So Salesforce is hiring 1,000 more salespeople to sell AI software … that is supposed to reduce the need for humans and replace them with agents pic.twitter.com/hsjlrz3mqS
— Jason ✨????SaaStr 2025 is May 13-15✨ Lemkin (@jasonlk) November 11, 2024
So clearly AI is rapidly changing the way we do sales, but how will it all shake out? Over in the contact center and post-sales space, we can already see 20%+ of customer support execs been routinely replaced by AI.
But what about the more personal sales side?
AI SDRs have taken off more quickly than AI AEs (although personally, I suspect more value will be in AI SEs and AEs that can answer my deep product and pricing questions instantly, without games).
But is it working yet, these AI SDRs?
At SaaStr Annual, Tomasz Tunguz presented the results of their survey, along with a great story of a public company CRO who had deployed AI SDRs and generated a ton of pipeline … but no closed deals.
That was the overall result of their survey. Tons of B2B companies deploying AI SDRs already, but few deals closed so far.
So we ran a similar survey, and it showed similar results — so far at least:
As you can see above, only 3% of you have generated real revenue from AI SDRs. 83% of you haven’t gotten anything from AI SDRs.
But 11% are building some pipe at least from AI SDRs. So that’s something to get better at, and build on.
I would be cautious today. No one needs to be sending more spam. But be realistic, take your time, experiment, tune the engine. And let’s run this survey in another 9-12 months. And see if the numbers go up.
And the full session with Thomasz here:
