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What Call Centers Using AI Should Do


On March 24, 2026, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced a settlement with Air AI Technologies and its owners, concluding a lawsuit filed in August 2025. Under the terms of the proposed order, Air AI and its operators are banned from selling or marketing any business opportunity and from making false or unsubstantiated claims while telemarketing or selling any goods and services.

The monetary judgment totaled $18 million, with operators required to pay $50,000 to the Commission for consumer relief based on their stated inability to pay the full amount.

If you were evaluating Air AI as part of your call center’s AI outbound strategy, or if you are currently using it, here is what you need to know right now.

What the FTC Alleged

The FTC’s complaint, originally filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona in August 2025, alleged that since at least February 2023, Air AI and its operators, Caleb Maddix, Ryan O’Donnell, and Thomas Lancer, engaged in a pattern of deceptive practices targeting entrepreneurs and small businesses. Specifically, the agency alleged they:

  • Falsely claimed that purchasers of their services would or were likely to make substantial earnings
  • Falsely represented that a refund or buy-back guarantee protected purchasers of the Air AI Access Card or licenses
  • Misrepresented the performance, efficacy, and core characteristics of their services
  • Violated the Telemarketing Sales Rule by failing to provide required disclosure documents and earnings claims statements
  • Failed to honor refunds when consumers met the stated refund policy requirements

The FTC estimated that these practices collectively resulted in roughly $18 million in consumer losses, with some individual small business owners losing as much as $250,000.

The proposed settlement order, filed today, permanently bans Air AI’s operators from marketing business opportunities and from making unsubstantiated claims in telemarketing or sales contexts.

Why This Matters for Call Centers

Air AI was one of the more prominently marketed AI voice calling platforms over the past two years, positioning itself as a solution capable of conducting full-length, human-like sales conversations ranging from 10 to 40 minutes. It attracted attention from call centers, sales agencies, and outbound marketing operations across the United States.

The FTC action does not just raise questions about Air AI specifically. It signals something broader: that the AI calling space is under active regulatory scrutiny, that claims made by AI voice vendors will be held to a legal standard, and that call centers choosing vendors based on marketing promises, rather than verified infrastructure and compliance track records, carry real risk.

There are several practical implications worth understanding.

  • Vendor credibility is a compliance variable. If your AI calling vendor makes promises it cannot substantiate, your business may bear downstream risk, particularly if those claims influenced your compliance posture, consent processes, or call center operations. Choosing platforms with verifiable track records and transparent operations is not just a preference. It is risk management.
  • Platform instability is a pipeline risk. If your outbound operation depended on Air AI or was evaluating it as a primary calling infrastructure, the settlement creates immediate operational uncertainty. Even if the platform continues to operate in some form, its ownership structure, legal status, and ongoing reliability are now legitimately in question.
  • The FTC is actively watching AI calling. This action follows broader FCC and FTC enforcement activity around AI-generated voice calls, TCPA violations, and deceptive telemarketing practices. The message from federal regulators in 2026 is consistent: AI calling without verified consent, honest performance claims, and compliant infrastructure are enforcement targets.

What to Look for in an Air AI Alternative

If you are now evaluating alternatives, whether you were an Air AI customer or a prospect who has been following the space, here is a straightforward framework for assessing AI calling platforms after this settlement.

  • Verifiable compliance infrastructure, not just claims. Any platform can claim TCPA compliance. What you want to see is how compliance is actually enforced, including automated state-by-state dialing windows, real-time DNC suppression, consent validation integration, and documented opt-out handling across all channels. Ask vendors to show you the compliance mechanism, not just describe it.
  • Transparent, substantiated performance data. The FTC action against Air AI centered largely on unsubstantiated earnings and performance claims. Before committing to any AI calling platform, ask for real case study data from real clients in your industry. Vague claims about “human-like conversations” and “unlimited scale” without specific, verifiable performance benchmarks should be treated with skepticism.
  • Number management and spam protection. The number of calls is the operational variable that most directly determines your actual answer rates, and most AI calling vendors, including the developer-first platforms like Bland AI and Retell AI, leave this responsibility entirely to the customer. You want a platform that purchases, registers, and actively monitors dedicated phone numbers on your behalf, with continuous spam detection and number replacement built into the service.
  • Managed infrastructure vs. software tools. The Air AI model, like most competitors in this space, is designed to sell you software while leaving the operational complexity to you. Number management, compliance enforcement, CRM integration, campaign optimization, and ongoing troubleshooting are all your problem. The platform itself carries those responsibilities in a fully managed solution.
  • A clean regulatory record. After today’s settlement, this criterion should be explicit in any vendor evaluation. Verify whether the platform or its operators have any FTC, FCC, or state regulatory actions on record. This data is public information. A five-minute search can tell you what years of marketing material will not.

What Bigly Sales Does Differently

Bigly Sales was built from the ground up for one specific use case: high-volume, compliant outbound calling for call centers operating in regulated industries. The architecture reflects that focus in ways that matter directly in the current regulatory environment.

Before a single call is placed on your behalf, Bigly purchases and registers hundreds of dedicated phone numbers with carriers, whitelists them, and deploys local presence dialing matched to your target geographies. Call volume is distributed across a managed pool, keeping per-number velocity within compliant thresholds. Numbers are monitored continuously and replaced the moment they show flagging signals.

TCPA compliance is not a setting you configure. It is enforced automatically at the system level — federal dialing rules, state-by-state windows, velocity caps, holiday restrictions, real-time DNC suppression, consent validation via TrustedForm, and immediate opt-out propagation across voice and SMS. Your team does not manage these rules. The platform does.

Every call result, transcript, recording, disposition, qualification answers, and conversion status is pushed automatically to your CRM after every call. No manual logging. No data gaps.

And Bigly’s performance claims are built around the one metric that actually drives outbound revenue: cost per live conversation, not cost per dial. That is the number that matters when you are evaluating whether an AI calling platform is actually delivering what it promises.

Book a Free Demo to see what a managed, compliant AI outbound calling system looks like and to get real performance data from operations in your industry.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q1: What exactly did the FTC allege against Air AI?

The FTC alleged that Air AI Technologies and its operators made false claims about earnings potential, misrepresented a refund guarantee that they rarely honored, and violated the Telemarketing Sales Rule and the Business Opportunity Rule. The complaint, filed in August 2025 and settled on March 24, 2026, covered conduct dating back to at least February 2023, with estimated consumer losses of approximately $19 million.

Q2: Is Air AI still operational after the FTC settlement?

The settlement prohibits Air AI’s operators from marketing business opportunities and from making unsubstantiated claims in telemarketing or sales contexts. The operational status of the platform itself is uncertain. Call centers that were relying on or evaluating Air AI should treat the platform’s continuity as unreliable and begin evaluating alternatives immediately.

Q3: Does the Air AI FTC action mean AI outbound calling itself is being banned?

No. The FTC action targets specific deceptive business practices by Air AI’s operators, false earnings claims, misrepresented refund guarantees, and Telemarketing Sales Rule violations. AI outbound calling is legal when conducted with proper consent, compliant infrastructure, and honest representation of capabilities. The action reinforces that the AI calling space is under regulatory scrutiny, not that the technology itself is prohibited.

Q4: What should a call center do if they were using Air AI?

First, assess your operational continuity. If Air AI is your primary outbound calling infrastructure, begin evaluating alternatives now instead of waiting for service disruption. Second, review your consent documentation to ensure your calling practices are independently defensible, separate from whatever Air AI claimed about compliance. Third, evaluate replacement platforms specifically on their compliance infrastructure, number management, and verified performance data, not marketing claims.

Q5: What makes a compliant AI calling platform in 2026?

A compliant AI calling platform enforces TCPA rules automatically at the system level, including federal and state dialing windows, DNC suppression, consent validation, and opt-out handling. It uses registered, whitelisted phone numbers to maintain carrier trust and answer rates. It provides a full audit trail of call activity, consent records, and opt-out events. And it is transparent about what compliance it enforces vs. what remains the customer’s responsibility.

Q6: How is Bigly Sales different from platforms like Air AI, Bland AI, or Retell AI?

Bigly Sales is a fully managed AI outbound calling solution, not a self-serve software platform. The core difference is that Bigly builds and manages the entire infrastructure: number purchasing and registration, carrier whitelisting, TCPA compliance enforcement at the federal and state levels, spam monitoring, CRM integration, and continuous campaign optimization. Competitors like Bland and Retell provide developer tools that require customers to manage all of those components themselves. Air AI provided software with performance claims that the FTC found to be unsubstantiated.



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Recent Reviews

After-Hours Answering Service and How AI Covers Your Sales


Your best lead this week called at 7:43 PM on a Tuesday. Nobody answered. They left a voicemail. Your team found it Wednesday morning. By the time someone called back, the person had already signed with a competitor. That happens in sales operations every single day. Usually, nobody tracks it as a loss because the lead never entered the pipeline.

The problem isn’t your team. It’s the hours. Your sales team is probably pretty good. They work hard during the day, follow up on leads, and close deals. But leads don’t care about business hours. A homeowner researches insurance quotes after the kids are in bed. A small business owner thinks about their liability coverage on a Sunday afternoon. A mortgage prospect has questions at 6:30 PM after work. A solar lead fills out a form at 9 PM while watching TV. Those people are ready to talk right then, and if you’re not there, someone else is.

This is the after-hours problem. Although it doesn’t show up on your P&L as a line item. But it’s costing sales operations a lot more than they realize.

Voicemail Isn’t an Answering Service

A voicemail box is not an after-hours answering service. It’s a place where leads go to disappear.

Callback rates on voicemails in sales contexts are around 4 to 5 percent. That means 95 out of 100 people who call your business after hours and hit voicemail are gone. They didn’t leave a message. Or they left a message and didn’t pick up when you called back. Or they picked up and the conversation started cold because you had no idea what they actually wanted.

In insurance, mortgage, solar, and pretty much any industry where the same lead goes to multiple providers simultaneously, voicemail isn’t just inconvenient. It means your competitor got the conversation first.

What an After-Hours Answering Service Actually Does

An AI after-hours answering service picks up the phone when your team can’t. Not with a “press 1 for sales” menu. Not with a hold queue. With an actual conversation. The AI answers the call, greets the person naturally, and starts asking the questions your best rep would ask. What kind of coverage are you looking for? Are you a homeowner? What’s your timeline? What brought you to us today?

It listens to the answers. It asks for follow-ups. It figures out whether this person has a real need or is just poking around. If they’re serious, the AI can do a few things depending on how you’ve set it up. It can transfer them to an on-call rep right then. It can book a specific callback time. It can send your team an alert so the first call in the morning is already warm. And all of it gets logged. By the time your team walks in, they have a full summary of every after-hours conversation. Who called? What they need. How urgent it is. What was said.

No cold callbacks. No, “I saw you called last night, what was this about?” Just warm, informed conversations from the first word.

The Number You’re Not Tracking

Most sales operations don’t track their after-hours missed call rate. So they don’t know what they’re losing.

Here’s a rough way to think about it.

If you take 200 inbound calls per week and 30 percent come in after hours, that’s 60 conversations per week you’re not having. If your normal close rate on inbound leads is 15 percent and you assume after-hours leads convert at half that after a cold next-day callback, you’re missing roughly 4 to 5 deals per week.

In insurance, where an average policy is worth $1,200 a year, that’s $5,000 to $6,000 in annual recurring revenue per week. Every week.

In mortgage or solar, where deal values are higher, the math gets bigger fast.

And none of it shows up anywhere because the lead never made it into a pipeline. It just vanished.

Why Live Answering Services Don’t Really Solve It

Many businesses use live answering services for after-hours coverage. Operators working overnight, fielding calls from a script, passing messages along in the morning.

It’s better than voicemail. But it’s not much better.

Live operators take a name and a phone number. They don’t qualify. They don’t capture urgency. They don’t know enough about your business to ask the right questions. Your reps get a list of callbacks in the morning with basically no context about which ones matter.

And when your marketing drives a surge in overnight calls, the live service strains. More operators means more cost. Quality gets inconsistent. Handoffs break.

AI doesn’t have those problems. It handles one call and 500 calls the same way. It asks the same questions in the same order with the same tone. It doesn’t have bad nights.

After-Hours Coverage in Insurance Is a Different Conversation

We were at an insurance industry event in New York recently. Met a lot of great people, including folks from Berkshire Hathaway, the biggest insurance company in America. And you know what everyone was talking about? The same two things. Speed-to-lead. And follow-up.

Insurance is a comparison shopping industry. A homeowner fills out a quote request online and that same lead goes to four or five carriers at the same moment. The first one to have a real conversation wins. Not the cheapest. Not the one with the best coverage. The first one to actually talk to the person.

After hours is where that race gets decided a lot more often than people think. The homeowner researches at night. They call at night. If you’re not there at night, you’re not in the running. An after-hours answering service for an insurance agency isn’t a nice-to-have. In this market, it’s basically the price of entry.

Compliance Doesn’t Take a Night Off Either

One thing is worth knowing if you’re using AI for after-hours calls.

The FCC ruled in 2024 that AI-generated voices count as artificial or prerecorded voices under the TCPA. That means the same rules that apply to AI outbound calls during the day apply at night too. No calls to consumers before 8 AM or after 9 PM in their local time zone without proper consent.

For inbound calls where the person called you, this is pretty straightforward. They reached out, so you’re answering. The compliance question is simpler.

For outbound follow-up calls the AI makes overnight or early morning, you need proper consent and time-of-day compliance built into your system. A well-configured platform handles this automatically so your team never has to think about it.

For a full breakdown of how TCPA applies to AI calling, take a look at our TCPA compliance guide.

What Your Team Wakes Up To

This is the part that matters most practically.

Without after-hours coverage, your team walks in, checks voicemail, finds a handful of incomplete messages, and spends the first hour of the day making cold callbacks to people who may or may not pick up and who definitely don’t remember exactly why they called.

With AI after-hours coverage, your team walks in to a prioritized queue. Eight calls came in last night. Five are qualified leads with full conversation summaries. Two were existing clients whose questions got handled. One was a wrong number. The five leads have callbacks scheduled and two are flagged high priority.

The first hour of the day is warm conversations. Not cold callbacks.

That difference adds up fast. Not just in closed deals but in how your team feels about their mornings. They’re not starting every day digging through the aftermath of the night before. They’re starting every day with momentum.

How Bigly Sales Handles This

We built Bigly Sales to handle exactly this kind of problem. Our AI voice agents cover your sales line 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We configure the qualification questions, the call flow, the CRM integration, and the compliance rules. Your team handles the close.

We think that’s the right division of work. AI is better at volume, consistency, and availability. Your reps are better at relationships, judgment, and closing. We offer a 25,000-call pilot so you can see this working with your actual leads in your actual market before you commit to anything.

Start your 25,000-call pilot at biglysales.com.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an after-hours answering service?

It’s a system that handles calls to your business outside your normal operating hours. A good one answers, qualifies the caller, and hands your team a warm lead in the morning. A bad one takes a message and hopes for the best.

How much does an AI after-hours answering service cost?

It’s a lot less than a live operator service and a lot less than the leads you’re losing without one. Traditional live answering services run $1 to $2.50 per minute. AI costs are significantly lower and don’t scale up with call volume.

Is an AI after-hours answering service TCPA compliant?

It depends on how it’s set up. Inbound calls answered by AI are generally not subject to the same TCPA restrictions as outbound AI calls. Outbound follow-up calls made by AI are subject to time-of-day rules and consent requirements. A properly configured platform handles all of this automatically.

What industries need after-hours answering coverage the most?

Insurance, mortgage, solar, debt relief, real estate, and staffing. Any industry where leads come from multiple sources at the same time and where the first conversation tends to determine who wins the deal.

Can the AI handle conversations that go off-script?

Modern AI voice agents are built for real conversations, not rigid scripts. They handle unexpected questions, basic objections, and changes in direction without losing context. For things that genuinely need a human, the AI escalates.

What does my team get in the morning after an AI-handled night?

A full log of every call. Who called, what they said, what they need, and how urgent it is. High-priority leads are flagged. Follow-up callbacks are scheduled. Everything is already in your CRM. Your team starts the day with context, not cold calls.



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