2024 Saw the Rise of the AI SDR. In 2025, Agentic AI Will Go Further and Transform GTM Strategies Forever
Twenty-twenty-four marked a pivotal moment for AI-supported sales. Upstart developers of the technology received record levels of funding. New platforms were unveiled. And customer adoption — or at least experimentation — soared.
It’s no surprise that AI-empowered sales tools are expected to grow at double-digit rates for years to come. The Global AI Sales Assistant Software Market alone was valued at $18.58 billion in 2023 and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 20.2% from 2024 to 2030. By then, it will be worth $67.36 billion, according to Virtue Market Research (2024).
However, the news on AI-enabled sales technology is not universally upbeat. The number of startups that develop this technology is unsustainably high. Some technologists have embraced brash tactics that make sales professionals uneasy. One launched a campaign in late 2024 suggesting that organizations should “stop hiring humans.” And while solving one problem — the difficulty of eliminating manual processes from sending emails to customers — they have created another. Conversion rates have fallen to worrisome lows.
One big reason is that a lot of new technology zeroes in on the role of a specific sales professional instead of an organization’s broader go-to-market (GTM) strategy. Everyone wants to empower the sales development representative (SDR) with AI. Make that replace it. It’s shortsighted.
Writing for TechCrunch in August 2024, journalist Marina Temkin summed up what a lot of people are saying about the market: “Investors are not surprised by the rapid adoption of AI SDRs; they are just doubting that adoption is sticky.”
Why is simple: humans just perform certain sales duties and roles better than technology can.
Landbase believes there is a better way. It’s called agentic AI, which extends the capabilities of sales professionals without trying to replace them. Agentic AI is an advanced AI technology that can independently act and solve complex problems based on contextual input. The key term here is “independently.”
While an AI SDR can help with basic sales tasks, agentic AI can assume responsibility for domain buying, email warming, IP and DNS management, copy generation, manual research, sequencing, forecasting, and data management. It can perform these tasks autonomously. The technology frees sales professionals to focus on higher-level priorities such as customer success and intimacy. It’s unprecedented and goes far beyond automating one specific sales role.
The magic of agentic AI, which will become apparent in 2025, is that it addresses a problem that customers from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies all have in common: generating leads. This is a costly, time-consuming problem that depends on repetitive processes borne of siloed IT systems and fragmented software solutions. This is why we at Landbase are closely monitoring companies like Artisan, 11X, and Reggie, whose technologies leverage large language models (LLMs) and voice technology to craft personalized emails and place automated calls to potential customers.
The Rise of the AI SDR and Beyond
The role of an SDR is complicated and multi-dimensional. It often involves managing a suite of technology tools to help with domain buying, email warming, IP and DNS management, copy generation, manual research, sequencing, forecasting, and data management. The complexity and expense of these tools and processes are substantial.
Despite these challenges, outbound sales development remains a powerful go-to-market (GTM) activity. AI SDRs, such as Artisan’s “Ava” and 11X’s “Alice,” have emerged as efficient, all-in-one solutions designed to automate these functions. By sending targeted, high-volume emails, AI SDRs can handle many of the repetitive tasks that once burdened human SDRs, leading to better ROI and enhanced operational efficiency.
However, this shift towards automation comes with significant challenges. One of the primary technologies driving AI SDRs is generative AI, which, while effective at creating content, is prone to errors or “hallucinations,” which are inaccuracies in the generated output. The automated scraping of platforms like LinkedIn to personalize emails can result in ineffective communications, decreased relevance to intended targets, and spam filter penalties that can set organizations back significantly. With improved automation, targeting prospects has never been so easy — or frustrating. Due to a surge in email volume and a drop in quality, conversion rates have fallen. Studies show that conversion rates have dipped from 1–2% to 0.5–1.5% in similar cohorts over the past year. If you regularly read what sales professionals post on Reddit about this issue, you can almost feel their anxiety.
The collective apprehension over what some call the “human problem” is equally distressing. Critics argue that merely replacing human SDRs with AI is dehumanizing and ineffective. Some CEOs and industry leaders have shared concerns about poorly personalized emails that lift irrelevant information, leading to potential customer alienation. The goal is not to eliminate human SDRs but to augment their abilities with AI, enabling a harmonious blend of machine precision and human intuition, Landbase believes.
If you can harness machine intelligence alongside top human performance, you can achieve superior outcomes.
The Path Forward: Beyond Basic Prompting
If you want to see this in action, get to know agentic AI, which goes well beyond simple language generation. Landbase differentiates itself by incorporating an agentic transformer model that trains AI not just to generate content but to predict outcomes and simulate human-like responses. Reinforcement learning with human intervention ensures that a system can adapt, improving accuracy and reducing spam by up to 70% while boosting conversion rates 4–7 times above human or basic AI benchmarks.
Unlike traditional prompting methods, Landbase leverages data from over 40 million sales campaigns, contextualizing each interaction based on buyer and seller data to predict what will work best. This provides companies with a comprehensive GTM platform that goes beyond outbound campaigns, integrating inbound and nurture strategies to streamline operations across sales and marketing.
The Investment Case and Industry Growth
The market for GTM technology has been one of 2024’s fastest-growing sectors. Marketing technology companies like Jasper and Copy.ai and sales automation companies, including Clay and 11x, have all enjoyed tremendous growth. However, questions over technology roadmaps and customer retention remain. In an industry known for high churn, maintaining customer loyalty requires differentiated technology that can offer predictive accuracy and better outcomes. The algorithmic advantage, as seen in companies like Uber and Google, is critical for long-term success.
This is where we come in. Investing in AI SDR technology showcases the optimism businesses have to try new tools to optimize their GTM strategies. However, to truly drive leads at scale, something more is required. That something is agentic AI like our GTM-1 Omni technology.
GTM-1 Omni aims to improve customer retention through its unique approach to AI training and data-driven insights. By enabling businesses to achieve higher conversion rates and reduce spam, Landbase positions itself as a transformative force in the AI SDR landscape. Here’s why: Where LLMs understand natural language, which the current batch of AI SDRs use for prompting, Landbase’s GTM-1 Omni is a LAM (large action model), which can act based on data that is purpose-built for predicting and executing go-to-market activities.
Better technology input. Better human output.
That’s the Landbase way.
