The world's top AI voice company won't use AI for sales

AI isn’t going to save your bad outbound.

I know, I know. The promise is alluring. Sit down for a few days, build an agent that hammers out hundreds of calls per hour, sounds human, never calls in sick, never takes days off, and fills your calendar on autopilot.

And this agent doesn’t just follow a playbook—it’s AI. So it can write the damn playbook.

A lot of people are banking on this being reality now, or in the near future. Here are 3 (of many) reasons I firmly believe it’s a pipe dream. And, as I’ll share in a moment, I’m not the only one.

Inbound? People have intent. They’ve shopped, researched, searched. They have a problem they know about and they believe they know what the solution is. There’s at least some small chance they believe that solution is you.

If you have an AI agent ready to answer their questions on demand, it’s a service, not an inconvenience.

Outbound? People didn’t want to talk to you to begin with. They aren’t looking for you, your information, or your answers to questions you think they have about what you sell.

They’re minding their own business and you’re popping in to interrupt it. That’s why outbound is hard. 

Now, what do you think the chances are they’re going to be responsive to an AI robot calling them on their cell phone while they’ve stepped out of the office to pick up their kids from school? Or interrupting their one hour to do real work between a marathon of Zoom and Teams calls?

It’s hard enough as a human. And even then, you get treated like a robot.

How are people going to feel about your actual robot doing it?

If you want to build a badass AI agent for outbound, you need a clear playbook and process for it to follow, plenty of time to train it properly, and regular sessions to review what it’s saying and coach it.

Sound familiar?

I’ve worked with 250+ SMBs trying to hire a salesperson, SDR, BDR, etc. And the vast majority of those initiatives fail for three reasons:

They don’t have a clear playbook and won’t invest the time to create one. They don’t have a plan to train the person and won’t invest the time to do it properly. And they don’t manage, don’t review calls, don’t coach—and then wonder why it didn’t work.

The same systems that lead outbound to fail with humans lead it to fail with agents.

An AI agent isn’t a shortcut around doing the work. It’s just a more creative way to get no results by skipping it. 

AI is incredibly efficient at activity-based tasks. An AI agent can make more calls per hour and use more hours per day than any human ever could.

But it’s incredibly inefficient when it comes to conversion.

Based on research we’ve done at MSP Sales Partners and companies we’re evaluating through my investment company Repeatable Revenue, a good human outreach converts at 6–7x higher rates than an AI agent. 

On a per-lead basis, the human BDR wins by a mile. The BDR only loses on sheer volume—they can’t reach as many people in a given time period.

But play this out: if you’re operating in a defined market—geography, industry, vertical (and if you’re not, outbound isn’t going to work anyway)—you’re going to burn through your market at half the conversion rate. Your total addressable market is literally half as valuable as it was before you turned the agent on.

And that’s before the incoming wave of regulations requiring disclosure of AI use, limiting high-volume outreach, and cracking down on companies using AI to imitate humans.

Now, you must be thinking: “Okay Ray, you’re some old-school, anti-AI curmudgeon who’s upset about technology displacing the way we’ve always done things.”

Not even close. 

We have GPT and Claude accounts for everyone on my team. I’m a power user and max-plan payer on both OpenAI and Anthropic. I’ve built AI agents, have one cleaning my CRM as we speak, and I’ve got another that takes my podcasts, turns them into transcripts, routes the transcript through Make.com, and automatically generates drafts of LinkedIn posts, newsletters, and tweets for me to review. I recently used AI to coach me through high level decision-making in the business and some personal health challenges. Suffice it to say, I’m a fan.

But if my own AI credentials aren’t enough, consider this:

ElevenLabs—the world’s leading AI voice company, the company that literally builds voice agents better than anyone on the planet—is actively scaling their outbound sales team. With humans.

Jonathan Chemouny leads their Go-To-Market team. When he joined a year ago, they were running 95% inbound. His entire mandate was to build an outbound motion. And what did they NOT do? Leverage some of the world’s most advanced AI voice talent to build outbound AI agents.

They’re hiring human SDRs. They’re screening for people who can think on their feet under pressure, who can build real relationships with target accounts, who bring autonomy and creativity to their prospecting. They’re at 46% outbound sourced pipeline and climbing.

If an AI company that specializes in AI voice doesn’t trust AI agents to run their own outbound, why would you?

I get why so many of you want AI outbound to be the answer. If it works, you finally get to skip the part of business you hate—dealing with sales, salespeople, and all the noise and messiness that comes with it.

But if you want to drive outbound sales, you still have to roll up your sleeves and deal with people. That’s going to be true for a long time, if not forever.

So take a lesson from the company that could automate their own outbound better than anyone else on the planet—and chose not to. Embrace that reality while your competitors chase an easy button that won’t work.

Adios,

Ray

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