AI SDR Showdown: Sales Autopilots vs Sales Copilots
Which is better for your sales outreach: AI sales autopilots or AI sales copilots?
The market is full of AI-powered sales solutions that handle outreach, but they typically fall into one of two camps – sales autopilots and sales copilots.
Both have their strengths, but the right choice depends on your team’s needs and how much control you want over the process.
What is an AI autopilot?
AI SDR autopilots are powerful tools that can handle many routine sales tasks with little need for human involvement. They use generative AI, machine learning, and natural language processing to get the job done.
Here are some of the tasks you can delegate partially or fully to an AI SDR autopilot:
- Score and prioritize leads according to set criteria, including the lead’s intent level and likelihood of converting
- Personalize your sales emails at scale
- Schedule and send emails, email sequences, and follow-ups
- Address inbound requests, questions, and objections
- Sync contacts and data to your CRM database
- Engage leads in multiple channels (e.g. email, text, LinkedIn)
- Build sales pipeline consistently
To put it simply, a sales autopilot can craft and send outreach emails without human approval or manual control. AI autopilots also personalize emails by pulling data from CRMs, social media, and websites.
Here are a few of the major benefits of AI autopilots:
- Saving time – AI autopilots can deal with routine, time-consuming tasks in minutes instead of hours
- Scalability – AI autopilots can reach 10,000 leads just as quickly as they’d reach 100
- Reducing manual effort – Humans don’t need to double-check and approve the autopilot’s work
But as cool as the idea of building pipeline on autopilot is, there are some drawbacks.
Without the right setup, emails by AI autopilots can come across as robotic and impersonal. Their quality also depends heavily on your data, which means incomplete or low-quality data will lead to emails that fall flat.
Additionally, sales autopilots need some extra fine-tuning so they have industry-specific knowledge. Otherwise, they might miss certain nuances and references.
Common AI autopilots
Some well-known AI SDR autopilots include:
- AiSDR
- HubSpot Sales Hub
- Outreach.io
- Conversica
- Unify
- 11x
- Artisan
What is an AI copilot?
In contrast to autopilots, AI SDR copilots are AI-powered tools that assist sales teams without fully automating their workload. Like autopilots, they use generative AI and NLP, but they function more as assistants than replacements.
For example, an AI SDR copilot can draft outreach emails, but it won’t send them. Instead, humans will need to review and edit the email copy before sending it.
Beyond that, sales copilots can:
- Offer personalized suggestions, such as highlighting key customer information and proposing next steps
- Draft tailored emails, presentations, and proposals
- Provide feedback on sales calls and meetings
- Propose AI call scripts
- Assist with scheduling meetings, reminders, and daily tasks
While copilots don’t fully automate your sales workflows, they do have some key advantages to autopilots:
- Human oversight – Every action is visible and can be adjusted before anything goes live
- Adaptability – Autopilots struggle with exceptions, but copilots allow human reps to handle complex or nuanced situations with greater speed
The biggest downside of AI copilots is that they require more human involvement than autopilots. They don’t handle tasks end-to-end, so a human has to guide them at every step. The quality of an AI copilot’s AI-generated email copy is typically lower than an autopilot’s since they require less tuning as they assume a human will review and edit emails before sending.
Common AI copilots
AI SDR copilots include:
- Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales Copilot
- Salesforce Einstein GPT
- Gong.io
- OneShot
You can also use tools like Copy.ai, ChatGPT, and other LLMs to draft emails and edit them before sending.
AI SDR autopilots vs AI SDR copilots
Here’s a closer look at the strengths and weaknesses of AI autopilots and AI copilots, and which has the advantage in different situations.
Time efficiency
AI autopilots are built for speed and efficiency, handling multiple tasks without breaks.
While a human might burn 10 minutes each time they switch tasks, an AI autopilot can transition between updating CRM data to writing and sending out emails without losing a stride. They also work 24/7 without needing coffee breaks or holidays.
AI SDR copilots, on the other hand, require human input at every step. Sales reps must review, edit, and approve actions. While this gives greater control, it burns time (at least 10 minutes per switch) and slows down the process.
Still, copilots do save time compared to doing everything manually. They speed up email drafting and provide suggestions, but they won’t generate and send personalized messages on their own like an autopilot would.
The difference becomes clearer with larger prospect lists. Writing 1,000 outreach emails – even with a copilot’s help – is a major time drain, while an autopilot will create and send them in seconds without breaking a sweat.
At the end of the day, it’s about how many people you need to reach and when. If it’s 50 prospects in a week or that one person you accidentally stumbled across, you can do great with an AI SDR copilot. But if you want to find and reach out to 5,000 leads in a 3-month period, you’ll probably want an autopilot.
Verdict: Autopilot
Work efficiency
AI autopilots streamline workflows by handling repetitive tasks, freeing your team to focus on more valuable GTM plays.
With high-volume work off their plate, reps can make more calls, run A/B tests to fine-tune messaging, and stay on top of industry trends.
Plus, this shift is likely to boost your team’s morale. AI SDR autopilots excel at the sort of tasks that salespeople themselves would dump or delegate. Free from this drudgery, they’ll see their job as more satisfying and meaningful, which will ultimately drive up efficiency.
AI copilots also improve efficiency, but in a different way. They can suggest next steps and organize call notes, saving humans from dealing with them. This simplifies follow-ups, allowing teams to manage more prospects while keeping conversations personal.
Efficiency gains from AI SDR copilots might be considerable, but they’ll always lag the gains offered by an autopilot.
Verdict: Autopilot
Scalability
AI autopilots can research and qualify thousands of leads at the same time. On top of that, they send out thousands of emails while staggering them for better deliverability.
As a result, AI autopilots let you cover a lot more ground without growing headcount. By automating high-volume tasks, you can scale far more aggressively than what would’ve been possible otherwise. It also lets you target several new markets or automate GTM tactics like engaging website visitors.
AI copilots are effective at scaling a stellar team member. Assisted by an AI SDR copilot, this person will be able to reach far more people while leveraging their unique communication style, empathy, and persuasiveness. A copilot can help them draft emails faster or highlight key talking points.
However, autopilots like AiSDR can replicate your voice, a star team member’s voice, or a top sales leader with the right sales persona.
To sum up, AI autopilots can scale your entire pipeline by finding and engaging leads at velocities your team won’t be able to match. In contrast, AI copilots can scale the expertise of your best sales reps, expanding their reach while preserving a human touch.
Verdict: Autopilot
Personalization
People struggle to come up with personalization that sounds natural, or they hit writer’s block, especially when having to crank up sales emails day after day. Unlike humans, AI autopilots are built for this kind of repetitive, detail-oriented work.
AI autopilots pull data from CRM databases and social media to hyper-personalize each email, no matter how many you need to send. Most offer a deeper personalization level than segment-based, which decreases the risk of using the same messaging for Charles III and Ozzy Osbourne (believe it or not, they share the same segment!).
As for AI copilots, their personalization capabilities aren’t as thorough. They can suggest details from social media or CRMs, but it’s up to the salesperson to decide what to include. In most cases, they’re a bit stiff and not send-ready. But the fact you can generate and re-generate does mean they have value for iterating drafts.
Emails created this way may come out more authentic, even if slower. But this depends on the salesperson’s own writing capabilities.
Verdict: Autopilot
Control and oversight
This is where AI copilots stand out compared to autopilots. Unlike autopilots, which work independently, copilots support your work while giving you the power to review and approve work at each step.
AI autopilots leverage LLMs to create messages, answer questions, handle objections, and carry out other sales functions. While you can use sales personas to fine-tune messaging and write emails like you, you won’t be able to control content 100%. If you choose a poorly trained autopilot and use a generic persona, you risk creating bad emails that burn through your total addressable market.
AI copilots let you keep hold of the reins. You decide which suggestions and data points to use, which are better left out, and how to shape each generated email to fit your style and strategy. Better yet for control, copilots won’t send anything on your behalf without your approval, eliminating any chances of hallucinations.
Verdict: Copilot
Outbound potential
AI autopilots can whip up thousands of sales emails in seconds. That’s something no human, even with an AI copilot, can hope to surpass. These emails are polished enough to get sent without manual review, saving time and effort.
Beyond speed, AI autopilots can stagger sends to strengthen deliverability. A large batch of emails sent simultaneously might trigger a server’s anti-spam filters, causing messages to land in spam or getting your account blacklisted.
To avoid this, AI autopilots drip emails one at a time at non-regular intervals. This makes it seem like a human’s behind the trigger, rather than a human.
Since AI SDR copilots don’t handle sending, it’s up to human teams to manage emails. AI copilots also offer greater flexibility as teams can rework messages in real time and tailor emails if they know leads well or you’re in a very niche market with highly specific prospects.
Despite this advantage, AI copilots can’t match the scale of AI autopilots. And in the world of outbound where messages already have a low chance of converting into sales, autopilots free you from stressing too much about each email’s results.
Verdict: Autopilot
Inbound potential
AI autopilots can respond to requests within just 10 minutes, and we know that faster responses increase your chances of conversion.
The longer a lead waits, the more likely they are to lose interest. And pipeline leakage is more likely to occur if your team is handling a high volume of inbound requests.
AI SDR autopilots can solve this problem. No matter how many queries you get, they’ll respond to each, pulling data from the CRM as necessary. (However, many AI SDRs currently don’t support responses to inbound leads.)
AI copilots can’t handle inbound requests on their own. They can only forward queries to a human SDR and suggest a possible response.
If the request is simple, the sales rep can reply with the copilot’s suggestion and save time. With a non-standard query, the rep can step in, rework the response as needed, and send.
Yet while AI SDR copilots can flag inbound requests for human attention, AI autopilots can do the same. And in a situation when speed is so critical in using inbound to solve pipeline poverty, autopilots will always outperform copilots.
Verdict: Autopilot
Which is better: Autopilot or copilot?
When comparing AI SDR autopilots and copilots, autopilots come out ahead in most areas, such as:
- Time efficiency
- Work efficiency
- Personalization
- Consistency
- Scalability
- Speed
These benefits are why startups and SMBs opt for autopilots that can speed up the execution of their go-to-market strategy.
However, AI SDR copilots shine in complex situations where greater reasoning, specialized knowledge, and control are essential. This is partly why copilots are preferred by enterprises, who want to limit the risk of huge deals going wrong.
At the end of the day, the choice between autopilot and copilot is determined by your goal. If it’s speed and scale, an autopilot is likely your best choice, but if it’s control and drafting ideation, then you’re better off with a copilot.
