What is an AI SDR, and how does it work?

You don’t need to hire more SDRs to generate more leads. And you don’t have to worry about nurturing MQLs or scheduling qualified meetings. AI SDRs can take care of all that for you.

AI SDRs use automation and personalization to engage buyers, qualify leads, and send prospecting emails at scale. They help sales teams work faster and more efficiently, making them a powerful tool for B2B sales teams.

In this blog, you’ll learn what an AI SDR is, how it works, how it compares to a human SDR, and the best practices for getting started.

What is an AI SDR?

An AI SDR is intelligent software that uses artificial intelligence to automate the repetitive tasks typically handled by human SDRs. These tasks mostly include early-stage sales activities like lead generation, lead qualification, and outreach.

AI SDRs are making both inbound and outbound sales faster and more efficient. One AI SDR can work 24/7, handling tasks that would normally require a team of human reps. This helps you optimize conversions, speed up your sales cycle, and scale your operations more effectively.

How does AI SDR work?

AI SDR uses natural language processing (NLP) to understand queries and generate personalized answers pulled from your knowledge base. This is how they deliver smart, contextual responses to engage prospects across your website, social media platforms, email, and SMS.

AI SDRs also integrate with existing platforms to collect or save data. For example, they can connect with your calendar to show available time slots and book meetings for your sales team. Similarly, they can sync with your CRM to automatically enrich lead profiles.

There are two main types of AI SDRs:

Inbound AI SDR: These agents chat with your website visitors, qualify their needs, collect valuable lead data, update your CRM, and schedule sales meetings.

Outbound AI SDR: These agents find the right prospects, research their needs, detect buying intent signals, send them personalized cold emails and follow-ups, and book meetings.

AI SDR vs. Human SDR

Can AI SDRs replace human sales agents? Which one should you hire for your business? Let’s compare them with each other.

AI SDR advantages:

• Fast and scalable: AI SDRs can reach thousands of prospects in seconds. A human SDR would take days or even weeks to do the same.
• Always available: They can work 24/7, even when your employees sleep. They don’t need any weekends, breaks, or holidays.
• Hyper-personalization: They can analyze huge amounts of data, understand each prospect, and deliver personalized experiences at scale. (Related read: How to beat the competition with hyper-personalization.)
• Consistent: AI SDRs provide consistent, on-brand messaging across your website, emails, and social platforms.
• Low cost: They handle repetitive tasks at a much lower cost than full-time SDRs.

Human SDR advantages:

• Emotional intelligence: Human reps can read emotions, show empathy, and build real connections.
• Understand needs: They can ask smart questions to uncover specific pain points.
• Creative problem-solving: They can handle complex objections that require out-of-the-box thinking.
• Adaptability: They respond better in unexpected situations and off-script conversations.
• Build trust: Human reps connect and build relationships with prospects. Buyers prefer real conversations when making big decisions.

So, you can't replace human SDRs with AI. Not yet. But you surely can make their job quick, easy, and effective with AI. With their ability to automate, AI SDRs ensure your human agents are working on things that matter.

Example of an inbound AI SDR

Expertise AI is an inbound AI SDR that lives on your website, engages your visitors, qualifies their needs, and enriches their data. Here's how it does all that:

• Generates hyper-personalized microsites for each visitor query, displaying only relevant content, graphics, and CTAs.
• Helps buyers find what they need and transfers chats to the right human agent when needed.
• Asks qualification questions to know more about visitor's needs, budgets, authority, and timeline.
• Collects visitor's contact details through short lead capture forms.
• Saves all the collected lead data to your CRM automatically.
• Books meetings with sales-qualified leads, helping your team close high-value deals.
• Sends personalized, instant follow-up emails to nurture your captured leads.

You can easily train the Expertise AI agent, integrate it with your CRM, and connect it to your website (without writing any code). Sign up for a free trial to improve the efficiency of your sales team.

What's the future of AI SDR

A few years ago, AI SDRs didn’t even exist. And now, they’re already driving real business growth. As the technology evolves, we’ll see smarter, more capable, and more human-like AI SDRs. Here’s what the future may look like:

Multimodal: AI SDRs will interact with prospects through multiple channels, including text, voice, and video. For example, they could video chat with website visitors to guide them through the sales funnel in real-time.

Smarter: Future AI SDRs will be able to detect emotions, understand prospects' needs, and handle complex objections like a pro sales rep. They may collect data from multiple sources like CRM or social media to personalize conversations.

Smooth collaboration: AI SDRs will become a key part of every sales team, and humans will be able to collaborate more smoothly. AI will handle repetitive tasks, while humans focus on strategy and closing deals. With AI handling 40-60% of early sales tasks, hybrid teams will be common.

All of this shows just how important AI SDRs are becoming. They help your sales team do in minutes what used to take weeks. The earlier you start using them, the more of an edge you’ll gain.

Looking for a smart inbound AI SDR to boost your lead generation and sales? Try Expertise AI.