AI cold calling for B2B: what is legal in the US and Canada, and where AI calling actually works

In Declaratory Ruling FCC 24-17, adopted on February 2 and released on February 8, 2024, the FCC confirmed that the Telephone Consumer Protection Act’s restrictions on artificial or prerecorded voices cover current AI technologies that generate human voices. In the Commission’s words, such messages are artificial because a person is not speaking them.

The consequences follow the TCPA. Non-emergency calls to wireless numbers using an artificial voice need the called party’s prior express consent, calls to residential lines need it too unless an exemption applies, and a call that includes telemarketing or an advertisement needs prior express written consent. The ruling also notes that artificial voice messages must identify the entity responsible for the call, and telemarketing messages must offer a way to opt out.

Less than many sales teams assume. The US National Do Not Call Registry rule and the calling-hour limits for telephone solicitations (not before 8 a.m. or after 9 p.m. at the called party’s location) in 47 CFR 64.1200 protect residential subscribers, and paragraph (e) applies them to wireless numbers too. The number you reach for a B2B buyer is often a personal mobile, so the registry, the hours and the TCPA consent rules for artificial voices can all apply even when the call is about work. Several US states have their own telemarketing laws, some stricter than the federal rules; include them in counsel’s review.

So the safe operating assumption in the US is: if an AI voice is going to speak to someone, you need their consent to be called that way, documented, before the call.

The CRTC’s Unsolicited Telecommunications Rules have three relevant parts. The CRTC states that business-to-business calls are exempt from Part II, the National DNCL Rules, and that calls to business numbers are regulated under Part III, the Telemarketing Rules, and Part IV, the Automatic Dialing-Announcing Device (ADAD) Rules.

The Telemarketing Rules limit calls to 9:00 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. on weekdays and 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. on weekends, in the recipient’s local time, and require the caller to identify who is calling and on whose behalf. The ADAD Rules prohibit telemarketing through an ADAD, equipment that stores or produces numbers and delivers a recorded or synthesized voice message, unless express consent has been given. Whether a specific AI voice agent setup is an ADAD is a question for your counsel; treating consent as required is the conservative position.

Organizations must also keep an internal do-not-call list and stop calling numbers on it, and provincial consumer protection laws can add requirements of their own.

Rules change and depend on the details of each program. Have counsel review your consent language and calling setup before launch.

Read the rules and a clear strategy appears. AI voice agents are a poor fit for cold lists and a strong fit for speed and volume on people who raised their hand. A demo request at 7 pm, a webinar registrant who ticked a box to be contacted, a trial sign-up who asked for a call: these leads cool by the hour, and most teams cannot call each one within minutes.

That is where an agent earns its cost. It calls within minutes of the form, inside the lead’s calling hours, answers common questions from your knowledge base, books the meeting in the calendar and hands off to a person when the conversation needs one.

Your SDRs spend their time on the conversations that need judgment, and the cost per meeting changes accordingly.

Our article on speed to lead covers the routing side of the same problem.

1. Collect consent on the form that creates the lead, with wording that covers calls from an automated or AI voice, and store it on the contact.
2. Call only contacts with that consent; keep cold lists for human outreach.
3. Set calling hours per weekday in each lead’s own time zone.
4. Disclose at the start of the call that the caller is an AI agent and that the call is recorded, name your company and give a callback number.
5. Offer a live transfer to a person and a clear way to stop calls; add opt-outs to your internal do-not-call list.
6. Record and review calls, and have counsel approve the script, the consent text and retention.

Bigphone.ai is the AI voice agent we build at PlanConversion. Agents call leads, answer questions about your business, handle voicemail and SMS, book meetings through Cal.com or Calendly, update HubSpot or Salesforce and transfer to a person at any point, with recordings and transcripts of every call.

The controls this article recommends are built in: calling hours per day of the week in the lead’s time zone, up to two retries after a delay you choose, scheduled callbacks and live transfer. Agents speak English and French. Plans start at US$149 a month for 1,000 calls; every placed call uses one unit, including unanswered calls and voicemails. SMS follow-ups start on Growth and the HubSpot and Salesforce connection is on Enterprise. Consent and scripts remain your responsibility, which is exactly where they belong.