Human Conversations in an AI World: Inside PhoneBurner With Sammy Winner Chris Sorensen

What happens to sales when AI can flood every inbox, feed, and phone line, but real human attention is scarcer than ever? In this Winners Circle episode, Russ Fordyce sits down with Sammy Award winner Chris Sorensen, CEO of PhoneBurner, to unpack what “responsible dialing” really means in 2025 and why authentic conversations still win.Chris explains how PhoneBurner helps quota carrying reps hit their numbers the old fashioned way, by having real, one to one calls with people who actually pick up, while using modern infrastructure, analytics, and AI to keep answer rates high. He pulls back the curtain on what happens between the moment you hit dial and when or if a call reaches a mobile phone, from carrier filtering and “spam likely” labels to silent blocking deep in the network. Over half of PhoneBurner’s team now focuses purely on call delivery and reputation, working closely with tier one carriers like AT&T, Verizon, and T Mobile to ensure that legitimate calls show up with clean caller ID instead of being treated like robocall noise.The conversation dives into why spam flags and call blocking have become such a massive issue and why many outbound teams are making it worse. Chris breaks down the hidden cost of bad tactics like number rotation, where organizations blast prospects from dozens of different phone numbers in the hope that one gets through. Carriers can now fingerprint this behavior quickly, he explains, which not only torpedoes answer rates but also destroys the long term value of your phone numbers, much like burning through disposable email domains. Instead, he shares a practical framework for getting back into double digit answer rate territory: start with high intent leads, stop rotating numbers, register where appropriate, and treat frequency and follow up like a relationship, not a game.​Chris also introduces ARMOR, Answer Rate Monitoring, Optimization, and Remediation, PhoneBurner’s end to end program for diagnosing and improving outbound performance. By analyzing SIP signaling data, carrier reputation signals, call durations, and even whether calls are getting returned, ARMOR helps separate delivery problems from behavior problems and gives teams clear steps to “nurse back to health” their outbound strategy. Looking ahead, Chris and Russ explore a near future where AI agents sit on the network itself, screening calls before a human ever hears a ring. In that world, integrity based practices, clean data, honest caller identity, thoughtful cadences, will not just be ethical choices, they will be survival requirements.For sales leaders, revenue teams, and marketers, this episode is a masterclass in how to keep the phone a trusted, high value channel in an AI saturated landscape: use technology to protect and amplify human to human conversations, not to overwhelm them.