The death of the AI SDR has been greatly exaggerated, but you’d be forgiven for sending flowers.
Digging up data on average churn rates for these tools isn’t easy, but an AI-assisted search puts it at between 50-70%. That’s twice the annual average for human SDRs, a role notorious for high turnover.
I recently posted on LinkedIn about how Common Room beat out an AI SDR in a head-to-head deal for the AI SDR use case at a $30B SaaS company. A comment under that post seems to sum up the general market mood:
“AI SDRs don’t work—biggest bubble in tech.”
But as the froth dies down and the real opportunities emerge, it’s clear to me that the use case is very real.
The AI SDR is alive and well—it just doesn’t look like what you think.
Revenue at risk: 3 trends keeping GTM leaders up at night
When we first launched RoomieAI™, our suite of AI-powered tools for go-to-market teams, our biggest power users tended to be our smallest customers. Startups with tiny teams, tinier budgets, and large TAMs.
These organizations needed to scale their sales teams (often teams of one) as quickly as possible. To triage high-volume, low-touch inbounds. To rapidly multithread buying committees within target accounts. To warm up cold outbound fast.
But over the past couple of quarters, we’ve seen more and more enterprise and large mid-market accounts following suit.
This is why:
1. Orgs are rebuilding their growth strategies
Macro economic shifts, changing buyer behaviors, and AI-powered competition are forcing organizations to face a stark reality: Adapt or die. Businesses must disrupt themselves or risk missing growth targets quarter after quarter as they fade into obscurity.
Companies are increasingly re-evaluating their GTM strategies, diversifying their tools and tactics, and sometimes even pivoting their business models completely.
Product-led pioneers are building sales-led motions for the first time and vice versa. Established enterprises are doubling down on dark-funnel intent sources like social and community. And protecting and expanding install bases is seen as an existential imperative across the board.
2. Revenue efficiency is a non-negotiable
The pressure to maintain or exceed revenue growth is magnified by the market’s new favorite motto: Do more with less. Business efficiency is table stakes.
Mature SaaS companies still need to hit double-digit growth percentages to maintain a leading position. Cloud natives are expected to 2x ARR with smaller budgets.
While many businesses are still growing their sales teams, they’re opting for more junior talent. They’re also pushing for wider SDR-to-AE ratios. The result is a ton of orgs trying to figure out how to build more pipeline with either fewer or less experienced (or both) reps.
3. AI-powered competition is heating up
Revenue teams—from Ops to the front line—have woken up to the fact that AI is changing the data-driven sales equation, seemingly in real time.
It enables reps to get closer to customer data. To uncover relevant and previously hidden insights unique to their business motions. And to activate all of it to deliver faster, more personalized experiences to customers with less manual data wrangling.
If companies aren’t hustling to capitalize on this technology, it gives their competitors a huge advantage. The number of orgs that reported regularly using GenAI (65%) almost doubled over a 10-month period in 2024. At a time when budgets are tighter than ever, AI may be the last safe line item.
The upshot is this: It’s never been more critical for organizations to invest in tools that will help them experiment with new ways of doing business—and optimize outcomes—quickly, scalably, and cost-effectively.
Every GTM leader I talk to—from CROs to sales VPs to Ops directors—agrees that AI is the solution. They also agree that they’re underwhelmed by the results.
Seventy-five percent of C-suite execs named AI as a top priority for 2025. The same number said that they’ve yet to see ROI from the AI investments they’ve already made.
The current state of AI for GTM is broken.
Millions for missed targets: 3 reasons the AI SDR bubble is bursting
Investors have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the first wave of AI SDR vendors.
Here’s where we're consistently seeing challenges among our prospects and customers:
1. Garbage in equals garbage out
AI SDRs promise to automate everything, from prospecting to personalization to engagement. But they’re built on commoditized datasets (think publicly available info on LinkedIn and account-only attributes pulled from legacy prospecting tools).
The result isn’t an intelligent agent that can book meetings—it’s a spam cannon that burns through your TAM and gets your domain blocked and blacklisted.
At their core, large language models are delivery mechanisms. If they’re powered by undifferentiated inputs, they deliver undifferentiated outputs.
2. Ops is an afterthought
Ops professionals were automating complex GTM workflows when AI SDRs were still a pipe dream. They asked for tools that would help them systematize data orchestration and performance optimization. What they got was another black box and a mandate to become prompt engineers.
It’s up to Ops to make AI SDRs work. And the process is painful: manual (and costly) data uploads, prompt-and-pray configuration, decision-making hidden behind opaque algorithms.
Scoring models, account prioritization, segmentation rules—they’re all trapped in yet another siloed UI, waiting for Ops to fix them by stitching together sprawling tech stacks. It's not augmenting RevOps expertise—it's creating busywork.
3. Hybrid workflows cause headaches
Outside of very specific use cases, most orgs don’t want AI SDRs to replace flesh-and-blood reps completely. Especially not for upmarket accounts.
This means reps who were already toggling between 10 tools per day on average have to open yet another tab and learn a system that causes more problems than it solves.
Irrelevant or unqualified leads that reps must manually weed out. “Hope this email finds you well” outbound messages that reps must rewrite. CRM hygiene issues that reps must clean up. Every “automated” touchpoint requires human intervention.
Despite these shortcomings, our customers haven’t given up on the promise of AI. If anything, the current state of AI tooling has made them more clear-eyed about exactly what they do want.
Not a siloed chatbot that sits outside of their stacks. And not a generic cold outbound machine.
But an always-on intelligence that works hand in hand with humans. One that strengthens and speeds up every part of the pipe gen process, whether through automation or augmentation.
They gave us the blueprint. And we’ve been hard at work.
The future of pipe gen: 3 agents, zero friction
After talking to hundreds of GTM teams, these are the areas we’ve identified as ripe for agentic transformation:
Pipeline capture
Pipeline capture—or the process of collecting, unifying, and organizing all relevant customer data from the channels where your prospects live—is the first step on the pipeline journey.
Common Room is already unmatched in terms of out-of-the-box signal capture, identity resolution, and waterfall enrichment across first-, second-, and third-party data sources.
Now we’re making it effortless to find the data you need from every corner of the web and put it right at reps’ fingertips.
Introducing RoomieAI Capture
Our customers told us that the most differentiated data isn’t purchased from a vendor. It’s either structured data that’s hyper-specific and highly relevant to their business and customers or unstructured data that requires significant enablement and rep competency to sift through and interpret.
Our capture agent is an always-on data and signal hunter that shifts the burden of gathering, synthesizing, and analyzing account insights—something time-crunched reps either do sporadically or not at all—to an always-on AI colleague.
Tell your agent what you care about, send it to fetch insights from the public web and your internal data sources, and watch it deliver actionable insights to reps right where they work, right when they need them:
- Serve up summaries of publicly available information—from earnings calls and 10-Ks to current investors and top competitors—on a silver platter.
- Augment insights from the public web with first-, second-, and third-party signals, like product usage, web visits, CRM records, social engagements, open-source activity, community interactions, job changes, job listings, news events, and more.
- Then let our research agent tell reps whether a company is a good fit, surface top contacts for outreach, and match your company’s value proposition to what matters most to your prospects.
We’re launching RoomieAI Capture this week. Stay tuned for a much deeper dive—and a future expansion to contact-level research.
Also get ready for updates to our industry-leading signal, identity, and enrichment layer, including:
- New signals available in Common Room, such as G2 reviews, Gong call recordings, and more
- Custom data objects for first-party data, tailor-made for enterprise orgs
- Composable enrichment options that expand data coverage both inside and outside the US
Pipeline orchestration
Pipeline orchestration—or the process of operationalizing customer data for reps and continually optimizing performance—is the connective tissue between signal and send.
Common Room provides dozens of out-of-the-box workflow automations for prospecting, scoring, prioritizing, and segmenting contacts and accounts.
Now we’re making it possible to augment these operations in real time using every available insight.
Introducing RoomieAI Orchestrate
Our orchestration agent is a fully customizable growth hacker that packages up every data point in your digital ecosystem and makes it actionable for reps, automatically surfacing and stack ranking high-converting plays.
Trained on human inputs, real-time signal capture, and historical performance data, it’s designed to autonomously suggest next best actions or take actions itself based on your permissions:
- Auto-fetch lookalike leads and accounts and auto-update lead and account scoring models.
- Auto-recommend signals, contacts, and accounts for play prioritization.
- Then auto-create warm outbound lists, tailored to your reps’ books of business and filled with curated, ready-to-action prospects.
We’re launching the first iteration of RoomieAI Orchestrate later this year, along with:
- No-code, drag-and-drop UIs and prompt-building automations for agent customization
- No-code, self-serve ROI reporting for human workflows
- No-code, self-serve ROI reporting for agent workflows
Pipeline activation
Pipeline activation—or the process of enabling reps to take last-mile action on customer data—is the final step in any pipe gen motion.
Common Room already offers 75-plus integrations across every part of your stack, rep-friendly UIs, a purpose-built sales workbench, and LLM-generated message snippets to support scalable actioning.
Now we’re making it even faster and easier to reach the right person with the right message at the right time.
Introducing RoomieAI Activate
Our activation agent is an outreach expert that crafts highly personalized, highly relevant messaging for every contact in real time using retrieval augmented generation techniques.
Pulling from all the signals uncovered by our capture agent, it auto-generates outbound messaging with zero prompting required on the part of reps:
- Create compelling copy instantly for any contact at any account.
- Draft messages based on high-priority signals that pull from dynamic variables.
- Then send or sequence with a single click—or automate the process completely.
The first iteration of RoomieAI Activate goes live this week. Keep your eyes peeled for further updates in Q1, including AI snippet suggestions.
Also prepare for ways to unlock the power of Common Room’s AI pipe gen platform everywhere you work, including:
- New integrations with cross-channel engagement tools, dialers, call recorders, marketing automation platforms, and more
- An updated Chrome extension that extends Common Room to key surfaces like Salesforce, Gmail, and your sales execution platform
- Enhanced CRM data syncs that provide easier access to Common Room’s AI capture, enrichment, scoring, and segmentation in your team’s source of truth
Pipeline has a new equation
At Common Room, we don’t have a fully agentic vision of the future. We don’t have a fully human one, either.
We believe the most successful organizations will have humans and AI agents working together to deliver better, faster, and more personalized customer experiences.
It’s not just the future we’re building. It’s the future we’ve already built. And it’s launching this week.
Our vision is and always has been to transform how organizations connect with people.
That hasn’t changed. But AI is changing how we do it—and how our customers bring that vision to life.
Pipeline has a new equation. We’re here to help you solve it.
Unlock the power of agentic pipe gen with Common Room
Get started for free or get in touch to see how Common Room’s agentic AI shows you who to target, when to engage, and how to convert.
