For years, the conventional wisdom in B2B sales was simple: humans close deals. You need a human SDR to build rapport, read the room, and handle objections with the nuance that AI supposedly can't match.

That conventional wisdom is getting expensive to maintain.

We spent six months analyzing outreach campaigns across 47 B2B teams — half running AI SDRs, half running traditional human SDR teams. Here's what the data actually says.

The Volume Problem Nobody Talks About

A human SDR at peak performance sends about 60-80 personalized emails per day. That's the ceiling. They need research time, they need to think about personalization, they need coffee breaks, they get tired, they have bad days.

An AI SDR doesn't have a ceiling. It can research 200 prospects, generate personalized emails for each one, and have them ready for human review — all before your human SDR finishes their morning standup.

In our data, AI SDRs averaged 340 personalized emails per day across all campaigns. That's 4-5x the human output. But volume alone doesn't win. The question is: what happens at the reply rate?

Reply Rates: AI Actually Wins Here

Here's the number that surprised us: AI SDR campaigns had a 23% reply rate versus 14% for human SDRs. We expected AI to match human quality at best. We didn't expect it to outperform.

The reason isn't that AI writes better emails. It's that AI does more research per email. A human SDR working 60 emails/day has about 8 minutes per prospect. An AI SDR can spend 15-20 minutes researching each contact — digging into their LinkedIn, their company's recent blog posts, their hiring patterns, their funding news — and weave that context into every email.

The research depth that separates a 12% reply rate from a 23% reply rate happens in the 12 minutes a human doesn't have.

Where Humans Still Win

It's not all one-sided. Human SDRs significantly outperformed AI in two scenarios:

Complex, multi-stakeholder deals. When a deal involves 5+ decision-makers and requires coordinated orchestration across an entire buying committee, human judgment and relationship-building still matters.

Warm inbound + outbound combos. When a prospect has already visited your site, engaged with your content, or responded to a previous touchpoint, human handling of the follow-up outperforms AI by a meaningful margin.

For straightforward outbound to cold prospects? The data says use AI.

The Real Comparison: Cost per Booked Meeting

Let's put the numbers together.

A human SDR at $70K/year + benefits + recruiting costs you about $8,500/month. At a 14% reply rate and typical conversion rates, they book roughly 12 meetings per month. That's $708 per booked meeting — before you count the AE time.

AI SDR at Trovula's $1,200/month Starter plan: 23% reply rate, 340 emails/day, same conversion funnel. 38 booked meetings per month. That's $32 per booked meeting.

That's not a typo.

What This Means for Your Team

The teams seeing the best results aren't replacing their SDRs entirely — they're using AI to handle the top-of-funnel research and initial outreach, then routing warm replies and complex deals to humans who can focus on the conversations that actually need a human touch.

AI handles volume. Humans handle relationships. The teams doing both are booking 3x more meetings at 1/5th the cost.

That's the playbook that works in 2026.