"The AI agent hit those ghosted leads with a stunning 70% open rate. Leads no human wanted to follow up with."

AI SDRs: Lessons from SaaStr AI London

At SaaStr AI London, Amelia and I went deep on our AI SDR journey. We shared all our data, all the emails we’ve sent, all the performance metrics—everything. And the response was overwhelming.

But here’s the thing: the #1 objection we kept hearing was “Yeah, but this won’t work for me. I don’t have your scale. I don’t have your data. I don’t have 10 years of history.”

That’s simply not true.

If you have customers, if you have revenue, if you have a database of any size—AI agents will work for you. You don’t need as much data as you think. You don’t need as much trailing history as you think. What you need is a methodology.

Here’s what we’ve learned after sending 60,000+ hyper‑personalized emails, booking 130+ meetings automatically, and generating 15 % of our London event revenue through AI agents alone.

This is the single most important insight we’ve discovered.

Our human SDRs wouldn’t follow up with return attendees for ticket sales. It wasn’t worth their time—they wanted to hunt six‑figure sponsorships instead. We tried incentives. We tried Starbucks cards. We begged them. They said they’d do it, then we’d check the activity logs and discover they lied.

The result? When we deployed AI agents on those exact same leads, they generated 15 % of our London ticket revenue—revenue we literally would not have gotten otherwise.

Same story with our “ghosted” leads—people who reached out wanting to sponsor SaaStr for five and six figures, and our human team just… never responded. Not because they didn’t like the leads, but because every salesperson is force‑ranking in their head, putting all their effort into the one big deal closing this quarter.

The AI agent hit those ghosted leads with a 70 % open rate.

Mental model shift: Don’t think of AI SDRs as magic revenue generators. Think of them as the team that finally does the work your humans refuse to do—the small leads, the low‑scored leads, the “not worth my time” leads. Those leads deserve better, and AI doesn’t discriminate.

Before AI agents, our human SDRs sent maybe 75‑300 personalized emails per rep per month. In six months with AI, we’ve sent nearly 60,000 hyper‑personalized emails—that’s 32× the max human output.

But here’s what people get wrong when they see our results: they expect jaw‑dropping, month‑of‑research‑level personalization.

That’s not what this is.

On a scale of 1‑10, our AI emails are maybe a 3‑to‑6 in customization. They reference the prospect’s company, what they’ve been looking at, maybe something they posted about. They’re not poems. They’re not love letters.

And that’s fine. Because the bar isn’t “better than the best human SDR having the best day.” The bar is:

As good or better than your average human SDR, with 24/7 consistency.

A lot of folks on the internet say “I could do better if I hired 30 top‑tier Oxford graduates to craft one email each day.” Sure, maybe. But those people want to be promoted to AE in three months. They’re not going to stay. And you can’t hire 30 of them anyway.

Pretty good emails with zero errors, sent consistently at scale, crush inconsistent brilliance every time.

Where almost everyone fails with AI SDRs:

They buy a product, do nothing, and expect millions in revenue.

It didn’t work that way before Claude 4 when these products barely functioned. It didn’t work after Q1 2025 when they started getting good. It doesn’t work now.

How AI agents work for GTM:

1. You figure out something that works with humans first.

2. You nail the email, the script, the objections, the questions.

3. You document what worked.

4. You give it to the agent and train it for a month.

5. Then you do it at scale.

If you’re expecting an agent to sell when you can’t sell, that’s never worked. Go back to founder‑led sales basics. But instead of handing off to that first human hire, you hand off to your first agent hire.

Same principles. Same rigor. Different execution.

Do NOT just point an AI SDR at your entire database and hit send.

Our approach:

• Batch contacts into groups of 800‑1,000 max for each campaign.

• Create sub‑agents or sub‑campaigns for each persona (CRO, CMO, website visitors, churned customers, etc.).

• Train each sub‑agent specifically for that persona and use case.

• Give each agent different goals (book a meeting, sell a ticket, follow up on a ghosted lead).

Start with low‑stakes segments:

• People you ghosted.

• Good inbound you couldn’t fully follow up on.

• Post‑meeting follow‑ups that fell through the cracks.

Don’t start with mission‑critical leads. You’ll be disappointed if you can’t get it working quickly, and these agents have ramp time.

Two essential human roles:

1. Human #1 – A forward‑deployed engineer from the vendor.

   Call them a solution architect, an FDE, whatever—you need someone from the vendor who will work with you on training and get your agent into production. If the vendor won’t give you this help, don’t buy from them. A worse product with great implementation support beats a great product you can’t get working.

2. Human #2 – A GTM engineer on your team.

   This is the AI nerd. They could come from marketing (technical marketers, HubSpot nerds, anyone who’s built complex campaigns). They could come from RevOps if they’re technical enough. They probably can’t come from your standard sales team. Find the one GTM nerd on your team, promote them, and have them own the rollout. They’ll manage orchestration—what contacts go to which agents, what CTAs, what follow‑ups, what happens when leads close.

Self‑serve AI SDR products are coming, but we’re not there yet. Even Zendesk’s CEO told me their enterprise customers hit 60‑80 % automation after months of training, while self‑serve gets 20 %. Training with no humans isn’t quite ready.

We run 20+ agents now—more agents than humans. Here’s the core performance:

• Artisan – ~6 % response rate on outbound.

• Qualified – ~6 % response rate on inbound, 130+ meetings booked since August.

• Agentforce – 70 % open rate on re‑engagement (our newest agent, hitting ghosted leads).

All required about two weeks to deploy and tune, plus ongoing spot‑checking and training refinement. All are connected to a single source of truth so we know which agents get which contacts.

Chat vs. voice vs. video:

Don’t over‑analyze it. Our data shows about 85 % prefer chat, 15 % prefer voice. Chat is easiest to implement. Voice takes a bit more work (we did our voice clone on 11 Labs in five minutes). Video is two orders of magnitude more work. Start with chat, layer in voice when ready, and add video only if you need the extra trust for high‑ASP sales.

Key lessons learned

• If your team consistently refuses to do certain work, stop fighting it. Deploy an AI agent on that segment immediately. That 15 % of London revenue was found money we’d been leaving on the table for half a decade.

• In the first 30 days, read everything your agents send—every email, chat response, follow‑up. Catch errors, find training gaps, and understand what’s actually being sent in your name. Only after you’ve built trust should you move to spot‑checking and flag‑based alerts.

• Budget at least two weeks to deploy each agent properly. Expecting it to work in a day sets you up for failure. This training time pays dividends for months.

• Don’t stake your entire AI GTM strategy on a single person who might leave. If you’re cloning a voice or training on a style, make sure that person has a real stake in the company and a reason to stay.

• Limit vendor bake‑offs to three vendors max. Pick one with strong references, get the implementation help you need, and commit to making it work before expanding.

If you’re still having humans qualify prospects and waiting days for follow‑ups in 2026, there’s no excuse. The products are good now. Chat, voice, even video—they all work. But this isn’t plug‑and‑play magic. It’s:

1. Take what humans have figured out.

2. Document it.

3. Train an agent with what works.

4. Segment ruthlessly.

5. Have two humans (vendor + internal) own the rollout.

6. Read everything early, then build trust over time.

Even a modest 15‑20 % faster growth in 2026 because of AI agents is a gift from heaven—much of that growth is found revenue: leads that weren’t being touched, follow‑ups that weren’t happening, work humans just refused to do.

Your leads deserve better. And now there’s no excuse not to give it to them.

All our agent details, vendor breakdowns, and data are available at saastr.ai/agents.