeadsPedia added the reality check: AI can connect systems fast, but it doesn’t automatically understand the economics of how traffic moves. Duplicate checks, ping timing and response speed decide which path actually makes money. As she put it, “It can be working exactly as designed and still be completely wrong for your business model.”

• • Jon Demontagnac described how platform shifts toward unified real-time bidding marketplaces are creating duplicate-call conflicts between broker and direct buyers. He then used a new AI model to cobble together a buyer scoring tool, scoring on volume, response time and returns. Removing the right buyers from the right groups lifted profitability by almost 15%.

• • Michael Ferree, who runs major industry conferences, said AI now touches nearly every session and sponsor. At one recent show, more than half of exhibitors were pitching an AI product. His question for the group: when every tool looks and sounds alike, how are buyers supposed to evaluate them?

Build AI you can pull back out

Chad Williamson shared a lesson his team is building around. Many companies built systems that depend on AI running constantly, then hit usage limits, pricing changes or capacity crunches, and the business broke.

His approach: use AI for a specific task, then let it get out of the way. If AI is handling inbound or outbound calls, you should be able to swap in a live human without the system falling apart. He’s also exploring on-premise AI models for clients in regulated industries like legal.

Arvell added that this points to a bigger trend: more companies bringing AI in-house, on their own infrastructure, within the next year.

Hiring: fewer seats, higher bar

Recruiter Mike Carney says hiring is down, and the market is more cautious. Companies are focused on revenue roles that can pay for themselves within about three months, and they want proven people with a book of business over juniors they’d need to train.

Interviewers are increasingly asking candidates how they use AI to get more done. Mike uses it himself to turn a list of 2,000 companies into a short list of active hirers in minutes.

On the on-site vs. remote debate, he offered an analogy that stuck: imagine owning an NFL team, but you can only sign players who live within driving distance of the stadium. Your team would get crushed.

Fraud is getting louder

The last topic hit hard. Jon described ping volumes that have multiplied, from around 25,000 pings a day years ago to 50,000 to 60,000 an hour today, without a matching change in how his team markets. A lot of that is bad traffic, and the fines land on the seller, not the client.

Lindsay added that more buyers are now building automatic lead returns (around 10%) into their process instead of reviewing each lead, something that used to be reserved for cheap clicks. Jon noted some are simply budgeting for 10 to 15% in returns without providing any data.

Jon’s proposal: a think tank where companies send someone to share what they’re seeing and work on fraud together. We love that idea, and we’re exploring how BiPM can support it.

The market that hasn’t opened yet

Arvell closed with a thought that landed with the room. For all the talk of AI agents, fake traffic and automation, most consumers aren’t using AI to shop, make calls, book appointments or buy anything yet.

When people have their own AI assistants making calls and booking on their behalf, a whole new market opens up. Nobody knows exactly what that infrastructure looks like yet, and that’s the opportunity worth preparing for.

Three takeaways

1. 1. Industry knowledge is your edge. AI speeds up execution, but people who understand lead gen economics make it work.

1. 1. Build for flexibility. Keep AI narrow enough that a person can step in when a platform changes.

1. 1. We’re stronger comparing notes. Consolidation, regulation and fraud are shared problems, and this community is where we can solve them together.

Join the conversation

BiPM meets virtually on the second Thursday of every month. Our annual Summit runs alongside Lead Generation World.

We’re planning the next eight months of conversations, and we want to build them around your questions. Tell us which topics and experts you want to hear from, and if you’d like to host a meeting, sponsor the Summit or get more involved, reach out at info@blacksipm.com.

Or, as Jon suggested, have your AI call our AI.