Why 11x AI and Artisan Are Only Half the Solution

11x AI raised $76 million. Artisan raised $46 million. Both promised to replace your SDRs with AI that books meetings around the clock.

And then ZoomInfo tested 11x for a month and found it "performed significantly worse than SDR employees." Now they're threatening legal action.

I've spent years building sales automation tools—first at GoCustomer.ai, now at Rep. What I've learned is uncomfortable: automating outbound is the easy part. The hard part is what happens after you book the meeting.

Here's the problem nobody in the AI SDR space wants to talk about. They've automated the interruption. They haven't automated the evaluation. And that gap is where your revenue actually dies.

What is 11x AI and why is everyone talking about it?

11x AI is an AI SDR platform that promises to replace human sales development reps with "digital workers." Their flagship product, Alice, handles prospecting, personalized outreach across email and LinkedIn, and meeting scheduling. The company's pitch? They sell "work, not software"—each digital worker supposedly replaces 11 full-time employees.

That pitch attracted serious money. Benchmark led their Series A. Andreessen Horowitz led their Series B. By November 2024, 11x had a $350 million valuation.

The Data: 11x raised $76M total across three rounds, reaching a $350M valuation by November 2024. (TechCrunch, March 2025)

But then TechCrunch started digging. And what they found wasn't pretty.

ZoomInfo ran a month-long trial. The result? 11x "performed significantly worse than SDR employees." They never became a customer—but 11x listed them anyway. Airtable's trial was "very short" and "never used in production." Also listed as a customer.

A former employee told TechCrunch that 11x was "losing 70-80% of customers that came through the door." The company reportedly used "Contracted ARR" numbers that included customers in 3-month trials who churned—inflating $3M in retained revenue to a claimed $14M.

The founder stepped down as CEO in 2025.

How does Artisan compare?

Artisan takes a similar approach. Their AI BDR, Ava, taps into 300+ million B2B contacts across 200+ countries. Like 11x, they promise AI-powered prospecting at scale.

They've raised about $46 million, including a $25M Series A in April 2025. Y Combinator backed them. LinkedIn ranked them #39 on their Top 50 U.S. Startups list.

But Artisan has its own problems.

In January 2026, LinkedIn temporarily banned Artisan for platform usage concerns. They got reinstated after two weeks, but the message was clear: even LinkedIn thinks aggressive AI outbound is a problem.

Key Insight: Artisan's CEO admitted the core issue to TechCrunch: "We've historically sold to a lot of the wrong customers, and learned the hard way that it's not just like a typical SaaS product where you can sell to everyone—you have to actually qualify pretty heavily." (TechCrunch, April 2025)

That quote should worry you. The CEO of an AI SDR company is saying that AI SDRs don't work for most customers.

What real users say (it's not good)

I spend a lot of time reading user reviews. Not the curated testimonials on vendor websites—the raw feedback on Trustpilot, G2, and Reddit. For 11x and Artisan, the pattern is consistent.

From Trustpilot (11x, February 2025): "6 months in, and still almost no result. We don't use it but can't cancel the expensive subscription, and they ignore us."

From Trustpilot (11x, September 2024): "Since starting with 11x.ai, we have had 0 meetings set through this software."

From G2 (Artisan, verified Sr. Account Executive): "The messaging is extremely bland and obviously AI. The extent of the personalization is scraping some small piece of info from the prospects LinkedIn/company url and mentioning they read it. Then going into a generic pitch based on your website. We have been using it for 2 months now and have gotten ZERO quality leads/interactions from it."

From Reddit (r/sales, 2025): "11x is the biggest disappointment—they promised endless results but delivered none, they don't personalize as they promise, don't handle replies either and locked us into an annual contract which they refuse to break."

That last point matters more than you'd think. Both 11x and Artisan struggle with handling replies. One SDR manager testing both tools in 2025 found that "reply rate can increase by 40% if responses come within 2-4 minutes"—but neither tool could respond that fast.

So they book the meeting. Then they ghost the prospect.

The real problem: What happens after the meeting is booked

Here's where I have to get honest with you. When we built GoCustomer.ai, we focused on the outbound problem. More emails. Better personalization. More meetings.

And we learned something painful: meetings don't equal revenue.

The math tells the story:

The Data: According to Optifai's Q1-Q3 2025 analysis, the average B2B demo-to-close rate is just 25%. Three out of four demos fail to convert.

But it gets worse. Let me walk you through the full funnel:

That's an 80-87% drop-off from booking to close. AI SDRs handle the first row. Everything after that? You're on your own.

And here's what really frustrates me: 11x and Artisan charge $18k-60k+ per year to solve 15% of your funnel. The other 85%—where revenue actually happens—they can't touch.

Buyers don't want more meetings (they want to see the product)

This is the part that AI SDR vendors don't want to acknowledge.

The Data: According to Gartner's June 2025 research, 61% of B2B buyers now prefer a "rep-free" buying experience.

Let that sink in. The majority of your buyers actively don't want to talk to a sales rep. And what do AI SDRs do? They automate the process of forcing buyers into meetings they don't want.

It's backwards. Completely backwards.

The same Gartner research found that 73% of buyers avoid suppliers who send irrelevant outreach. And 54% avoid suppliers who send too many messages. AI SDRs, by design, send more messages at higher volume. They're optimized for the exact behavior buyers hate.

When we were planning Rep, this data changed our entire approach. We stopped asking "how do we book more meetings?" and started asking "how do we let prospects evaluate the product without forcing them into a sales call?"

That's a completely different question. And it leads to a completely different product.

The speed problem no one talks about

There's another gap in the AI SDR model that bothers me.

The Data: Multiple studies from 2024-2025 show that prospects are 9x more likely to engage if contacted within 5 minutes. And 35-78% of sales go to the first responder. (Ripperit, Salesar, Martal)

So speed matters enormously. But what do AI SDRs actually do? They book a meeting for next Tuesday.

Think about that. A prospect fills out a demo request on your website at 11pm on Thursday. They're researching solutions, they're motivated, they're ready to evaluate. The AI SDR sends them a meeting invite for Tuesday at 2pm.

By Tuesday, they've already talked to two competitors. They've lost the context of why they reached out. Their boss asked them about three other priorities. The window is gone.

Speed to lead isn't about responding to an email faster. It's about giving the prospect what they need—information, evaluation, understanding—in the moment they're ready for it.

What we learned at GoCustomer: We could book meetings 10x faster than a human SDR. But if the meeting wasn't until next week, it didn't matter. The lead was cold by then. This is why we built Rep to deliver demos instantly—not to schedule them for later.

What AI SDRs actually do well (and don't)

Look, I'm not saying AI SDRs are useless. That would be intellectually dishonest. They do solve real problems:

What AI SDRs handle well:

• Sourcing leads from large databases (300M+ contacts)
• Initial outreach at scale (email, LinkedIn)
• 24/7 operation across time zones
• Basic personalization from public data
• Meeting scheduling logistics

What AI SDRs can't do:

• Handle complex objections in real-time
• Conduct the actual product demo
• Build genuine trust with enterprise buyers
• Manage multi-stakeholder conversations
• Respond to replies within the critical 5-minute window
• Prevent "TAM burn" from generic messaging
• Qualify prospects well (hence the 30-50% unqualified demo problem)

The core issue is this: AI SDRs are built for the interruption phase of sales. Cold outreach. Getting attention. Booking time.

But B2B purchases aren't made during the interruption. They're made during the evaluation—when the buyer actually looks at your product, understands how it works, and decides if it solves their problem.

That's the demo. And AI SDRs don't do demos.

The demo gap: Where revenue actually dies

Consensus—a company that actually tracks demo metrics—published data that should terrify every VP of Sales relying on AI SDRs:

The Data: 30-50% of demos are unqualified. Over 50% of sales engineers report that 30%+ of their demos are unqualified. One in five report that 50%+ are unqualified. (Consensus 2025)

So AI SDRs book meetings. Half of those meetings are with people who were never going to buy. Your sales engineers—your most expensive technical resources—spend their time showing product to prospects who don't have budget, don't have authority, or don't have a problem you solve.

And the average lag time from demo request to actual demo? 5.6 days. Nearly a week.

Compare that to the speed data we looked at earlier. 9x engagement lift within 5 minutes. 35-78% of sales go to the first responder. But your prospect waits almost a week for a demo.

This is why we built Rep the way we did. Not to replace SDRs. Not to send more outbound. But to automate the demo itself—instantly, at the moment the prospect is ready, without making them wait for a human's calendar to open up.

My take: AI SDRs are a feature, not a solution

Here's my honest assessment after building in this space for years:

AI SDRs will be part of the stack. Kyle Norton, CRO of Owner.com, is probably right when he says "it's a near certainty that some version of the AI SDR becomes a viable and important part of the GTM tech stack."

But right now? The category is immature. The tools hallucinate. They send "AI slop" that damages your brand. They lock you into expensive annual contracts. And they only solve the first 15% of your funnel.

If you're a VP of Sales considering 11x or Artisan, here's what I'd actually recommend:

Ask these questions first:

1. What's your current demo-to-close rate? (If it's below 25%, booking more demos won't help.)
2. What percentage of your demos are unqualified? (If it's over 30%, AI SDRs will make this worse.)
3. How fast can prospects actually see your product after requesting a demo? (If it's over 24 hours, you have a speed problem, not a volume problem.)

And understand what you're buying: AI SDRs automate the interruption. They don't automate the evaluation. They book the meeting. They don't close the deal.

That might be valuable for your business. But it's half the solution, at best.

The AI SDR category isn't going away. The funding is too big, the promise is too attractive, and the pressure to cut SDR costs is too real.

But if you're evaluating 11x, Artisan, or any other tool in this space, understand what you're actually getting. You're automating the interruption—the cold outreach, the meeting booking, the calendar logistics.

You're not automating the evaluation. You're not giving prospects what they actually want: a way to see your product on their own terms, at the moment they're ready.

That's the gap we're building Rep to fill. Not to send more emails. Not to book more meetings. But to let prospects actually experience your product—live, interactive, instant—without waiting for your AE's calendar to open up.

Because in the end, meetings don't equal revenue. Demos do. And right now, AI SDRs are only half the solution.

See how Rep delivers instant, AI-powered demos →