6 AI BDR Platforms Compared (2026): What They Actually Automate
AI BDR platforms automate the first 3 hours of sales development—list building, enrichment, routing, and QA—not the full SDR job. Pricing ranges from $750–$5,000+ per month. The real ROI killer isn't the AI; it's broken email authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) and poor CRM hygiene. Microsoft now rejects bulk email from domains without proper authentication, and most platforms don't manage deliverability for you.
AI BDR Platforms: What They Actually Automate (and Where They Break)
TL;DR
An AI BDR platform automates the first 3 hours of sales development — list building, enrichment, routing, and QA — not the job itself. StoryPros has tested or built against every major vendor on this list, and the ROI killer isn't the AI. It's deliverability and CRM hygiene. Microsoft now rejects bulk email from domains without SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, and most AI BDR platforms don't manage that for you.
| Platform | Best For | Price Range | Rating (G2) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Artisan AI (Ava) | Full-cycle outbound automation | $900–$5,000/mo | 4.2/5 |
| 11x (Alice) | High-volume prospecting | $5,000+/mo (custom) | 3.9/5 |
| Regie.ai | Sequence writing + prospecting | $900–$3,500/mo | 4.4/5 |
| AiSDR | Inbound + outbound hybrid | $750–$2,500/mo | 4.0/5 |
| Qualified (Piper) | Inbound website conversion | $3,500+/mo | 4.6/5 |
| StoryPros (Custom) | Ops-integrated outbound agents | $2,000–$6,000/mo | N/A (client NPS 72) |
A client called me three weeks ago. VP of Sales at a 200-person SaaS company. He'd just signed a $4,500/month contract with an AI BDR vendor. Six weeks in, zero meetings booked.
I asked three questions: Does your domain have DMARC set up? Are you warming your sending domains? Is the AI writing to verified emails or just scraping LinkedIn?
He didn't know the answer to any of them.
That's the state of AI BDR platforms in 2026. The AI part works fine. The plumbing underneath is where every deal dies.
I've built over 100 AI automations at StoryPros. A huge chunk touches sales development. I've tested, broken, rebuilt, or replaced most of the tools on this list. Here's what I actually think about each one — and where the real problems are.
1. Artisan AI (Ava): Best for Full-Cycle Outbound
Artisan raised $12M and built Ava, an AI agent that handles prospecting, enrichment, email writing, and follow-up in one platform. It's the most all-in-one option on this list.
Pricing
Starts at $900/month for 1,000 leads. Scales to $5,000/month for larger volumes with custom integrations.
Strengths
Ava pulls from a 300M+ contact database and writes personalized first lines using LinkedIn and company data. The UI is clean. Onboarding takes about a week. For teams that want one tool and don't have ops support, it's a solid starting point.
Limitations
CRM sync is one-directional in most setups. That means Ava creates contacts your SDRs don't know about. We've seen duplicate records spike 40% within 60 days on teams using Ava without a dedup workflow.
Ava also doesn't manage sending domain health — you're on your own for SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and warmup.
Best For
Teams of 5–15 reps who want outbound running fast and have someone on ops to manage CRM hygiene weekly.
2. 11x (Alice): Best for High-Volume Prospecting
11x built Alice as a "digital worker" — their term for an AI agent that sits inside your sales workflow and handles top-of-funnel prospecting end to end. They've raised over $50M.
Pricing
Custom pricing only. Most clients I've talked to pay $5,000–$10,000/month. You're paying for volume and white-glove onboarding.
Strengths
Alice is strong at list building. She pulls from intent data, technographic signals, and job postings to build targeted prospect lists. One 11x customer told me Alice cut their list-building time from 6 hours a week to 20 minutes.
Limitations
The email copy Alice generates is good but generic at scale. We A/B tested Alice's output against custom sequences built in n8n + Clay, and the custom sequences had a 23% higher reply rate.
Alice also doesn't handle email deliverability. If your domain reputation tanks, Alice keeps sending into the void.
Best For
Funded teams doing 10,000+ outbound emails per month who need a managed prospecting layer and can afford the price tag.
3. Regie.ai: Best for Sequence Writing + Prospecting
Regie started as an AI copywriting tool for sales teams and evolved into a prospecting platform. They're good at the content layer — subject lines, email bodies, follow-up cadences.
Pricing
$900–$3,500/month depending on seats and features. Mid-market pricing.
Strengths
Regie's sequence generator is the best pure writing tool in this list. It pulls company context, persona data, and competitive intel to write emails that actually sound human. G2 reviewers give it a 4.4/5 — highest in this group. Their Auto-Pilot mode handles prospecting and outreach without rep involvement.
Limitations
Regie doesn't enrich data as well as Artisan or 11x. You'll still need Clay or Apollo to verify emails and enrich contact data before Regie touches it.
Their CRM integration with HubSpot is solid. Their Salesforce sync has gaps — we've seen field mapping break on custom objects.
Best For
Marketing-savvy sales teams that care about copy quality and already have a data enrichment tool in their stack.
4. AiSDR: Best for Inbound + Outbound Hybrid
AiSDR is the underdog. Smaller team, lower price, but they handle both inbound lead qualification and outbound prospecting in one workflow.
Pricing
$750–$2,500/month. The most affordable option here for teams under 10 reps.
Strengths
AiSDR qualifies inbound leads and routes them to the right rep based on ICP scoring. That's a big deal. ElevenLabs built their own AI SDR and reported it qualifies 78% of leads end-to-end. AiSDR does something similar for teams that can't build it themselves.
Their outbound module handles basic prospecting and follow-up sequences.
Limitations
The outbound engine is thinner than Artisan's or 11x's. Contact database is smaller. Personalization is surface-level — company name and title, not the deep LinkedIn scraping Ava does. You'll hit a ceiling around 5,000 emails/month before quality drops.
Best For
Early-stage teams ($2M–$10M ARR) running both inbound and outbound who need one affordable tool to handle qualification and initial outreach.
5. Qualified (Piper): Best for Inbound Website Conversion
Piper isn't an outbound tool. It's an AI SDR that lives on your website, qualifies visitors in real time, and books meetings while your human reps sleep.
Pricing
$3,500+/month. Premium pricing for premium inbound conversion.
Strengths
Aiven used Piper and doubled their meetings booked. They saw a 260% increase in engagement and 293% ROI. Piper books 2x more meetings monthly than Aiven's human SDR did. For high-traffic B2B websites, Piper is the best inbound conversion tool I've tested.
Limitations
It only works on inbound. If you don't have 5,000+ monthly website visitors, the ROI math doesn't work. It also doesn't touch your outbound list building, enrichment, or email deliverability. You need a separate tool for that.
Best For
B2B SaaS companies with strong inbound traffic (5,000+ monthly visitors) that want to convert more website visits into qualified meetings.
The Real ROI Killer: Deliverability and CRM Hygiene
None of these platforms will save you if your email infrastructure is broken.
Microsoft now requires SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for anyone sending 5,000+ emails per day to Outlook.com, Hotmail.com, and Live.com addresses. Google and Yahoo enforced similar rules in February 2024. If your bounce rate exceeds 2% or your spam complaint rate tops 0.3%, your emails get rejected. Not sent to spam. Rejected.
I've watched three AI BDR rollouts fail in the last 90 days. The AI wasn't bad. The sending domains weren't warmed up.
New domains need 4–6 weeks of warmup, starting at 5–10 emails per day, before you can send at volume. Every AI BDR vendor I've talked to skips this part of the conversation during the sales process.
Here's the CRM hygiene checklist we run at StoryPros before any AI BDR touches a client's Salesforce or HubSpot:
Dedup audit. How many duplicate contacts exist today? We've seen databases with 30%+ duplicates.
Field mapping. Does the AI write to standard fields or custom objects? Mismatches create ghost records.
Lead routing rules. Does the AI know which rep owns which territory? If not, you get meeting conflicts in week one.
Unsubscribe compliance. Gmail requires one-click unsubscribe (RFC 8058). Yahoo demands it's honored within two days. Microsoft requires a functional unsubscribe link. Your AI BDR needs to respect all of this.
Bounce handling. Hard bounces must trigger automatic suppression. If your AI keeps mailing dead addresses, your domain reputation craters.
A Revenue Velocity Lab study of 938 B2B companies found AI-augmented reps generate 41% more revenue per rep ($1.75M vs. $1.24M) with 18% fewer activities. But that's augmented reps — humans using AI tools — not AI working alone.
The "first 3 hours" use case is where the money is. List building, enrichment, routing, QA. Let the AI do the grunt work. Let your humans close.
What We Build at StoryPros (and Why It's Different)
I'm biased. I'll say that upfront.
We don't sell a platform. We build custom AI BDR agents using n8n, Clay, and direct API connections to your CRM. The agent does list building, enrichment, email verification, lead scoring, and routing — then hands a clean, qualified list to your SDR team every morning.
Our best-performing agent books 30+ meetings per week for about $200/month in tool costs. That's not a platform fee — that's the actual infrastructure cost. Our build and management fee is on top of that.
The difference is we own the deliverability layer. We set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. We warm the domains. We monitor bounce rates daily. We build the dedup logic into the CRM sync. When something breaks at 2 AM, the agent pauses itself instead of torching your sender reputation.
If you want to talk about what this looks like for your team, start here.
FAQ
Will SDR jobs be replaced by AI?
Not in 2026. AI BDR platforms replace the first 3 hours of an SDR's day — list building, enrichment, routing, and QA. A Revenue Velocity Lab study of 938 B2B companies found AI-augmented reps still outperform fully automated workflows. The SDR role is shifting from data entry to deal strategy, but the job itself isn't going away yet.
Are AI SDRs worth it?
Yes, if your email infrastructure is set up correctly. Aiven doubled their meetings booked using Qualified's Piper and saw 293% ROI. But AI SDRs fail when domains lack SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication, when bounce rates exceed 2%, or when CRM hygiene creates duplicate records that confuse routing logic.
What is an AI BDR?
An AI BDR (Business Development Representative) is a software agent that automates top-of-funnel sales tasks: building prospect lists, enriching contact data, writing outreach emails, qualifying inbound leads, and routing meetings to the right rep. StoryPros builds custom AI BDR agents that book 30+ meetings per week at roughly $200/month in infrastructure costs.
How do you set up an AI SDR/BDR without breaking CRM hygiene?
Run a dedup audit first — most B2B CRMs have 20–30% duplicate contacts. Map every field the AI writes to and confirm it matches your CRM schema. Set up hard-bounce suppression so dead emails get removed automatically. Build lead routing rules before the AI starts prospecting, not after. Monitor weekly for the first 60 days.
What email authentication do you need before launching an AI BDR platform?
You need SPF, DKIM, and DMARC configured on every sending domain. As of 2025, Microsoft rejects bulk email from domains missing these protocols. Gmail and Yahoo require one-click unsubscribe headers (RFC 8058) and spam complaint rates under 0.3%. New sending domains need 4–6 weeks of warmup at 5–10 emails per day before scaling to full volume.
Related Reading
How much do AI BDR platforms cost per month?
AI BDR platform pricing ranges from $750–$5,000+ per month depending on the vendor and volume. AiSDR is the most affordable at $750–$2,500/month for teams under 10 reps, while 11x (Alice) charges custom pricing starting at $5,000–$10,000/month for high-volume prospecting. StoryPros charges $2,000–$6,000/month for custom ops-integrated agents plus roughly $200/month in infrastructure costs.
What email authentication do I need before using an AI BDR?
You must configure SPF, DKIM, and DMARC on every sending domain—Microsoft now rejects bulk email from domains without these protocols as of 2025. New sending domains require 4–6 weeks of warmup at 5–10 emails per day before scaling to full volume, and you must maintain bounce rates under 2% and spam complaint rates under 0.3% to avoid rejection.
How much more revenue do AI-augmented sales reps generate?
According to a Revenue Velocity Lab study of 938 B2B companies, AI-augmented reps generate 41% more revenue per rep ($1.75M vs. $1.24M) with 18% fewer activities. However, this is human reps using AI tools—not fully autonomous AI agents—which is why AI BDR platforms are most effective automating the first 3 hours of work (list building, enrichment, routing, QA) rather than replacing SDRs entirely.