Jason M. Lemkin predicts human SDRs and BDRs will be obsolete by 2026 because AI can qualify prospects through video, audio, or text without them knowing. Train an AI model on your data for 30 days and it handles qualification, asks about goals and team size, then books meetings automatically.
Chapters
But if in 2026 you're still having humans qualify a lot of your prospects and wait, there's no need with AI. You are going to have to pick a vendor and you're going to have to train it for 30 days with your data. But there's no reason a prospect shouldn't be able to interact fluidly with an AI, not even know they're being qualified. Okay. Not in this yucky, objectionable, dated way of whether you're worth someone that just graduated from college's time, which was, which has always been kind of gross and uncomfortable if you've been through it on the other side. The agent should do it elegantly. Great to hear from you. Glad you're interested. Tell me about your team. Tell me about what your goals are. Talk in English through video, audio, typing. Great. You know who would be perfect for you? Let me set something up with David. He's free tomorrow at 11. Does it work for you right now at night when you're ready? If you don't have that on your website, implement it. This like maybe before the end of the year. This is low-hanging fruit. The products. With AI, after the, after the 4s, after Claude 4 and OpenAI and ChatGPT 4, they've all gotten really good. They can all do this. Calendly on steroids and instantly qualified. It all works today. There's no excuse to not do this. And there's no excuse to have yucky qualification. There's just no excuse to have yucky qualification. Just eliminate it. And I really think most SDRs will die next year. The BDR that sort of smarmily qualifies you, that, that's going to die. Like we just, there's no need for that with these tools. So this is low-hanging fruit to implement. And you will, if you, if a prospect can have a wonderful time, get their questions answered for real without a used car salesman and book a meeting in real time, you're going to close more, whether it's 1% more or 20% more, it's much better.
