The number everyone quotes wrong
Every vendor deck opens with 'a human SDR costs $150k a year.' They're picking the top of the range and ignoring the fact that most SDRs sit in Austin, Denver, and Chicago, not Palo Alto.
The 2025 Bridge Group data plus our own survey of 214 buyers puts the actual median fully loaded cost at $102,400 per year in the US. That includes base ($62k), commission at plan ($18k), benefits and payroll tax ($14k), tooling ($4.5k), and a share of management and enablement overhead ($3.9k).
What a 'comparable' AI SDR actually costs
We built the comparison by matching capabilities, not seats. A single human SDR at a typical B2B SaaS company touches roughly 400 accounts and sends 3,000 emails a month. To match that with an AI SDR, you need the vendor's mid-tier plan plus one or two mailboxes.
Across the 12 vendors we surveyed at that volume, the median annual cost is $28,000. AiSDR is cheapest at around $12k. 11x lands around $48k. Artisan around $32k. Add another $3–8k for a data enrichment layer if the vendor doesn't include one.
| Model | Annual cost | Meetings/month expected |
|---|---|---|
| 5 human SDRs | $512,000 | 42 |
| 5 AI SDR licenses | $140,000 | 30 |
| Hybrid: 2 humans + 3 AI | $289,000 | 37 |
What we found running the same list through both
We took a 2,000-account target list from a mid-market SaaS company (we can't name them; NDA), gave half to their existing human SDR team and half to Artisan's Ava, and ran both for 8 weeks.
The humans booked 6.8 meetings per SDR per month. Ava booked 6.1. That looked like a tie until we counted the tails: humans booked meetings the AI couldn't have — a warm intro that turned into a $400k deal, a re-engagement of a former customer, a creative lateral move to a subsidiary. AI booked meetings the humans didn't — a stack of small deals from personas the humans deprioritized.
The hybrid model outperformed both. Same 8 weeks: 7.9 meetings per rep-equivalent when AI handled first-touch and humans took over at 'interested.'
Where humans still crush AI
Multi-stakeholder deals. Real objection handling. Reading political dynamics inside an account. Building a champion. Recovering a stalled deal. These are the parts of sales development that reward creativity and social intelligence, and the current generation of AI is not close.
"The AI booked more meetings in month one than my best rep. It also booked five with people who had no budget and no authority. That took my AE three weeks to unwind."
Where AI crushes humans
Follow-up discipline. An AI SDR will send touch 7 on day 42 with the same energy as touch 1. Humans, in aggregate, won't. Bridge Group's data shows the median SDR gives up after 4.2 touches; the AI SDRs we tested average 8.6 before marking a contact cold.
Volume and coverage are the other easy wins. An AI agent doesn't care that your TAM includes 40,000 accounts.
The verdict — and how to actually decide
Don't buy AI SDRs to replace humans. Buy them to remove the parts of the job humans hate and are bad at (patience, list-building, follow-up 7) so the humans can do the parts they're great at (discovery, negotiation, closing).
Our decision rule: if you have zero SDRs, start with one AI SDR and one great human. If you have five humans, replace two with AI and give the remaining three better accounts. If you have twenty, run a hybrid pod and measure meetings-to-pipeline, not meetings booked.