AI lead qualification is an AI agent that answers every possible customer who contacts a company first, asks them a few questions, decides whether they are likely to buy, and passes the ready ones to a salesperson. Such a customer is called an inbound lead. The person came to the company, for example by filling in a website form, starting a chat or sending a WhatsApp message. Qualifying a lead means checking whether they are likely to buy.
Inbound leads are valuable, because they asked. But their interest fades quickly. If nobody answers a form for a day, the person may already have spoken to a rival. A sales team cannot answer every form within minutes, especially at night or on a Sunday. Many inbound leads are also not real buyers. They may be students, job seekers or people who only want a price list. Sorting them takes up salespeople's time.
The agent answers on the website chat, by email and on messaging apps. In India, the most important channel is WhatsApp, which businesses reach through the WhatsApp Business API. The agent is built on a language model, so it understands questions typed in plain English or Hinglish, and answers them from the company's own product information. It asks a set of qualifying questions that the sales team writes: what the buyer needs, how large the need is, when they want it and who will decide. Then it scores the answers. A ready lead goes straight to the CRM, with the whole conversation attached, and the agent books a call or a visit. A lead that is not ready yet goes to B2B marketing automation, which sends it useful emails over the next few months.
Take, for example, a Surat company that installs rooftop solar systems on factories. At 9:40 p.m. on a Saturday, the owner of a textile unit fills in the form on its website. Within a minute, the agent writes to him on WhatsApp. It asks about the roof area, which is 12,000 square feet, and the monthly electricity bill, which is ₹4.5 lakh. It asks whether he owns the building, and when he wants the system installed. He answers all four questions. The agent explains what a site survey involves. It marks the lead as ready, adds it to the CRM and books a site survey for Tuesday at 11 a.m. On Monday morning, the salesperson opens the CRM and reads the full conversation before calling him.
The agent does not close the deal. Its job ends when a person can take over. Selling through chat in this way is called conversational commerce. Similar agents that help existing customers are covered on the page on AI customer service agents.