What is an AI SDR? How they work, what they cost, and the two kinds
An AI SDR is software doing a sales development rep's job. The term covers two products that share a title and little else: one sends cold email at scale, the other answers the buyer who came to you.
What an SDR does, and what the AI version automates
A sales development representative, an SDR in sales shorthand, is the person at the top of a B2B sales team whose job is to turn strangers into meetings. They do not close. They find or receive potential buyers, work out which ones are worth an account executive's time, and book the qualified ones into a calendar. In an outbound team the SDR builds lists and sends cold sequences; in an inbound team the SDR watches the form fills, the chat widget and the pricing-page traffic, and answers before the buyer loses interest.
An AI SDR is software doing that job, or more honestly, software doing one half of it. That is the whole definition. Everything else you will read on the subject is a vendor describing their half as if it were the whole, because the label has quietly split into two products that share a job title and almost nothing else. This post takes the halves in turn, says what each costs, and gives you one ratio for telling which one your pipeline needs.
Outbound AI SDRs: the cold-email machine
Most of the companies selling an "AI SDR" today, [11x and Artisan](https://www.11x.ai) among the loudest, sell outbound automation: the software builds a list, enriches it, writes the cold emails, sends the sequences, and passes back whoever replies. The honest description of this product is a prospecting machine, and the honest question about it is arithmetic. Cold outbound was already a low-single-digit reply-rate game when humans did it carefully; automating it multiplies the volume and inherits the deliverability problem, because every inbox provider is now training filters against exactly this traffic. It can work, in the way outbound has always worked: as a numbers business, run by someone watching domain reputation the way a pilot watches fuel. If your problem is that not enough people have ever heard of you, this is the half you are shopping for, and you should size your expectations in replies per thousand, not in demos per week.
Inbound AI SDRs: answering the buyer who already came
The other product with the same name never sends a cold anything. It sits on your website, where your marketing spend already delivers people, and does what an SDR would do if one could greet every visitor the second they arrived: work out who this is and what they came for, ask the qualifying questions your team actually cares about, and put the ones who pass straight onto a salesperson's calendar, with the research already done. The arithmetic here runs the other way. These are people who chose to show up, which is the highest intent your funnel will ever see, and the standard failure is not reply rates but response time: the buyer who filled in a form on Tuesday and got an email on Thursday bought from whoever answered on Tuesday.
How an AI SDR works, outbound and inbound
The outbound machine is a pipeline of four stages: build a list from a data provider against the profile you give it; enrich each name with a title, a company size and whatever intent signals the vendor buys in; have a language model write a sequence per contact; and rotate the sending across mailboxes and domains, pausing when bounce rates say a domain is burning. What comes back is the replies, sorted into interested, not now and unsubscribe. Every stage is a data-quality problem before it is an AI problem.
The inbound agent runs a shorter loop, per visitor. It works out the company behind a visit where it can, from an email the visitor gives it or from enrichment on the account, opens a conversation, asks the qualifying questions you wrote, and applies the pass rules you set: company size, use case, budget, region. A visitor who passes is offered live slots from a rep's calendar and booked with a briefing attached; one who does not is answered politely and routed elsewhere. The hard part is doing all of that before the visitor closes the tab. [Our page on lead qualification](/resources/lead-qualification) walks through the questions and the pass rules in detail.
How to tell which half of the AI SDR job you need
Look at where your pipeline actually dies. If your website traffic is a rounding error and nobody in your market knows your name, you have a top-of-funnel problem, and the outbound half, carefully run, is the relevant tool. If people visit, browse the pricing page, maybe start a form, and then evaporate, you do not have a traffic problem; you have an answering problem, and pointing a cold-email machine at it buys you more of the traffic you already fail to convert. The tell is one ratio: visitors to booked meetings. Most B2B companies below enterprise scale lose far more revenue in that gap than in the gap between their list and their market.
How much does an AI SDR cost?
Less is published than you would expect for a category this loud. On the outbound side, 11x has no pricing page: 11x.ai/pricing returned a 404 when we checked on 3 September 2026, and the homepage links to none. [Artisan's pricing page](https://www.artisan.co/pricing) names tiers from startup to enterprise, calls the model credit-based, and prints no number. Both sell through a demo call.
The inbound side publishes more, unevenly. Qualified, owned by Salesforce since 1 April 2026, lists three tiers named Premier, Enterprise and Ultimate and not one number; third-party estimates circulate, but they are not Qualified's figures, so we do not repeat them. Our [Qualified alternatives post](/resources/qualified-alternatives) has the screenshot. [Docket publishes its prices](/resources/vs-docket): Growth from $3,000 a month for up to 20,000 monthly visitors, Scale from $4,000, both billed annually, so the floor is $36,000 a year, with no trial. [1mind has no pricing page](/resources/1mind-pricing); its founder told TechCrunch the average contract is six figures, and a procurement analysis estimates roughly $100,000 to $400,000 a year, a number we repeat only with that label. [Warmly publishes](https://www.warmly.ai/pricing) $10,000, $20,000 or $30,000 a year; the tier that talks to visitors starts at $20,000.
Algomo, the inbound agent this site sells, is a Free plan and then a monthly amount you set, $50 to $4,300, with Enterprise above. The amount buys credits; a conversation that actually helped someone costs five credits, one that went nowhere costs nothing; the amount is the most any one charge can be, with no overage and no top-ups. The Free plan covers about twenty useful conversations a month, enough to learn whether your site has the traffic to justify any of the numbers above. The full ladder is on [our pricing page](/pricing), and every inbound vendor's row sits beside ours on the [comparisons page](/resources/comparisons).
AI SDR tools, by which half they do
The vendors most often called AI SDRs, sorted by the half of the job they do. Prices are what each vendor publishes on its own site as of 3 September 2026; where the cell says not published, the only way in is a demo.
| Vendor | Half | What it does | Published price |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 11x | Outbound | Digital workers that build lists, write and send sequences, and hand back replies | Not published; pricing page returns 404 |
| Artisan | Outbound | Ava, an outbound rep that prospects, writes and sends | Not published; tiers named, credit-based, no numbers |
| Warmly | Both | Deanonymizes visitors and converts them; the TAM Agent runs outbound | $10,000, $20,000 or $30,000 a year; chat from $20,000 |
| Qualified | Inbound | Piper, an inbound AI SDR for marketers on Salesforce | Three tiers, no numbers; demo only |
| Docket | Inbound | Inbound demand agent sold on qualified leads, 7 to 14 day rollout by their team | From $3,000 a month, billed annually; $36,000 a year floor |
| 1mind | Inbound | Photorealistic AI sellers across the journey; Drift's anointed successor | No pricing page; founder says average contract is six figures |
| Algomo | Inbound | Qualifies and books the visitors already on your site; web chat only, no cold outbound | Free; then $50 to $4,300 a month you set |
Outbound rows describe what each vendor says on its own homepage. Inbound rows are the pipeline table from our comparisons hub, which names the page each cell was read from.
Is AI replacing SDRs?
It is replacing two specific pieces of the job. The first touch has gone to software on both halves: nobody needs a person to send the first cold email, or to say hello to a website visitor at two in the morning. The qualification conversation is going the same way, because it is a fixed set of questions with a written pass rule, which is what software is for. What has not moved is the relationship: the follow-up after a meeting that went sideways, the champion who needs coaching through their own procurement, the account that needs a person to notice it going quiet. The teams doing this well keep fewer SDRs and give them that work.
We are not going to put a percentage on it, because every percentage we have seen comes from a vendor counting its own customers. What we can say is narrower: an inbound agent that qualifies well makes an SDR's morning start with booked, briefed meetings instead of form fills to chase. Whether that means a smaller team or a bigger pipeline is your decision about the freed hours, not the software's.
Questions, answered
How much does an AI SDR cost?
From nothing to six figures a year, depending on the half and the vendor. Neither 11x nor Artisan publishes a price. Inbound, Qualified lists tiers with no numbers, Docket starts at $3,000 a month billed annually, Warmly at $10,000 a year with chat from $20,000, and 1mind's founder puts the average contract at six figures. Algomo is free, then $50 to $4,300 a month, an amount you set. Figures as published on 3 September 2026.
What are the top AI SDR tools?
It depends on which half you mean. For outbound prospecting the names most often cited are 11x, Artisan and Warmly's TAM Agent. For inbound qualification and booking the field is Qualified, Docket, 1mind and Warmly at enterprise prices, and Algomo from a free plan. The table above lists each with what it does and what it publishes.
Is AI replacing SDRs?
It is replacing the first touch and the qualification conversation, on both the outbound and inbound sides, because those are repeatable scripts with written rules. It is not replacing the relationship work: post-meeting follow-up, coaching a champion, noticing an account going quiet. Teams that adopt it tend to keep fewer SDRs and move them onto that work. We do not publish a percentage because every one we have seen is a vendor counting its own customers.
Is SDR the hardest sales job?
It is usually described as the hardest entry-level one, and the description is fair: the job is mostly rejection, cold reply rates sit in the low single digits, and the SDR rarely sees the deal they started get closed. That is also why it is the first sales role software has been pointed at: the parts an AI SDR takes over are the highest-volume, lowest-reward parts of the day.
Algomo as an inbound AI SDR, stated plainly
Algomo is the inbound half, so weigh this section accordingly. Our agent [qualifies the visitors](/solutions/b2b) your site already gets: it enriches the account before anybody types, asks the questions you wrote in plain language, applies the pass rules you set, and [books the meeting](/solutions/ai-agents-for-sales-and-lead-generation) with the rep briefed, on a Google or Outlook calendar. It does not send cold email, and we are not going to pretend that is a limitation we forgot to mention; it is the half of the job we think software should have started with, because the buyer is already there and the only question is whether anyone answers well. It also does not read or write a CRM, which Qualified does, and which is why a Salesforce shop should read [our comparison with Qualified](/resources/vs-qualified) before choosing.
The claim fits in an afternoon's test. Point Algomo at your site on the free plan, give it your qualifying questions, and watch what it does with your next real visitor. If your pipeline problem lives somewhere else, you will know quickly, and you will have lost nothing but the afternoon.