If you drive around the Bay Area right now, you might think the BDR role is headed for extinction due to the rise of AI replacements. Billboards urge companies to “stop hiring humans” beside a stoic-looking avatar presumably ready to work 24/7.

At Bain Capital Ventures, we’re often asked what AI means for sales—especially for BDRs. And what we’ve found in talking to portfolio companies and revenue leaders more broadly is that the reality is far more nuanced than the slogans suggest.

In short, BDRs are especially important now, in selling complex AI tooling amidst a changing tech landscape that confuses and overwhelms buyers. Particularly for nuanced, higher-ACV sales, BDRs can open opportunities and cut through the noise of AI slop far more effectively than an LLM. Of course, AI can and should handle routing, enrichment, and scheduling, but it can’t start a relationship, read a moment, or build trust with a prospect. And depending on your customer and product, the right time for an AI BDR may be “not yet” or “never.”

The work is human because it’s nuanced. It requires reading tone, adjusting mid-sentence, handling silence, setting the first live impression of your company. That’s why the best founders aren’t replacing humans at the top of the funnel; they’re doubling down on them. In this piece we go into a few examples of how that works, and how startups can find and empower talented (human) BDRs.

Sometimes automation can do more harm than good

Because of the rapid iteration involved in outbound campaigns, it’s easy to quickly spot the limitations of automation. One startup recently learned this the hard way: an AI-driven outbound system accidentally pulled in existing customers and sent them “cold” outreach as if coming from the CEO. The most important rule of automation, like the Hippocratic oath for doctors, should be “first, do no harm.”

Machines don’t understand context; they don’t know the difference between a lead and a relationship. BDRs do.

As Troy LeCaire, founder and CEO of GovWell put it emphatically, when we asked about his impressions on automating BDR work using LLMs, “The point of BDR work is the people.” He described the important qualification and selling work his team does when engaging with local government stakeholders, which is GovWell’s ICP. It would be disastrous to leave this up to AI, especially since civic tech buyers tend to be even more skeptical about AI than traditional tech buyers.

There are some ICPs and industries that might never be ready for AI BDRs. For example, if the product you’re selling is complicated and has a high ACV, interpersonal relationships are most critical. You should never leave critical discovery work to AI. If you’re selling an AI product in a hyper-noisy industry, you have to deftly explain your value proposition to customers all the time.

One BDR consultancy we spoke with explained that their email open rates and response rates have decreased over the last year, and they’re even less effective than phone calls. The solution to this problem is more personalization and a more human touch, not more automation. Standing out from AI slop depends upon interpersonal relationships, human relationships. Eamon Garrity-Rokous, SDR at Decagon confirms: “What’s working for the Decagon SDR team today? Cold calls - bar none.”

Yet a lot of outbound work doesn’t require human nuance; AI does well here

AI has reached the point where it can finally help humans sell — not by impersonating them, but by informing them, freeing up their time, and then letting them do more of the human part. As Eamon at Decagon puts it, “AI is still poor at the personalization piece. But it’s good at automating workflows.” At Decagon, the team relies on AI to organize outbound efforts and increase throughput, but they keep human hands on the parts that matter: timing, tone and context.

The most effective tools now pull from first-party data, not scraped lists or generic enrichment. One example of an AI sales tool is Actively, a BCV company building reasoning models that analyze a team’s own CRM and engagement data to predict which accounts are most likely to buy. Customers have reported more than 40 percent improvements in conversion when BDRs focus on the contacts Actively surfaces - but not because Actively is automatically pinging prospects, but because it’s freeing up BDRs’ time to talk to more humans.

Historically, a typical BDR spends upwards of an hour preparing their day, determining which people at which companies to call on and what to say to them. Now they can show up and Actively has prepped all this for them, including suggested talk track and email copy (though not necessarily sending the emails, to give the BDR the last line of review).

Another large decacorn uses AI to build lead lists - for instance, scrape all the portfolio companies of a private equity firm, and generate a list of personas, with contact information, so a BDR can outbound quickly and not have to spend hours lead building.

In both these examples, the BDR is empowered to spend more time with prospects because of AI. AI is adding more, not less, humanity into the sales process. As Tyler John, CRO of Actively put it, “Tomorrow's xDR will be akin to a news anchor or broadcaster of a live football game. You don't need to know what to say or when to say it, but you do need to be great at how you say it, when you say it, and what you do when the person on the other side [pushes back].” And when those responses could catch you off guard–say, a prospect is rude on the phone–AI agents can train BDRs beforehand with mock sales calls so they’re ready to handle all human interactions with grace.

How to build a modern outbound team

Early-stage founders often ask how best to build the right combination of tooling and team to tackle outbound. An example from our portfolio of a company who did this well is Aleph, which helps finance teams automate reporting and analysis. Their experience shows how a structured yet human-centered BDR function can outperform automation.

Start with simplicity.

Aleph runs a tight stack: Amplemarket for sequencing, Clay for enrichment, HubSpot for CRM, and Aleph itself for reporting. They decided against Salesforce because it’s too big for their current scale, and wanted something more tried-and-true than some of the newer AI native CRMs.

Hire BDRs based on learning velocity.

When hiring BDRs, Aleph has candidates complete mock cold calls, receive feedback, and repeat the exercise. The team hires based on how dramatically candidates improve — not only on what their initial attempt looks like.

Build in cohorts, not isolation.

Aleph hires BDRs in small pairs to foster competition and shared progress. It keeps morale high and accelerates peer learning. This is similar to how companies should hire initial AEs - in pairs, to disambiguate whether “they” or “we” (the company / product) are the problem. Learn more about how to build your early sales team here.

Pay for meaningful output.

Aleph sets a target of six qualified opportunities per month and gives reps a small percentage of closed-won deals. It’s a blend of activity and outcome that rewards both effort and precision.

So far, this approach has worked and they’ve had no attrition.

For founders looking to emulate this approach, a few tactics stand out; first, don’t overcomplicate your GTM approach (especially with tooling); second, hire in pairs, so you can learn from multiple people and have them learn from and motivate one another; and third, make sure your incentives are clear.

Another problem with automating outbound; your sales talent pipeline often starts with BDRs

Another problem with the idea that ‘AI will replace BDRs’ is the fact that BDRs are a critical part of a sales team’s talent pipeline. In many B2B companies, the BDR role is where future AEs, managers, and revenue leaders learn the rhythm of selling. Automating the role out of existence doesn’t just risk the sales pipeline, it risks the talent pipeline, too.

For BDR hiring and promotion, Aleph built a clear four-level ladder, with milestones that can be achieved roughly every four months. At the top tier, reps enter a “path to AE” program, learning pipeline management and closing techniques. The system is transparent, measurable and aspirational.

Brex takes a different approach to the same goal. CRO Garrett Marker explained that overperformers advance quickly; if an SDR exceeds target for three months, they’re given a starter AE book of business, and if they can hit quota while still covering their SDR goals, they’re automatically promoted. Although the policy challenged traditional headcount planning models, it worked for the team, which thrives on new revenue and quickly-promoted talent

Hiring an AE externally is expensive: the average ramp to full productivity can take six to nine months, during which time the company is paying full base and benefits without quota attainment. By contrast, promoting a high-performing BDR often cuts that ramp time in half, since they already understand the product, process and internal systems — and they bring their own qualified pipeline with them.

In many companies, the BDR role itself is becoming more full-funnel, blurring the line between AE and BDR. As Tyler of Actively put it, “xDRs will have 50% of their time back in the near future. What we're seeing in the enterprise is that rather than shift this time back to doing more of the same, leaders are elevating the role of the xDR, enabling them to progress prospects further down the funnel with AI.”

How to hire BDRs When You Don’t Have Brand, Inbound, or Time

The BDR role has always been a tricky one for smaller companies to hire. Large companies with established sales teams, market presence and enough PMF for learning and development teams can afford to recruit directly from universities and run employees through a rigorous training program. Smaller startups don’t have the luxury of hiring that far in advance, nor the resources to adequately onboard and train larger cohorts of BDRs. So where to find them?

It is possible to hire a BDR laterally from another company, but spend time understanding their path at the company (and its path in the market) to assess if this leads to selection bias issues. The best companies will promote BDRs quickly, and if they haven’t been promoted in 9+ months, chances are high that there’s a problem with the company or the candidate.

If you want help sourcing and placing BDR candidates, GTM-focused talent agencies can be indispensable, and they should charge lower fees for BDRs than for AEs.

When screening BDR candidates, look for the following:

Curiosity

• Do they want to learn? This will help them not only learn your product quickly, but how to ask the right questions of their prospects.
• Ask candidates about a topic they’ve learned within the last year, to walk you through their motivation in doing so, and to teach you more about it.

Competitiveness

• Are they motivated to outperform others? Do they fear losing more than they relish winning? Real talk: you want those who fear failure…the stick is more effective than the carrot.
• Ask them in which circumstances were they competitive? How competitive are they on a scale of 1 - 10? Why? [Ex-college athletes are often great candidates for BDR roles in particular, due to this dimension.]

Extraversion

• Do they like talking to people? This is perhaps the most important criterion to assess, as it’s very hard to teach or design a process to enable this.
• Ask them to interview five random people throughout the course of their week about a topic - the people must be complete strangers they encounter in their day-to-day life. Have them write up their findings in a doc and send them to you. Pressure test for legitimacy - bonus points if they build so much rapport that they include a selfie or two.

Coachability

• Do they respond well to feedback, and do they embrace growth?
• Give them feedback during the hiring process (similar to how Aleph guided their process) and see how they incorporate it into subsequent interactions.

People are still the biggest advantage in outbound

AI has raised the floor for sales development but not the ceiling. Every team now has access to the same automation stack, the same enrichment data, and roughly the same workflows. The advantage comes from the people — the ones who can listen, adjust, and build trust at speed.

The BDR function is still the front line of growth. It’s also the apprenticeship for judgment, empathy and persistence — traits that don’t scale easily and don’t come from a model. The companies that remember that will keep winning the right kind of business, because they’ll keep earning it.