Hey friends,
Last year I started working with a new client.
Good founder, solid product, but a small market in Italy. The week I came in, they had just signed a contract with 11x.
11x sells an AI SDR.
They call it Alice and Julian. It’s supposed to do the job of your sales development team.
The team was excited. I asked to see the demo.
It was way off.
The data was fine, but the emails Alice wrote just felt wrong.
None of it sounded like the founder or the company. If I got one of those emails, I’d delete it instantly.
I tried to cancel the contract on the spot.
The most honest part came from 11x themselves and their Customer Success team in London.
When we spoke with them, they said: "if you don’t have a large TAM (the total number of companies you can sell to), a tool like this does not make much sense."
Or something like this...
They were right, that is exactly the problem.
This tool only works if you have volume.
If your market is relative small (1-2K companies in Italy and Spain for example), it burns through all of them with bad emails in a few weeks.
And that’s it.
You only get one shot at a first impression.
But, what’s going on in the market - my client wasn’t just unlucky or the AI SDR was just a big bubble?
Lots of bad press last year for 11x.
- TechCrunch found that 11x showed logos of companies on its website that were not customers.
- ZoomInfo and Airtable both said they were not customers, and ZoomInfo’s lawyer threatened legal action.
- An employee told them: “We were losing 70-80% of customers that came through the door.”
- A former engineer said: “The products barely work.” 11x said its retention was 79%.
Six weeks later, the founder stepped down as CEO.
These are the “Stop Hiring Humans” billboards in San Francisco.
When they raised $25M, TechCrunch’s headline said they were “still hiring humans.”
Their CEO said the billboards were “mostly just for attention”. In January 2026, LinkedIn banned them for two weeks over scraped LinkedIn data.
Now they are back.
Salesforce closed the purchase of Qualified, the company behind the Piper AI SDR, in April 2026.
Rox, another sales automation startup, reached a $1.2B valuation in March 2026.
Here’s what all this does to your inbox...
Instantly sells cold email software, so they have no reason to make cold email look bad.
Their 2026 benchmark looked at billions of cold emails sent in 2025. The average reply rate was 3.43%. 💀
So 96 or 97 out of 100 people never reply. (let that sink in for a second)
They attribute this decline to:
Spray and pray was broken long before AI showed up. I made it clear 100 times already.
AI just made it cheaper and faster to do it badly.
I see it with people I know, friends, founders, people I talk to.
Thousands of emails go out every week with zero replies.
Next month, they will buy more domains, more inboxes, and send even more.
The real problem is bigger than just the AI SDR companies.
It’s this idea that sales is a numbers game you win by sending more.
I use AI every day, but I’ll never let it write an email or talk to a customer for me.
I’m in control.
And that’s how I plan to keep it: in control.
Hope you do the same, but I'm curious: have you tried an AI SDR? What happened?
Thanks for reading this far; see you all next week!
– Matteo
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