An AI SDR is an AI agent that does the first job of a junior salesperson: it researches each possible buyer, writes cold emails, sends a sequence of them and books meetings. SDR stands for sales development representative, the most junior role in a sales team. The agent is built on a large language model (LLM), the kind of AI behind chatbots. It is also called an AI sales agent or an AI prospecting agent.
A human SDR spends most of the day researching and writing. For each name, the SDR reads the company's website and recent news, looks at the person's profile, and writes an email that mentions something specific. Then the SDR follows up, again and again. A careful SDR might write 50 such emails a day. An AI SDR can do the same research and writing for thousands of contacts.
Here is how it works. The agent receives a list of target accounts, often from a B2B contact database and from intent data, which shows who is looking to buy. For each account, it reads public sources: the website, news, job postings and the person's public profile. It writes a short email that refers to what it found. It sends the email and its follow-ups through a sales engagement platform, or through its own sending system. It reads the replies. When someone asks for a meeting, it offers times from the salesperson's calendar and books the meeting. Then it records everything in the CRM. Most products let a person approve the emails before they are sent, at least at the start. Some CRMs now build such agents in, as an AI CRM.
Imagine a Kochi company that sells practice software to veterinary clinics in the United States. Its buyers are clinic owners in America, and its sales team of four works from India. The company gives the AI SDR 400 clinics in Florida and Georgia. The agent notices that one clinic in Tampa has just opened a second branch. So it writes to the owner about managing appointments at two locations. A salesperson checks the first 50 emails and changes the tone of a few. After that, the agent sends the rest on its own. In three weeks, 31 owners reply and 11 book a call. The agent puts each call in the calendar of a salesperson who is working at that hour in America.
Several AI SDR start-ups have engineers in Bengaluru. The best-known AI SDR companies are based in the United States. Most sell to small and mid-sized companies, mainly in the United States, where cold email is a common way to sell.
The open question is whether buyers will keep replying. Agents can send far more emails than people can. If every seller uses them, inboxes fill up, and buyers may reply less. Email providers also block senders whose emails are often reported as spam. Agents that answer existing customers, rather than write to new ones, are covered on the page on AI customer service agents.