What actually matters at this stage
You don't need a Ferrari. You need a reliable pickup. At under 50 employees, the AI SDR criteria that matter aren't 'best autonomy score' — they're time-to-live, blast radius if it goes wrong, and price you can defend to the board.
The vendors that win here are boring on purpose: AiSDR and Artisan. Both are live in a week, both give you enough guardrails that a bad week doesn't cost you your domain, and both come in under $20k/year.
Our picks
First pick: AiSDR. Sub-week deploy, price starts around $750/mo, and it does exactly what it says on the tin — cold outbound at reasonable volume with reasonable personalization. Not sexy. Works.
Second pick: Artisan (Ava). More expensive (~$1.5k/mo starting) but the interface is stronger and the personalization is a real notch above AiSDR. Worth the delta if you have a distinct ICP where quality of personalization moves the needle.
Don't buy: 11x, Qualified, or anything enterprise. You will pay $50k, get a 6-week deployment, and still be waiting for pipeline while your AE burns out.
How to deploy without wrecking anything
One AE, one AI SDR, one subdomain, one target segment. That's it. Do not try to run three segments at once. Do not point it at your primary domain. Do not let the vendor talk you into 20 mailboxes in month one.
Give the AE explicit ownership of what the AI does and doesn't do. If the AE and the AI aren't aligned, the AI will book meetings the AE hates and the whole experiment will fail politically inside 90 days.
When to graduate
Two signals mean you're ready to upgrade to a more serious vendor: your AI SDR is booking more meetings than one AE can handle, and your target market is broadening beyond what a template-driven tool can personalize for. Both usually hit around $8–12M ARR.