Has anyone here actually replaced a junior SDR with AI? Curious what the experience was like
We've been debating this internally for months so wanted to hear from people who've actually done it. Our situation: high inbound volume, fairly repetitive qualification questions, and a senior closer who's spending too much time on leads that aren't ready. Classic SDR problem. We ended up going the AI route instead of hiring and have been running it for about six months now. A few honest observations: The consistency is the biggest win. Same quality conversation every time, no off days, no leads falling through the cracks. Our inbound conversion improved noticeably just from speed of first response alone. Objection handling surprised us. We expected it to fall apart under pressure but it holds up better than we thought on standard objections. Complex enterprise deals still need a human — we haven't pretended otherwise. The failure mode is when leads want to go off script. Anything outside the trained scenarios and you can feel it struggling. Curious if others have gone down this road. What worked, what didn't, would you do it again?