The Challenge

For American Way Health, phone calls are the engine of the business.

The Florida-based health insurance agency depends heavily on outbound calling to generate leads, qualify prospects, and connect potential customers with licensed agents. That meant managing roughly 400,000 outbound calls every month.

Before implementing Bland, the company relied on offshore outbound callers to handle the initial qualification layer. While the system worked, it became increasingly difficult to scale. Training, management, and quality control all required constant oversight, and performance varied significantly from agent to agent.

“There’s a lot they did well, but a lot that could have improved,” said Anthony Bottley, CEO of American Way Health. “We wanted a standardized system of an agent that never gets tired, never messes up, that could just keep cranking and that we could really scale.”

The team also faced the operational realities that come with managing human outbound teams at volume. Some agents struggled with rebuttals. Others handled calls inconsistently. Scaling meant hiring more people, which meant costs continued rising alongside growth.

“If we wanted to scale, the cost would go up per caller,” Anthony explained. “The only thing that would go up with AI was just the minutes, but the cost was marginal comparatively."

At first, the goal was simple: reduce operational costs without sacrificing performance. But after discovering Bland and testing the voice experience firsthand, Anthony realized AI could potentially outperform the existing process altogether.

“What got me was just trying it out,” he said. “The AI sounded like a real person. There were no delays and gaps. I was like, that’s how I want my phone calls to sound.”

The Solution

American Way Health launched “Ashley,” a Bland-powered outbound voice agent built specifically to qualify health insurance leads and warm transfer interested prospects directly to licensed agents.

The workflow was intentionally narrow and focused. Ashley confirms the customer’s identity, verifies they are still looking for health insurance, validates location information, and then transfers qualified callers directly into the sales floor.

The transfer itself is seamless. Ashley first briefs the live agent before connecting the caller, creating a smooth handoff experience that feels coordinated instead of robotic.

The calls are short, fast, and optimized around a single objective: increasing the number of qualified conversations for the sales team.

American Way Health also expanded into SMS as part of the workflow. The company found that many consumers who ignored unknown phone numbers would still engage over text, creating another touchpoint for lead conversion.

“People are always looking at their phone,” Anthony said. “They may not answer the call, but they’ll respond to a text.”

The rollout happened gradually. For several months, the company operated both human callers and Ashley simultaneously while refining prompts, rebuttals, and transfer logic. Once the team saw the performance gap widen, they fully transitioned the outbound qualification process to AI.

Today, Ashley AI handles the company’s entire outbound front-end qualification workflow across millions of calls.

The Outcome

What began as a cost-saving initiative quickly became a revenue growth engine.

Before Bland, human callers converted roughly 20% to 30% of connected calls into transfers. After implementing Ashley, transfer rates climbed to roughly 40% to 50%.

“I think the hypothesis as to why this happened is that there’s no human error,” Anthony explained. “Ashley is consistently great.”

That consistency created a major downstream impact for the business.

At American Way Health’s scale, the difference between a 25% transfer rate and a 45% transfer rate translates into roughly 80,000 additional transfers every month. With the company closing approximately 25% of transferred calls and generating around $1,800 in revenue per sale, this alone allows them to unlock an additional $36 million in monthly revenue. Annualized, that equates to more than $430 million in additional revenue from using Ashley to handle their phone calls.

“More swings at the bat equals more revenue,” Anthony said. "And Bland gives us those swings."

The company also eliminated the operational burden of managing offshore outbound teams while building a system capable of scaling far beyond what was previously possible with human labor alone.

“It started as wanting to cut costs,” Anthony explained. “Then it became a thing of, hey, Ashley could handle a lot. This is going to save us money and help us grow revenue. So it’s a win-win.”

Anthony also emphasized the partnership aspect of working with Bland throughout the rollout process.

“You can tell it’s not transactional,” he said. “When I have an issue, I put it in Slack and they’re very quick to respond and get things fixed.”

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The Future

American Way Health sees outbound qualification as only the beginning of its AI strategy.

The company is already exploring additional Bland-powered workflows focused on customer service and payment operations. Anthony’s team plans to build AI agents capable of handling payment decline outreach, collecting payments, answering benefit questions, assisting with portal access, and routing more complex support issues to human agents when necessary.

The long-term vision is to create a scalable AI-powered communications layer across both sales and customer experience.

“I think it puts me ahead,” Anthony said. “I don’t see anybody else in my direct space doing this right now.”

For other businesses considering AI voice automation, his advice is straightforward.

“If you have the money, get set up ASAP. Don’t wait. You’re going to save money in the long run, but more importantly, you’ll be able to scale.”