An AI SDR that shows its work.

An AI SDR does the first half of a sale

A sales development rep, or SDR, starts conversations with buyers who don't know you yet. The job ends when a buyer agrees to a first meeting. Then an account executive, or AE, takes over and works the deal to the close.

Some teams call the same job BDR, for business development rep, but the work is the same either way. An AI SDR does that first half of the sale in software, in this order.

1. Learns what you sell, the pain points it solves and the kind of company that buys it.
2. Takes in the companies you want to sell to, or finds new ones worth a look.
3. Researches each company and the people in it, then says who to call first and why.
4. Writes the first message and every follow-up, one person at a time.
5. Reads each reply, sorts it by what the buyer wants and drafts the answer.
6. Books the meeting on a seller's calendar and hands the buyer over to a person.

Say Priya runs sales at a 30-person dev shop in Pune, with a list of 200 companies and 1 SDR. The AI SDR's real job is to tell her which 20 to start with this week, and why.

What an AI SDR shouldn't do on its own

Some vendors pitch an AI SDR as a whole sales team in a box. Don't buy that pitch, because a few jobs still need a person and a good tool knows which ones.

• Set prices or agree to contract terms, even small ones.
• Make a promise your team hasn't made before, such as a delivery date.
• Answer a complaint or an angry reply without a person reading it first.
• Run the meeting or close the deal. That's the AE's work, not the SDR's.
• Guess. When it knows too little about a company, it should say so instead of filling the gap with a likely story.

The last one matters most. A wrong fact in a first email costs you that buyer, because nobody replies to a stranger who got their company wrong.

How to judge an AI SDR: 8 questions

Nearly every AI SDR can write a decent email now. The real gaps show up in what it knows about you, who checks the work and how it protects your name. Ask each vendor these 8 questions on the first call.

If a vendor can't answer the first 2 questions clearly, stop there. The rest won't save it.

Where Mach does the work

Mach starts with your business, not with a contact list. It reads your website and proposes what you sell, the pain points each offering solves, your ICPs and your case studies. You approve each finding.

Then it gets to work on the companies you bring from your CRM or a file. Here's what it does with each one.

• Research gives each company a fit score, an intent score, a plain verdict and the reasons against. Every fact links to the page where Mach saw it.
• It names someone for each role in the buying committee: decision maker, champion, user and approver. You accept each name before anyone gets a message.
• It writes each email and LinkedIn message with the case study that fits that buyer. Next to each line, it keeps the reason it says that.
• It reads each reply in one thread, sorts it and drafts the answer. When someone asks to stop, Mach stops at once.
• It books the meeting on the company owner's calendar. For calls, it writes a short call brief, and a person dials.

Mach can also look for new leads. Lead search listens for people who ask in public for help with a problem you solve. It also reads job ads for the roles that do that work.

Lead search never writes to anyone on its own. You add each lead, save it for later or dismiss it.

Where a person still decides

Every campaign starts in review, so you read each message before it goes. Most teams should stay there for their first few weeks.

When you trust the drafts, you can let Mach send some steps on its own. That can be the follow-ups, the answers to replies or one channel at a time, and you can go back to review whenever you like.

Some things never go out on their own, whatever you switch on. Mach hands these back to a person every time.

• Replies that aren't clear about what the buyer wants.
• Anything about price or contract terms.
• Complaints, however small.
• Calls, deals and prices. Those stay with your team.

A few rules have no switch at all. Opt-outs hold for good, and a reply stops the automatic follow-ups to that person. A company also sits in one campaign at a time, so 2 campaigns never write to the same buyer at once.

5 mistakes teams make with an AI SDR

• Turning on full autopilot in week one. Start in review instead, because you'll learn more from 50 approved drafts than from any demo.
• Feeding it a vague offer. If your own team can't name the pain point you solve, the AI can't either, so fix the offer first.
• Sending from your main domain. One bad week of spam complaints can hurt the email your whole company sends, so use a separate sending domain.
• Judging it by emails sent. Volume is easy and trust is hard, so count replies and meetings instead.
• Writing to one person per company. Most B2B purchases go through a few people, so write to each role about what that role cares about.

We made a version of the second mistake ourselves. Mach first wrote pain points in the seller's words, which read well on a slide but sound nothing like a buyer.

So in October 2026 we rewrote them in the buyer's own words, the way a buyer types them in a post. Lead search now listens for exactly those sentences.

When Mach is not the right fit

Mach isn't for everyone, and we'd rather say so now. Choose another tool if one of these is true for you.

• You want a big contact database to pull lists from. Mach doesn't sell lists.
• You want an AI to make phone calls. Mach writes the call brief, and a person dials.
• You sell to consumers. Mach is for teams that sell software and software services to other businesses.
• You need a free trial before you talk to anyone. There's no free trial today.

Compare Mach with other AI SDRs

We compare Mach with other tools in their own words, with links and the date we checked. Each page also says where the other tool is stronger than Mach.

• MachGTM vs Artisan
• MachGTM vs 11x