Not a week goes by without some drama in the world of artificial intelligence. Just a couple of weeks ago, the DeepSeek saga shook the tech market, challenging some of its long-held beliefs about the computing power needed to power AI.
But over the following days, OpenAI released Deep Research, a much more powerful model that blew DeepSeek out of the water. Now OpenAI has demoed an AI SDR product, signaling its future moves.
OpenAI’s SDR Agent
At an event in Tokyo where OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Software Chief, Masayoshi Son announced their new joint venture in Japan, the audience was treated to a variety of demos to show off the latest AI tech.
One of these was a three-minute demo of an OpenAI Sales App, that could ingest incoming leads from a website, perform data enrichment, and send an automated email in the correct language, with available calendar time slots for a call.
This type of product will seem familiar to anyone who works in CRM or GTM, as AI SDRs (Sales Development Representatives) are seemingly everywhere.
There seem to be two major areas of disruption in the customer-facing CRM world: the work of SDR and live chatbots for customer service teams. Removing some of the more tedious work to free up humans for more creative problem-solving tasks, or potentially, to simply remove them from the workforce to save cash.
AI SDR startups in particular are big business. Techcrunch reported back in December 2024 that startups are booming in this area, with big names such as Clay, 11x, Qualified, and ZoomInfo moving into the space.
However, the article goes on to say that VCs are wary of these startups. CRMs such as Salesforce and Hubspot are ultimately the system of record that hold customers’ data, so are well positioned to compete and offer their own products.
But OpenAI potentially offering their own AI SDR is opening a whole new can of worms. “Wrapper” products – components that plug into LLMs such as OpenAI – are at risk of being hung out to dry. Sam Altman said that his company will steamroll any startup or product trying to build in and around their blast radius.
Salesforce are in the unique position of being the market leader in CRM, and could very well dominate the Sales and Service Agent market with their new offering, Agentforce. To add to Salesforce’s position, whilst most of the technology market was in decline from the DeepSeek product announcement, Salesforce’s stock grew 10% over a few days.
The logic is, that as the cost of LLM’s goes down, tools such as Salesforce should be able to benefit from cheaper costs to run their AI technology.
AGI or GTM?
OpenAIs longstanding mission has been to develop Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), an LLM that matches the intelligence level of a human and can carry out most tasks flawlessly.
So it begs the question, why would OpenAI want to move into Sales technology?
Although there are some estimations for when AGI will be developed, no one really knows. OpenAI are also spending huge sums of money on its hardware and LLM development and will need to continue growing its customer base and revenue, especially with competitors hot on their heels such as Google, Meta, and Perplexity.
Additionally, Sam Altman’s brutal quote suggests that they can go after any startups that are in their blast radius pretty easily. AI SDRs, as well as chatbots, are a huge market. Although it’s safe to say no one has truly cracked the market yet, it does feel like we are at a tipping point where the right mixture of agents, data, and the right LLM could change the world of CRM forever.
Final Thoughts
OpenAI’s AI SDR product marks a significant shift in the sales tech landscape, raising big questions about the future of CRMs like Salesforce.
Will AI-driven sales reps enhance existing platforms or disrupt them entirely? Leave your thoughts in the comments.
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