# AI SDR

> An AI SDR is software that runs sales development work such as prospecting, outreach, and follow-up, with autonomy that varies enormously between vendors.

An AI SDR is software that does sales development work, prospecting, personalized outreach, and follow-up, with a language model in the loop. The label is a category rather than a specification: autonomy ranges from drafting copy inside a human-built sequence to placing calls unattended, and vendors rarely say which they are.

**An AI SDR is software that does sales development work, prospecting, personalized outreach, and follow-up, with a language model in the loop instead of a junior rep.** The label is a category, not a specification, and that is the first thing to know about it.

The autonomy behind the name varies enormously between vendors, and the marketing rarely tells you where a product sits. At one end, "AI SDR" means assistive drafting inside a deterministic sequence: the software follows a step order a human built and the model writes the copy. [Apollo](/tools/apollo) is the honest version of that shape, where the AI features help a rep move faster without deciding anything. At the other end sit products that genuinely act. [Close](/tools/close) released Chloe in June 2026, a voice agent that places calls, qualifies prospects in conversation, and books meetings while updating the CRM. [Outreach](/tools/outreach) launched Outreach Omni in April 2026 as a universal conversational agent. [Unify](/tools/unify) fires plays automatically off real-time signals. Those are different purchases with different failure modes, and pricing them as if they were the same product is how buyers get surprised.

The useful evaluation question is not "is it agentic" but "which decisions does it make without a human, and what happens when it gets one wrong". Ask which step is autonomous, what the review gate is, and whether the claims in a generated email are grounded in something you can check.

Where each product actually sits is in [the best AI sales tools in 2026](/guides/comparisons/best-ai-sales-tools-2026), and the workflow that wraps around them is in [Claude for sales teams](/guides/sales/claude-for-sales-teams).

---

_Source: https://agentscamp.com/glossary/ai-sdr — Term on AgentsCamp._