we killed our AI SDR after 6 months and pipeline is up 40%
quick context. series C B2B SaaS, around 22M ARR, 4 person marketing team. i signed us up for one of the big AI SDR vendors back in late 2024, you can probably guess which one, signed before they 5xd their pricing. 18 month contract because the demo was magic and my board kept asking why we werent AI first. it was a 180k decision and i am the one who made it, im not pretending otherwise.
heres how it actually went.
the first two months the tool sent around 3000 emails a week. reply rate was 4%, positive reply rate was under 1%. our CSM kept telling me it just needed to warm up and i kept telling myself the same thing, CSMs always say that and i apparently always believe it.
by month three our domain reputation was tanking. our actual human sales reps were watching their outreach land in spam. our RevOps lead pulled me into a meeting with the deliverability data and i could not really argue with what i was looking at.
month four was when the AI started hallucinating. one prospect emailed our CEO directly to ask about a "recent funding round" the AI had referenced in the outbound. we hadnt raised in two years. that was a fun slack thread, i can tell you that much.
month five i did a real audit. of the 47 meetings the tool had booked, only 11 actually showed up. of those 11, zero became opportunities. not slow opps, not closed lost, not even nurture. zero pipeline from the entire experiment to that point.
month six i shut it off. i negotiated out of the remaining 12 months by very politely letting the vendor know id be writing publicly about my experience. contract was unwound in six business days. happy to share the email script if anyone here needs it, it actually works.
what i did with the money instead.
i hired one human SDR at 75k base. she books 8 to 12 real meetings a week, show rate 82%. i moved 40k to a freelance researcher who builds intel docs on our top 50 target accounts, real account briefings not Clay enrichment dumps. the rest went into in person dinners. yes 200 a head, yes 8 people at a time, yes its expensive. i closed two of our biggest deals of the year out of one dinner in chicago.
last quarter pipeline was 4.1M. the quarter before with the AI SDR running at full tilt was 2.8M. and that new number doesnt even include 3 deals my human SDR actually sourced that are still tagged "direct" in salesforce because RevOps hasnt updated the routing rules to recognise her seat yet, so the real number is probably higher.
the part i didnt expect was that sales actually likes me again. when you ship a tool that books fake meetings AND quietly tanks the sender reputation theyre relying on, you become the marketing person who ruined their quarter. taking that tool away repaired more cross functional trust than any QBR ever has, i did not have "AI SDR removal as relationship building exercise" on my 2026 bingo card and yet here we are.
i think these tools probably work for very specific cases. transactional, low ACV, high volume, prospects who dont care if the outreach is human. for considered B2B sales above 25k ACV with a buying committee i think we are way too early. the tech isnt there and the second order damage to deliverability and brand and sales trust is real and very underdiscussed.
if youre considering one of these tools, the question isnt "does it book meetings." it will. the question is what is the quality of those meetings and what is this doing to your domain and your sales relationship while it runs. nobody asks that in the sales cycle. ask it.
anyone else been through this? did you keep your AI SDR or kill it, and what was the exact moment that decided it for you. im honestly trying to figure out if were the outlier or the canary.