What is an AI SDR?

Sales development is a narrow job with a wide surface: work out which companies are worth contacting, find who inside them makes or influences the decision, write something specific enough to earn a reply, and follow up without becoming a nuisance. Different parts of that automate very differently. Research and drafting automate well, because both are pattern work over public information. Judgement — whether a company is really in the market, whether a reply is a brush-off or an opening — automates badly, and is where the supervision has to sit.

The failure mode is volume. Sending more email is the easiest thing to automate and the fastest way to make outbound stop working: spam filters weight complaint and bounce rates against the sending domain, so a tool that raises send volume without raising relevance degrades the one asset that cannot be bought back quickly. A useful AI SDR reduces the number of people contacted and raises the quality of each contact; a harmful one does the reverse and reports it as productivity.

Three questions separate the serious products from the rest. Where does the contact data come from, and are the email addresses verified or pattern-guessed — a guessed address bounces, and the bounce is charged to your domain. What is the approval model: does anything reach a real person without a human seeing it first? And what happens when the model is wrong about a company's fit, since a confidently wrong target list is more expensive than an empty one.