TRANSCRIPT

Sean Whiteley – Qualified

Alright. Welcome, everybody. Today, we're gonna talk about one of the hottest topics in GTM AI, the AI SDR agent landscape. I'm joined today with by Michele Buckley, VP research and advisory from Gartner, and Blue Bowen, research principal at G2.

I know you guys know a lot about this topic, and it seems to be one of the hottest topics on the web right now, especially as it relates to GTM AI. If you're in Martech or sales tech, it seems like you can't do scroll through LinkedIn without seeing all kinds of opinions about the AI SDR agent. So really appreciate you guys joining us, but I'll start with you, Michele. Why do you think AI SDR agents are getting so much attention right now?

Michele Buckley – Gartner

I think the value prop is just undeniable.

It's a area that a lot of sellers struggle with. Our research shows that sellers spend about fifteen percent of their time on average prospecting. And if you can identify a resource that can do that a hundred percent of the time, twenty four seven in multiple languages, fantastic.

Sean Whiteley – Qualified

Lou, how about why do you think this is, all the rage right now as the AI SDR agent?

Blue Bowen – G2

Yeah.

You know, it sounds great on paper. If I can automatically give you ten to fifteen meetings a week without doing anything, for a part of your sales organization that experiences the most turnover, that has high training lengths for, you know, really junior employees, why wouldn't you take the bait? Yeah. Hundred percent.

Sean Whiteley – Qualified

We, oh, sorry. Go ahead.

Blue Bowen – G2

Oh, I was just gonna say, Blue, like, to to add to your comments, as a former sales manager myself, I mean, how exciting would it be to have a digital employee that you can train and it retains all of its knowledge and it never quits? It's just really exciting as a concept.

Michele Buckley – Gartner

And Yeah. Viable option. The efficiency the efficiency gains and the productivity gains are, you know, probably two of the most exciting things. You know, when you think about, a global enterprise, call it a global distributed enterprise, you could have five, six hundred people in this position, and that's a lot of W-2.

And I think that's the first thing that comes to mind. But, you know, the other the other thing you hear a lot about on the on the interwebs is, you know, how accurate are they? How good are they are they at their job? Right?

Sean Whiteley – Qualified

And when you think about sort of this world we're entering around sort of AI agents and, you know, not just AI SDRs, but, you know, bringing an agentic layer into every sort of, you know, business function across your your enterprise.

How do you think about, like, the line between human augmentation and automation in sales? So sort of that, like, that partnership between, like, what people are still focused on and what you're sort of starting to hand off to the AI agent and sort of in terms of workflows. Michele, have you thought about sort of this line between augmentation and replacement?

Michele Buckley – Gartner

It's a great question, Sean, because a lot of people, when they hear the words AI SDR, tend to have a knee jerk reaction to it and just say, oh, no. No. I couldn't replace my SDRs. And that's not what it's about at all.

It's about augmentation, like you said. And I I see it as, like, the ability to turn SDRs everywhere into, like, Tony Stark in Iron Man. They've got a suit. You know?

They're still there. They're doing the work, but they're so much more powerful because they can focus on the high quality work that they're doing, not a repetitive administrative aspect that's time consuming and can be demoralizing.

Sean Whiteley – Qualified

Blue?

Blue Bowen – G2

Yeah. Agreed. I think it's really about, yeah, giving them superpowers. I love that analogy. But also allowing them to focus on more high value tasks, maybe actually speaking with prospects rather than spraying and praying these cold emails that, in some cases, are really kinda just look like a marketing email rather than, kind of a a sales outreach email. So it's really about kind of taking the tedious tasks and replacing those and then allowing them to focus on higher value tasks.

Sean Whiteley – Qualified

Yeah. A hundred percent. And and I think Michele used the term that I really liked called spam flamethrower, which was just a beautiful term. But, let's let's talk a little bit about terminology.

You know, I've been in enterprise software for a pretty long time as you can tell. And back in the day, we used to use terms like BDR, business development representative, SDR, sales development representative. I mean, there's a million acronyms, ADR and IDR and but history and and, of course, then there was born the hybrid representative that was sort of trying to do dual turntables. Right?

Trying to outbound, trying to inbound. Same goal, pipeline, but very different disciplines. How do you think about sort of the fact that SDR has sort of become this overarching term to encapsulate kind of the broader inside sales motion? Do you sort of have designation for people focused on outbound, which is sort of, of course, like sourcing contacts for buying committees and doing research and sort of trying to reach out to people over email and social versus sort of the classic inbound, which, of course, is, like, lead follow-up and qualification and things like that.

How do you how do you think about that designation?

Michele, let's start with you.

Michele Buckley – Gartner

I appreciate what you're describing.

I think the idea of the inbound outbound is honestly a a little bit old fashioned, dare I say. If you think about the role of an SDR, it was actually created, like, twenty years ago.

Twenty to twenty five years ago when Salesforce and Oracle started deploying SDRs to, address the fast growing market of just a land grab for CRM everywhere. Since then, times have changed dramatically. And since COVID, buyer behavior has changed dramatically.

So I tend to just look at the SDR as a holistic role, which is focused on both inbound and outbound communication where it's providing a fast, relevant, helpful response to clients.

Outbound, it's not performing as well as it used to, and we have data, to that effect. The Bridge Group has published some great data on that. The number of daily conversations that SDRs are having is going down. So I see the current state as a as an opportunity to redefine the role and and start with the the overall work that needs to be done that can be quite dynamic and and variable highly variable.

Sean Whiteley – Qualified

Interesting. Yeah. A hundred percent. Blue, do you have a different opinion on that, or do you share sort of Michele's sentiment?

Blue Bowen – G2

A little bit of both. I think, you know, to Michele's point, the buyer preferences is evolving. There's so many more channels now that they're communicating through, and, you know, ideally, they want a seamless omnichannel experience. So the goal of both inbound, outbound, BDR, SDR, is to qualify prospects, book meetings, and drive pipeline, in the manner in which they're doing so.

You know, attribution's a lot harder nowadays. Yeah. They opened up my outbound email, but I was actually at an event for them six months ago, and that's kinda what peaked my interest. So kind of blurring the lines.

But if you look at the the kinda landscape of solutions right now, there is kind of a bifurcation of people focusing on outbound use cases, versus inbound use cases. So, the the worlds are emerging, but they still, I think, are in kinda two separate lanes on the same highway.

Sean Whiteley – Qualified

Yeah. What what are you guys go ahead. Sorry. Michele.

Michele Buckley – Gartner

To clarify my comments, I focus primarily on B2B.

So B2B with tech providers. So that's sort of my world. I I think you're right. In in B2C and other, different industries, there could be that different kind of of combination.

Sean Whiteley – Qualified

Yeah. Speaking of of B2B, when you think about a lot of people have migrated towards this outbound motion. You're seeing, like, every day, there's a new outbound AI agent that's kinda coming into the market. And it seems to be sort of, you know, ninety ten in terms of, like, these these are the use cases they're focused on. And, you know, you guys have a different purview. Your analysts, you you sort of sit across all kinds of different businesses. As an operator, of course, I talk to customers, and I see the pilots they're running and sort of get deep into their requirements.

Why do you think so many people have sort of run at this outbound, specifically the outbound use cases so early on? It seems like nine out of ten are are sort of very focused on classically outbound use cases.

Blue Bowen – G2

Yeah. I I'll take a stab at this.

I think, it's kind of what we were talking about. Outbound's hard. Outbound's difficult. It's underperforming.

So people are trying to solve, you know, the biggest problem right now.

You know, perhaps people with a lot of inbound leads, that means they're generating a lot of interest and awareness.

You know, their only problem is talking to all the people that wanna talk to them, not the worst problem to have, versus outbound is extremely hard. You have to, penetrate into the contact into the account to even, get a hand raised, sometimes, you know, even incentivizing people just to wanna talk to you.

So it's a lot harder to overcome, and I think that's kind of, how they're trying to apply AI to gather robust insights using, social presence, web presence to kind of paint a picture for them. So I think it's just a a prettier problem to solve, if you will.

Sean Whiteley – Qualified

Yeah. Yeah. Michele, your thoughts?

Michele Buckley – Gartner

I do find what you're seeing, Sean. A lot of people are focused on outbound. I take calls from clients on that almost every day.

It's harder to get meetings today, and so it's a big pain point for a lot of people.

And there is the, aware that, like, the customer just didn't happen to be thinking about your solution until you called them, and you called them at exactly the right time. Right? There is this bit of, like, a lure, which can be a bit of a fool's gold that's really about building relationships, nurturing regular communication as well. So there is you know, in a sales function, the primary, operating model is communication.

SDRs are such a big part of that. It's important to make sure that you're providing the best service possible at scale to your customers when they wanna talk to you around the clock, around the world, and the like. So I think outbound is a big pain point that a lot of people are trying to to remedy. However, there's also, I think, a lot of expanded use cases that that should be considered.

We're finding, at least in B2B tech, half of the SDRs roughly report into marketing, half of them report into sales, so it's a wider scope.

Yes. We want to, remind everyone that they were registered for the webinar that we're running next Tuesday, much like this event. Right? We wanna remind them it's there. We wanna remind them the demo schedule. We wanna remind them that on the day and the week before, etcetera. So, I, in my mind, consider that all part of outbound as well.

Sean Whiteley – Qualified

Yeah. A hundred percent. And sort of getting back to, you know, Michele, I really appreciated the sentiments around in in your last sort of publication around companies kinda overusing, automation and damaging their brand. Like, how how how should companies think about you know, one of the things you hear a lot about is trust.

Can I trust it? Can I trust the AI? Can I trust the agent? Right? And how how can companies avoid sort of overusing, sort of automation or, you know, agentic layers to the point where it potentially damages their brand?

Michele Buckley – Gartner

I I would say it's not about, it's really about relevance and, yes, frequency.

We just did some research that showed that for the first time, B2B buyers are saying, look. If you contact me too often and you contact me with irrelevant messages, over half of B2B buyers say, I will actively avoid doing business with you.

So it scalability is important, but the the messaging and the relevance is even more important. And that is the promise of AI in this context where you can actually provide more personalization, more precision sales and marketing, learning more about them in an intelligent way.

The mistake would be not scaling it, but oversimplifying it and just, you know, using basic assumptions about individuals, getting the industry wrong, getting the title wrong, getting their area of focus wrong. It happens all the time. We, you know, we all get messages over LinkedIn. Right? We see the messages.

Right? But we don't respond to all of them because a lot of them aren't relevant. And that's really what, any company doing this kind of automation needs to avoid.

Blue Bowen – G2

Yeah. Completely aligned.

The hello, first name, last name. I saw where you went to school.

Not really personalization.

You know, you see so much now with the social signals out there, that if somebody gets funding or if they get a new promotion, influx of your of your inbox.

It's really kind of taking that, I think, best to the next level, a combination of insights to draw, you know, kind of being edgy, like, challenging the status quo rather than, one signal to one email kind of, you know, ideally trying to create a true customer profile, a prospect profile, like, what would resonate? Not, hey, Sean. Would you like ten x more pipeline and revenue to increase five percent? Like, I think all of sales leaders want that.

Or, you know, I get LinkedIn messages. Hey. I see your research principal. Like, do you need help hitting your sales targets?

It's like, a little bit more context would have been helpful there. So, you know, it it's a mighty sword, but you have to you have to use it wisely.

Sean Whiteley – Qualified

Yeah. And to be fair, you know, even when, you know, people were were doing this, you know, you got some pretty rough rough outreach. It's it's a hard job. The all MarTech and sales tech is founded on the core principle of, like, right message, right time, right person. Right? And it's it's not easy to do.

When you think about, enterprise ready AI, so, you know, I think what there's so much enthusiasm about the capabilities that are coming. And, again, we're in the first step of a marathon. Right? But, I think the first big wave we're seeing around production AI, especially in the GTM, is coming in the way of these agents.

How do you think about the enterprise readiness for this? And, of course, there's there's consumer agents.

There's agents that are sort of working in the background, but then there's also agents that are actually, like, working on behalf of your company across the firewall using enterprise data to communicate with prospects and customers. Like, how do you how do you advise companies, enterprises who who are thinking about this?

Michele Buckley – Gartner

At our most recent event, our tech growth and innovation conference in in March, I'm definitely very bullish in recommending people pilot an AI SDR.

The first step, though, to be a success is get the data in in shape. And a lot of clients don't have their data in in a great set of, they don't have deep they don't have great data quality. Their data is in a lot of different places. You have sales silos, marketing silos, service silos that don't share any information between them.

So it's definitely something that needs to be pursued now and piloted, but it's gotta start with getting the right data in place that that you wanna use in intelligent ways. Because this is it is a mighty sword, as you said, Blue. It's like we've all written an email. We go, oops.

We cc'd the wrong people. Right? In this case, you're, like, can do that to thousands of people by accident, and they can avoid doing business with you if you do it wrong.

Sean Whiteley – Qualified

Yeah. Hundred percent. Bleeding thoughts?

Blue Bowen – G2

Yeah. Couldn't be more aligned. I think, you know, we all have these grand ideas about how they'll be, you know, solve all the problems. But, you know, especially when we talk about enterprise organizations, you know, we think of them as, like, a holy grail. But more often than not, they're the ones with more complexity, more data inaccuracies.

We know how quickly a CRM can get outdated, you know, just, like, at half the time as it gets updated.

So really important that making sure the data is with your internal data is accessible by the agent. It's accurate.

So it can kinda get the full business context, not only about your sales process, your sales training, but also the the other systems that we were talking about with, you know, have you engaged with this prospect in the past? Or, you know, through a service inquiry, through, previous sales interaction.

So really kind of creating that whole picture, so they can be well informed agent or employee, and not a half baked one.

Sean Whiteley – Qualified

Yeah. Things no one's ever said, my data is perfect. We have perfect data hygiene, and it's all perfect.

And and if you say that, I'll talk to you in a week and then see if you actually really heal that.

Yes. But and the excitement of, AI agents is that when they are doing work on your behalf, they will update the CRM systems and the various data systems. Yeah. So it's could get over that initial hump, but then, you know, all of that communication, if they do schedule a meeting, either agents are putting that into the system probably with more detail than human sales reps ever have.

Yeah. One of the things I've gotten from both of your research that I've appreciated is you've called out quite a few of the pitfalls. You've called out things that areas where people are overpromising and underdelivering. You've called out, like, fundamental things you have to have in place and you have to do right.

I think, you know, a lot of people position these these magic agents as, like, an easy button where you push a button and it goes out. It automates all the tasks and workflows of people that you've been using. But at the same time, you're also strongly recommending that people jump into this world, whether it's in the way of a pilot or some some sort of experimentation or or, putting it into production in certain areas of the GTM. So why you know, give given all of the challenges and given all of the considerations, it's very clear that you're a very, very much proponent of of companies sort of, like, getting into this immediately.

Can you give a little bit of background on sort of why sort of that's your your central premise right now?

Michele Buckley – Gartner

I would say that we're seeing great success with agentic AI in a go to market context from a lot of big vendors. We've got case studies from Lenovo, Microsoft, and Avaya in terms of the ability to automate some tasks that are cross functional that are delivering, like, triple digit results. I mean, these are very reputable firms. They're finding that they're they're cutting time okay.

Maybe not always triple digits, but, like, maybe above eighty five to ninety percent. Right? They're getting proposals out ninety three percent faster at Microsoft. They're, getting their, Lenovo's getting out configuration information on on their, solutions ninety percent faster as well.

And so agentic AI absolutely is the future for go to market, and SDRs are just the start. So it may look like, a storm in a teacup, but it's not. It is the future.

Blue Bowen – G2

Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. I I'm a proponent of it for a few reasons. One, it's not going anywhere, so, better be joining the ship than looking at the ship.

And two, when you know, I'm a big proponent of, reducing friction in the buying process, using technology to empower the buyer, let almost being buyer led and seller guided.

You know, speed to lead is something that is not new. People have been talking about it for ten, fifteen years. And I think these, AI SDRs, particularly on the inbound case, can really kind of maximize the efficiencies when we talk about speed to lead. Catering towards the prospect's interest, answering their questions in real time.

So I think it's, you know, one of one of those things that you have to join it and experiment with it. Again, not overpromising and under delivering it with realistic expectations, measuring your, level of risk that you're willing to, and then going from there. So, yes, I think it's the way of the future. I don't think there'll be a one man billion dollar company this year.

But I do think that, you know, you need to implement these technologies that serve the buyer and then make the better buying experience.

Sean Whiteley – Qualified

Yeah. A hundred percent. And one of the things we've we've realized is this is transformation, and transformation is hard for businesses. And it's not just the software and the tech and the tooling, but it's also the operations and the processes and the org structures and the compensation models and all the things.

What advice would you have, given you you speak to so many vendors, you've done so much research on this. Like, what advice would you have for someone who's going out to evaluate like, I think a lot of people are feeling pressure. I think everyone every business leader at every company is being challenged by their leadership. You gotta go find out, like, if you're in R and D, are you using Cursor? How is that helping your engineers? How is that changing?

How are how would you recommend someone get started with an evaluation? What are the core things you're really looking for to go out and do a a pilot or to go out and start to experiment with bringing in an AI SDR into the business?

So would you, Blue?

Blue Bowen – G2

First thing I would do is we talked about it. I'd look internally, look inside before you look outside, you know, see if your data is in a spot that you can start making that jump.

Looking at your current sales practices, are you, are you just spraying and praying and then hoping that the one percent response rate works, to build your pipeline? Are you leveraging signals and intent?

You know, if you're not doing those basics, then I don't think AI SDRs are gonna fix it, and you kinda wanna start there.

But understanding I guess if you were to kinda do a pilot program, give it guardrails, test it out, quiz it, be hard on it as if, you know, it it's your student and you're the teacher. So you can feel more confident in its retaining its knowledge. It's saying what it's supposed to say. Your messaging is resonating.

So overall, just kind of trial and error as well as, you know, assessing your status quo right now.

Sean Whiteley – Qualified

Michele?

Michele Buckley – Gartner

I, I do agree with a lot of your points, Blue. I do see it, though, applicable at small companies as well as large companies.

I'm my mind, I'm thinking, look. If you're about right before you do your next hire, before you hire your next SDR or salesperson or marketing person, take a moment to reflect on hiring a digital human or hiring, this AI SDR capability to do work as part of the team. We've been saying you've gotta use tech as a teammate.

And you're hundred percent right, Sean. It is transformative. The tech works. The tech can do it. This is not like, oh, can the tech do it or not? It's more like, how does it fit into my go to market motions, and what opportunities for innovation does this offer me?

I think it would be a mistake to think, well, you know, I have an SDR, and now this AI SDR does this here. No. There's an opportunity to just change the way things have been done. The magic isn't necessarily like, yes.

And now we finally pounced on the buyer exactly when they were ready to click on a signature. You know, is not about that. It's about adding value, like you said, Blue. Valuable engagement to your clients, responsive, valuable assistance to, the many people that are just trying to get work done.

And and to me, that's the magic.

There a lot of people think, well, if I just have the right formula and and the right intent signal and if I respond within a second instead of a minute, and, you know, this isn't really about the the perfection of timing in a moment. It is about delivering value, and AI SDRs can do that in a number of different ways.

Sean Whiteley – Qualified

Yeah. We're, we're almost out of time. I I could go all day on this with you guys. I mean, obviously, you guys have a lot of insights, and this is a really important topic. But I'll I'll leave you with one one question.

One of the things I've always admired about companies is their mops and rev ops teams. They're they're just increasingly becoming heroes. Like, one of the themes throughout this conversation has been data. We've said data a lot.

You have to have good data to activate the AI. If you don't have good data, you can't activate the AI with the right context. It's instruction based. We're moving into this new world.

Right?

And from my purview, mops and rev ops are going to play an increasingly big role here. Not that they weren't already heroes in the go to market, but I think they're going to assume a lot more responsibility and have a lot more capabilities. Do you guys agree or disagree with that sentiment?

Blue Bowen – G2

I'll go first. I'll take the layup. I definitely agree.

You know, we're even seeing if you go on LinkedIn, the glorification of the GTM engineer, you know, which is so aligned to the underappreciated workers in in rev ops, m ops, and and sales ops. Also, like, taking a couple steps in the future when we think about agents of agents and systems of agents, and them talking to each other. If we look at the inbound use case, somebody comes on the website, starts talking with with an AI SDR.

What if it was a service request that they were service inquiry that they were looking for? Having that agent hand you over to the customer service agent to kind of, you know, fulfill your request, all that's kind of being done on the back end. And I think that's kind of the future state that we're looking at. It's kind of agents talking to agents and, you know, who's managing those agents. So I definitely think that they're going to be, more vital than ever.

Michele Buckley – Gartner

Yeah. I I agree with the multi agent future that we have ahead of us, and I'm a big fan of the title of go to market engineer because that is really what's involved in defining new workflows, sequencing, data points, when to involve humans in the loop, when not to, what how we coordinating all of our agents.

I have to be honest, I've seen, you know, rev ops in its inception, while I'm a big fan on it, I've been covering inquiries on it for a number of years.

It's very intimidating for a lot of companies to think about pulling all their silos together and merging it to into one big dataset. RevOps as a concept is actually quite, perhaps even more transformative than an AI SDRs because it requires moving and transforming the whole organization at once. So I'm with you, Sean, on the on the concept of the the rev ops and the m ops. I I'm a big fan of the go to market engineer, though, because it really starts to say, look. Let's think of this in a different way. We don't have to mash together all of our silos of tech, our heavy tech, our giant, you know, silo tech.

You can actually leave your silo tech where it is. Use the agents as the interface on top of it to go get the information you need from the various silos and bring it to the humans that need it. To me, that's the most exciting innovation ahead of us.

Sean Whiteley – Qualified

Well, hey. Really appreciate you guys joining us today. This is going to be, I think, a very hot year for AI SDR agents. So you guys have got a really really start. You've been covering it for a while. So, I'm sure you're gonna get a ton of new feedback cycles with production AI SDR agents. So look forward to staying in touch with you guys and really appreciate you joining us today at the summit.