The phone is the new cigarette
About 370 dials to book one meeting. That's the 2026 cold calling average, and only about one dial in ten reaches a live person.
I don't think the phone gets banned. I think outbound goes the way of a pack of cigarettes. Still legal, sold behind the counter, consent first, a warning printed on the side. I still prefer tobacco rules and GDPR to a ban, because a ban never stopped anyone who really wanted to make the call.
The buying moved while the dialers kept dialing. Gartner found 67% of B2B buyers would rather skip the rep entirely and it expects AI agents to sit between buyer and seller in 90% of B2B purchases by 2028. MCP is what lets those agents plug into other software and it passed 97 million SDK downloads a month in March.
So your next buyer sends an agent ahead of them, and you can't charm an agent. It won't pick up your call, open your deck or sit through a demo. It reads whatever your product lets it read, and if there's nothing there it moves on to the next vendor.
Before the bots take over, here's my pitch.
We build the part it reads. An MCP server that plugs agents straight into your product and design agents your customers can put to work inside it.
Your customers get software their own agents can use. You stay in the running with the buyers who stopped answering the phone.