More people are picking up the phone to talk to a business than they were a year ago. That should be good news for sales pipelines. New research from call analytics platform Infinity suggests it isn’t, because a growing share of those calls are failing at the very last step, and for a reason most sales teams aren’t briefed to handle.
More calls, not fewer
Infinity’s whitepaper, built from 41 million tracked calls over the past year, found call volume up 24% in the first half of 2026 compared with the same period a year earlier. The share of website visitors who go on to call also rose, from 1.59% in January 2025 to 2.04% in June 2026. Two distinct jumps in that curve align closely with major AI search rollouts: one in late 2025 and another in mid-2026. The assumption that AI assistants would quietly starve inbound call volume simply isn’t holding up in the data.
Where deals actually fall apart
The more revealing number sits further down the funnel. Infinity’s Smart Outcomes tool verified 1.3 million calls, out of 5.75 million inbound calls tracked, as carrying genuine purchase intent. Of those, only 349,000 resulted in a positive outcome. Put another way: even once intent is confirmed, roughly three out of every four calls still don’t close.
That gap didn’t open up because the leads were weak. It opened up because of what happens once the call connects. A year ago, the leading reason calls failed was confusion: buyers didn’t fully understand what was on offer. That objection has since more than halved. In its place, price and budget disagreements have become the single biggest reason deals collapse, up 77% year on year and now accounting for close to a third of every non-converting call.
Why the finish line keeps moving
The pattern points to something happening before the call ever starts. Buyers are increasingly using AI tools to research pricing and compare options ahead of contact, then treating the human conversation as a final check rather than a starting point. When the number they hear doesn’t match what they were told to expect, the deal doesn’t get lost to a competitor. It gets lost to a mismatch nobody on the call caused directly.
For FinTech and SaaS companies, that has a direct bearing on where marketing spend earns its keep. Paid search visitors convert to a call at 3.08%, against 1.76% for organic, and both sustain long, substantive conversations at a similar rate. Between January 2024 and April 2025, the period Infinity’s data covers, referral traffic arriving directly from AI platforms such as ChatGPT grew by close to 2,000%. Over the last 12 months, the calls that traffic already generates convert at a rate 46% higher than paid search referrals.
Daniel Wilkinson, Chief Customer Officer at Infinity, frames the underlying problem as a data gap as much as a sales one: “If you’re a marketer still treating phone calls as an offline black box, you’re leaving your best first-party data on the table.“
The gaps most teams haven’t closed yet
The finish line isn’t disappearing. It’s moving to a point most teams aren’t yet measuring. Attribution models built only around clicks and form fills are already missing a growing share of genuine conversions. Sales teams still briefed to explain the product, rather than defend a price against a number a buyer already believes, are losing deals they should have closed. And visibility inside AI-generated answers, built through reviews, cited content, and third-party mentions, is becoming a pre-call performance factor in its own right.
The businesses closing that gap aren’t chasing more calls. They’re figuring out why so many of the calls they already have are falling apart right before the finish line.
