I've now sat through several demos of AI sales development tools and had the same conversation with four founders. The pitch is consistent and genuinely appealing: a tireless rep who researches every prospect, personalises every message, and never has a bad week, for a fraction of a salary. Before signing anything, it's worth being clear about what you'd actually be buying.
The core problem the pitch ignores
Cold outbound has been degrading for years for one reason: volume. Every prospect receives more than they can read, so they stopped reading. The response to that cannot be a tool whose central promise is more volume at lower cost. If it works as advertised, every company in your category buys it too, prospect inboxes get substantially worse, and the channel degrades faster. You'd be paying to accelerate the trend that broke the thing you're buying.
'Personalised' is doing a lot of work
The personalisation these tools produce is real but shallow — it reads a LinkedIn profile and a company website and references them. So does everyone else's tool, drawing on the same public sources. Within months, prospects will have learned to recognise the pattern, exactly as they learned to recognise the merge-field opener. Genuine personalisation means knowing something not available on a public page, and that isn't what's being sold here.
- It automates research from public sources — which everyone's tool also reads
- Volume is the value proposition, and volume is the underlying problem
- Reply-rate gains in early trials reflect novelty, not durability
- Sender reputation is a shared, exhaustible resource you're spending faster
Where it's genuinely useful
Narrow the job and it becomes defensible. Researching and drafting for a list of fifty named accounts a human then reviews and sends — that's a real time saving on work that was always going to happen. Following up on inbound enquiries within minutes rather than hours. Re-engaging closed-lost opportunities on a defined trigger. In each case a human owns the judgement and the tool removes the mechanical part. That's a productivity purchase rather than a volume strategy.
The question to ask the vendor
Ask what happens to reply rates in accounts that have been running for twelve months, and ask to speak to one. Most of these products are new enough that the honest answer is that nobody knows yet. That isn't disqualifying, but it should shape what you commit to: a short pilot with a specific, narrow use case rather than an annual contract predicated on replacing a function.
If your outbound isn't working because your list is wrong or your offer is weak, sending more of it faster makes the problem bigger and the diagnosis harder.
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