Are sales teams wasting closers on lead qualification?

We’re wasting hours following up with inbound leads that don’t go anywhere. I wish there were a better way to serve agents qualified leads instead of asking them to qualify, follow up and close. I’ve been looking into whether AI voice agents like Bland can realistically handle the first part of that workflow or even getting the dev team to build something custom with Twilio My thinking is that if I can automate the first qualification call with people who have already opted in, confirm interest and basic eligibility, handle some common objections, I can then warm transfer qualified prospects to a human closer. Obviously there are still issues around compliance, consent, disclosure, etc which is why Im leaning towards a premade solution but Im open to any ideas at this point. The underlying model of letting automation create qualified conversations and skilled reps taking over makes sense to me, so I have a couple of demos lined up but I have questions too: How do qualified transfer rates compare with human SDRs? Do prospects react negatively if/when they realize they’re talking to a bot? Can this really improve revenue per lead or does it just increase call volume?