AI sales copilot vs. AI SDR: what's the difference and which is better?

If your sales team is anything like the typical team, your reps probably spend 70% of their time on non-selling tasks. But it’s time to change the norm.

Unsurprisingly, McKinsey has named sales as one of the key sectors where AI applications will have the greatest economic impact. From automating outbound motions to scaling sales plays, analyzing data to forecasting pipeline success, we’re seeing more and more AI tools designed to make reps’ lives easier in their day-to-day work.

But (and it’s a big but) we’re also seeing a divide in the way AI is applied to the sales process.

On the one hand, you have the AI sales copilot: a virtual assistant that literally “copilots” the sales rep’s workflows.

On the other, you have AI SDRs: fully autonomous virtual agents that remove (or at least, claim to) the need for a human SDR entirely.

So, what’s the difference between an AI sales copilot and an AI SDR?

And more importantly for you, which is better: an AI-powered SDR or an AI SDR?

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What is an AI SDR? The case for virtual sales reps

AI SDRs are marketed as virtual sales reps capable of working independently. Once up and running, AI SDRs or AI agents are designed to take care of prospecting, sending emails, and booking meetings without much interference.

The appeal for these tools lies in the fact that you could supposedly save on hiring and training human sales reps by letting AI fill their role.

For bootstrapped startups or small teams, the idea of outsourcing their entire sales process to specialized AI could sound like a dream.

AI SDRs shine when it comes to:

• Running 24/7 without breaks
• Handling high volumes of outreach
• Following up consistently
• Processing large amounts of data

But here's the catch: they lack the human touch. They can't pick up on subtle cues, build genuine relationships, or handle complex negotiations.

Crucially, they’re not always as easy to use or as effective as they might first appear. But we’ll get on to that below!

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What is an AI sales copilot? The case for AI-powered sales reps

An AI Sales Copilot like Amplemarket’s Duo, on the other hand, is more like your personal sales assistant. It works alongside you, helping with research, suggesting next steps, and handling routine tasks while you focus on building relationships and closing deals.

The key difference is that AI sales copilots, unlike AI SDR tools, are not designed to replace the human sales rep.

Luis Batalha, Amplemarket Co-Founder and CPO, explains:

"We like to compare the AI Sales Copilot to a self-driving car. Up until today building a go-to-market machine was like assembling a car from parts — you needed separate tools for business data, email outreach, dialing, social engagement etc. This approach is fragmented, complex, costly, and inefficient. 

We started by building the all-in-one platform and today we are introducing different levels of self-driving capabilities. Amplemarket Duo is capable of taking supervised actions to help guide reps from point A to B of their pipelines - akin to driver-assistance systems like lane assist. Our AI-driven approach significantly reduces manual work and augments the productivity of sales teams tremendously."

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Why AI sales copilots are taking the lead compared to AI SDRs

When it comes to capabilities, there’s often a lot of overlap between AI SDRs and AI copilots for sales.

But over time, we’re seeing more and more apparent differences in a few specific areas. In particular:

1. How easy the tools are to configure and set up
2. How easy it is to refine or edit AI actions
3. The depth of sophistication in data research and automated plays
4. The quality of results (i.e. identification and engagement with qualified leads)

One of the main concerns boils down to the fact that AI SDRs prioritize automation, whereas AI copilots prioritize depth and quality of actions. Only one of those is going to bring you consistent, long-term results.

To see what we mean, here are some of the areas we believe AI copilots have the edge over AI SDRs:

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Complementing human capabilities and helping reps grow

We’ve mentioned it already, but this is critically important: AI copilots aren’t intended to replace human sales reps, but rather enhance their existing skills and abilities. 

The reason this matters is that sales is still a trust game. People are more likely to buy when they have rapport with the vendor, and this is hard to recreate when you replace the seller with an AI agent.

Don’t forget that B2B buying journeys can be incredibly complex, take months (or even years) to complete, and usually involve a number of different stakeholders. The human rep is still irreplaceable when it comes to nurturing buyer relationships, especially for complicated decision processes.

The problem with AI SDRs is that they’re often built to focus on maximizing automation (i.e. quantity of outreach) over results (i.e. quality of leads and engagement). As Luis describes:

"We talked to many users over the past 18 months and saw that other AIs trying to automate SDR work often chose quantity over quality. They'd quickly go through prospect lists but get poor results."

In contrast, AI copilots aren’t just productivity tools; they are performance enhancers.

Everything decision and action the copilot takes is designed with one goal in mind: to help the user grow revenue. Unlike other AI outreach automation tools, then, quality is prioritized over quantity, and that’s especially important when you're fighting to be heard in the noisy digital marketplace.

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Providing intelligent insights

AI copilots analyze a wealth of data from multiple sources to surface valuable insights. For example, they can identify the best times to reach out, craft personalized messaging that resonates, and uncover relevant buying signals like job changes, social activity, and industry trends. 

All this contextual intelligence gives reps a number of significant advantages. Firstly, they’re able to access all the data they need to refine their engagement strategy so it’s hyper-personalized to each individual lead. 

We can see that this has a tangible effect on sales results:

Duo AI Copilot users have managed to 8x their conversion rates for booking meetings.

Secondly, the fact that the AI copilot does all this research automatically (even while the rep sleeps) means the rep saves enormous amounts of time that would otherwise be spent on manual data gathering!

We're seeing the average Duo user save around 10 hours a week on manual tasks.

Duo is able to do this because it slots seamlessly into your entire tech stack to pull insights from:

• CRM systems tracking historical interactions and relationship context
• Sales intelligence platforms revealing technographic data and buying signals
• Intent data sources monitoring research and buying behavior
• Social listening tools capturing digital engagement
• News and company updates showing strategic initiatives

By connecting all these data streams, the copilot develops a more nuanced understanding of each prospect's business context, challenges, and priorities, and is able to feed this into personalized outreach.

AI SDR tools often provide contextual research on the leads they find, but it’s unlikely you’ll come across the same depth of insights.

Many, for example, offer just a handful of lead intent signals and can only pull the most basic of firmographic data, where an AI copilot like Duo gives you access to hundreds of signals and incredibly granular account research.

This leads to another differentiating factor…

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Enhancing multichannel outreach personalization 

The limitations of lead intelligence for AI SDR tools mean that their ability to personalize outreach in relevant and interesting ways is limited, too.

Users of AI SDRs have reported that their AI-generated outreach messaging is surprisingly generic, bland, and robotic, which undermines their potential to engage and convert leads. 

Here’s an example of a real message generated by an AI SDR… (It’s not great!)

On top of this, many AI SDRs are limited in their multichannel outreach capabilities. It’s not uncommon for AI agents to support only email and restricted LinkedIn actions, for instance, which can get in the way of engaging hard-to-get prospects.

An AI copilot like Duo, however, has far broader multichannel reach, including more diverse LinkedIn actions, voice messaging, post interactions, and more. The result is that multichannel sequences feel more organic and authentic–as if a real human sent them.

Here's an example of what that looks like:

This brings us back to why AI copilots produce better personalized outreach. Rather than simply plugging static data points into templates, copilots analyze patterns and relationships within the data to:

• Identify relevant conversation hooks based on recent company updates
• Use relevant case studies and social proof from similar customers
• Adjust messaging tone and complexity based on the prospect's role and engagement history
• Recommend the best times and channels to maximize your chances of getting a reply
• Generate authentic, meaningful references to shared connections and mutual interests

In other words, AI copilot personalization is far more dynamic, intuitive, and sales savvy that your average AI-generated content. It won’t sacrifice quality of messaging in the interest of quantity of outreach!

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Bridging the performance gap

AI copilot platforms allow reps to leverage advanced and sophisticated sales plays tailored to their target audience, regardless of how experienced they are as a seller. 

To illustrate this, we looked at how Amplemarket’s Duo AI Copilot is helping teams bridge the gap between top and average performers:

Some teams using Duo AI Copilot have reported a 60% reduction in difference between top and average rep performance, as well as new reps booking meetings with enterprise clients in their first week instead of waiting 3 months.

This isn’t something AI SDRs are explicitly designed to tackle precisely because they’re intended to supplant the sales rep instead.

But in any case, most AI SDR platforms are far simpler and formulaic in the campaigns they generate.

Once again, the emphasis is on scaling quantity rather than quality of sales plays.

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Intuitive and easy to use

Despite the complex and advanced capabilities of AI copilots, platforms like Duo offer another benefit: the ease of use from day one. The copilot is educated on vast amounts of industry and sales data so it is able to build a coherent strategy around your target audience with relatively little manual input.

The problem with many AI SDRs it that, like many AI tools, they require heavy prompting to provide good results. 

Most of the time, users to input to provide pain points, proof points, and value propositions for every campaign they ask the AI SDR to run, which undermines the idea that the AI agent “does everything for you”.

There’s a lot of room for error, especially if users aren’t used to defining and segmenting their target personas, which can lead to the AI SDR generating completely irrelevant campaigns for unqualified leads.

As one Amplemarket prospect remarked:

"We got a qualified lead within days of trialing Duo AI Copilot, which was better than what we received in a year from an AI SDR tool."

An AI copilot, meanwhile, is far more intuitive. Users still have the option of refining prompts (like solution USPs, how to handle objections, how to respond to specific lead signals, etc.), but the platform is capable of making informed decisions by itself, too. 

For example, Duo can make educated guesses on how you define your target personas before you prompt it. The AI copilot will analyze your industry and solution positioning, compare it to competitors, and draft an outline of your target audience.

For novice sellers, this kind of intuitive AI decreases the go-to-market learning curve and gives them far more confidence from day one!

Driving efficiency across the sales cycle

Unlike AI point solutions and many AI SDR platforms, an AI copilot like Duo support reps throughout the entire sales process - from prospecting and outreach to opportunity management and deal closing. 

For example, Duo not only automates basic repetitive tasks, but it also handles replies and follow ups, answers objections, and gives youguidance at every step, boosting overall productivity and effectiveness throughout your deal cycle.

This matters because the more consolidate your sales process, the more consistent, sustainable, and scalable it will be.

If you opt for an AI SDR that is only capable of handling top- or middle-of-funnel activities (e.g. prospecting and initial outreach), you’ll be left to tackle follow-ups and further nurturing by yourself, or to invest in another tool. 

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The real-world impact of AI sales copilots

The real power of AI sales copilots lies in their ability to transform the sales rep’s performance and, by extension, their business growth.

This deep research enables truly personalized communication at scale, which is critical in a B2B world that is so over-saturated with outbound content. 

Each interaction is crafted based on company-specific insights, individual prospect research, relevant trigger events, and past interactions.

It's what we call the "invisible activities" that top performers do daily–the deep research, strategic thinking, and pattern recognition–that set exceptional salespeople apart, and that AI SDRs fundamentally lack.

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The bottom line with AI SDRs

We’ve tried to be as balanced as possible in our evaluation of AI SDR tools, but what about sellers who have actually used them?

One thing we have noticed is that as compelling as the marketing might be behind these tools (i.e. “you don’t have to do anything; this will sell for you!”), the reality is quite different. As one Amplemarket prospect remarked,

"If AI agents and AI SDRs were able to follow through on their promises (creating the perfect sales strategy for you with zero input), I would say they’d be better than an AI Copilot.

But instead you don’t have much control over what they do, and if you don’t get qualified leads, and you don’t have much visibility over what’s not working or much ability to change things. I don’t think the AI and our trust in AI is there yet."

This is not to say that AI SDR tools won’t get more sophisticated or more effective in future.

Right now though, they’re not always able to deliver on their pipeline promises, and for bootstrapped businesses who are depending on them for efficiency savings, that could be a serious–and expensive–problem.

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The future of sales AI

Like we say, we’re biased! But we’re approaching the future of sales from a different perspective.

As João Batalha, CEO and Co-Founder of Amplemarket has explained, 

"The sales rep is not going away. Even as we look 10 years into the future, we believe that human-to-human interactions will remain crucial in mediating business deals. The nuances of relationship building, trust, and complex decision-making in B2B sales cannot be fully automated.

However, this doesn't mean that sales can't be dramatically improved.

And as we look ahead, we see a world where sales becomes less about brute force outreach and more about intelligent, timely, and valuable interactions. A world where sales professionals are empowered to focus on what they do best - building relationships and solving problems - while AI handles the heavy lifting of deep research, analysis and task management.

The future of sales is not human vs. AI. It's human and AI, working in perfect harmony to create value for businesses and customers alike."

Want to try an AI sales copilot for yourself? Sign up to demo Duo today!