Spoke with Evan D. about the future of outbound with AI. We have our opinions, but curious as to yours @channel.
Will AI take over outbound sales?
👀 yes give it a few years
💯 it already is
🙌 no humans reign supreme
☎️ everything except cold calling
everything except verified social selling
🙃 Somewhere in between
🧵 your POV and where you see AI going with outbound - what has it taken over and what's to come?
IMHO there're already AI tools that can do an amazing job at list building, research, personalization/writing, and automate outreach via emails and linkedin. Not quite there yet when it comes to cold calling. Tried a few AI cold callers - All terrible so far. AI is also not a magical solution if you don't have message-market fit as well. It's less effective when you don't already know what message resonates well / what audience to sell to.
I am really confident it won't. Actually, the more AI will be implemented for outbound activities the more real human interactions will be valuable. And this si where I guess the important of EQ shines. It could work for inbound, and somewhere already is, however outbound has so many nuances. And in a world where people are annoyed of real people calling, I don't think AI cold calling will have great results aside costing less. However I am bullish about AI being a central part of the outbound process, already is and it will probably be more. The actual relation and exchange though, it will be human.
There will be a lot more regulation in years to come. It's already mostly taken over emails/ automation in general has really hurt email as a channel. I get a lot of AI phone calls - if it "takes over" I think it'd sooner just kill the effectiveness of all calls vs being more effective than human work. Social selling is here to stay and I'm seeing in-person selling be pushed even more.
This is quite an interesting conversation… I'll Love to hear from others
AI can write my emails, analyze my prospects, even tell me the best time to call… but it still can’t handle a ‘not interested’ turning into a 12-minute conversation and a booked demo Cold calling is safe… for now.
The effectiveness of email has already reduced significantly because of automation. With AI, the cost of high-quality outreach goes to zero, and the effectiveness will also decrease more precipitously. We're basically losing cold outreach email as a channel.
Well sooner or later it will. It's gone be similar to how people reacted that claude can't replace coding but we all are seeing the shift now. I am actually exploring the next step of this funnel, after outbound when someone actually lands on the site and is interested to check out the product but has to wait for a free slot in the companies calendar. Anyone thinking about that? AI agent that demos the product instantly, on the spot?
AI cold callers biggest hurdle right now is latency. I can already prompt smart enough AI phone agents but that causes the latency to spike. Improvements will get us passed this blocker soon enough.
I personally don't believe AI will take completely over outbound sales. Lead generation, qualification, messaging crafting — yes, it's already there and unfortunately besides productivity boost it has a huge downside — it empowers laziness in sales — we see everyday tons of low quality outreach messages with fake personalization. With AI model evolution smart „human in the loop“ approach definitely will help to achieve the same results with less human recourses. Where AI is struggling — in handling meaningful conversation after initial stage, treating not interested replies as opportunities to dig deeper and etc.
Honestly, it feels less like the future and more like what we’re already building right now. From what I’ve been working on, a big part of outbound is already automated end to end - list building, research, personalization, emails, and follow ups. That execution layer is pretty much getting solved. Where it still struggles is nuance. Cold calling isn’t quite there yet, and without strong message market fit, AI just scales noise faster. So it’s not really a takeover, more like AI compressing execution while humans still drive strategy, positioning, and trust.
No - not in b2b. A lot of people think AI can automate everything. It technically can in some places, but it shouldn't. You still need to be in the trenches working with AI. If you aren't, someone that is will take your job. I've seen it already. Automate the annoying stuff, add your personal human touch and experience to the rest.
I've yet to see an AI Agent run a full sales cycles from territory planning, to messaging, outbound, discovery, negotiation to sending a contract to onboarding a customer to renewal/upsell. There still a lot of dots to connect and dont see that happening soon without human guidance and interactions.
