AI SDR

An AI SDR is a software agent that does the job of a Sales Development Rep without the salary, the ramp time, or the burnout cycle. It sources prospects against your ICP from Apollo, LinkedIn Sales Nav, Crunchbase, and intent platforms. It enriches each lead with funding events, hiring signals, job changes, and product launches from the last 30 days. It writes a personalized first touch against that enrichment. It runs the multi-touch sequence across email and LinkedIn. It handles follow-ups, soft nos, reschedules, and out-of-office bounces. It hands off only when a prospect replies positively, and the warm reply lands in your team inbox with the full enrichment context attached.

The output gap versus a human SDR is wide. A human sends 80 templated emails a day at a 1% reply rate and produces 2 qualified opportunities a month. An AI SDR sends 500 researched touches a day at a 4 to 5% reply rate and produces 20 to 40 warm replies a week. Same payroll line. The mechanic is not magic. It is research time per touch. A human cannot spend 5 minutes reading a prospect feed before writing each email when their daily quota is 80. An agent can, because the cost per minute of agent compute is near zero compared to human salary.

AI SDRs are the engine inside the AI Sales Department. When clients ask whether they should replace SDRs with AI entirely or layer agents on top of an existing team, the answer is almost always replace. Two human SDRs at $80K loaded each cost more than the retainer and produce less. The exception is large enterprise motions with named accounts where a senior rep manages the relationship and the agent does the research underneath. For the standard motion of researching, writing, and sending at volume, the AI SDR replaces the role rather than augmenting it. See also alternative to Apollo for clients comparing this to tool-only stacks.