This post was originally published on LinkedIn.

It's very interesting to see the most forward thinking AI companies out there: OpenAI, Anthropic, Clay, etc hiring SDRs. A role that many people have declared as dead the last 12 months.

That said, I spoke with a marketing leader last week that is using a AI SDR tool for $150 a month and said their conversions went up.

And we're working with clients where they are making their sales team more productive by automating a lot of their jobs with AI (but still keeping the humans doing what they can uniquely do).

So who is right?

We will see how this develops. But our take at CS2 is:

1. However old your company is, at a minimum you should act like you are starting with a blank page and design the SDR function with AI embedded.
2. For enterprise deals (complex sales, multi-threading, 6-7 figure opps), you very likely need humans across the sales cycle.

The human is doing the high-judgment work: relationship building, multi-threading, reading the room on complex deals.

1. But, AI should handle the "human middleware": research, data entry, follow-up sequences, meeting prep, harvesting signals, writing email drafts. Making your team more effective and more efficient.
2. Try to get to a place where one SDR can probably handle 2-5x the accounts
3. Test full AI automation on the side. Run a pilot with AI handling the full cycle to meeting booked. See how it works. Bring learnings back to the human+AI mode. And overtime see where the best results are.

This take will likely evolve over time.

I'm curious on how far people have got with AI+automation across a complex sales cycle? Fully automated or sales + AI?