Role
Hire an AI SDR
It does the twenty minutes of account research nobody has time for, and hands you a first line that could only have been written about that company.
What this worker is
An AI SDR in Polaris is a worker you hire to prepare outbound: researching target accounts with live web search, documenting the trigger event that makes the timing right, drafting a first-touch message per account, and keeping the target list current as tasks. A person reviews every message and sends it. The worker does not send email or make calls.
- Typical output
- Account brief plus drafted first touch
- Core connections
- Web search, HubSpot, Gmail
- Illustrative task
- 3.5 human-hours, $7.00
What this worker is great at
The research that makes personalisation real rather than a merge field. For each account it looks for something checkable and recent: a funding round, a job posting that reveals a new team, a pricing page that changed, a public repository that shows which tools they run. Each finding comes back with the URL behind it, so you can read the source before you quote it in an email.
The output is two things per account. A short brief with the evidence, and one drafted opening that uses the strongest piece of it. Twelve accounts researched to that standard is a morning a person rarely gets, and it is the difference between a first line that could be sent to anyone and one that could only be sent to them.
It is also useful for the housekeeping that decays fast. Which accounts have gone quiet, which contacts changed jobs, which deals have no next step written down.
What to connect it to
Web search
The engine of the role. No search access, no evidence, and without evidence this worker writes the same email everyone else sends.
HubSpot
So account research is prepared against the deals and contacts that already exist rather than a separate list nobody reconciles.
Gmail
For drafting in context. Sending stays with a person, and that is a hard boundary of the product rather than a setting.
Slack
When a teammate drops an account name in a channel, the Inbox turns it into a prefilled research task waiting for one click.
A realistic first week
- 1
Monday: define the ideal account in writing
Company shape, the signal that means now rather than later, and the two disqualifiers. Put it in the skill file before any research runs.
- 2
Tuesday: twelve account briefs
One acceptance criterion per account: evidence found, URL cited, or explicitly marked as no trigger found.
- 3
Wednesday: the first touches
One drafted message per qualified account, each opening on the specific evidence. Read them, cut half the second paragraph, send.
- 4
Friday: pipeline hygiene
Every open deal without a written next step becomes a dated task with an owner.
What a research batch costs
Illustrative example, computed from the published human-hours formula: twelve account briefs in one session.
12
Accounts researched
Each with a cited trigger or an explicit none
3.5
Human-equivalent hours
6 searches, 7,200 characters, 3 criteria ticked
$7.00
Total cost
At $2 per human-hour, itemised on the work log
What an AI SDR is not good at
It does not send. No email leaves your account and no sequence starts because a worker decided to, which rules out the volume plays and is a deliberate limit rather than a missing feature.
It cannot reach gated data. Contact databases, sales intelligence platforms and anything behind a login are outside the connection catalog, so email addresses and phone numbers have to come from a tool you already pay for. It reads what the open web publishes, which is enough for the trigger and not enough for the contact record.
And it has no judgement about whether a prospect is worth your time beyond the criteria you wrote down. Give it a vague ideal customer profile and you get twelve briefs about companies you should never have looked at, delivered promptly.
Questions people ask
+Can an AI SDR send cold emails?
No. It drafts messages and posts them on the task, and a person reviews and sends. Polaris workers deliver work as comments and never take an outbound action on your behalf.
+Where does it find trigger events?
From live web search: funding announcements, job postings, changed pricing pages, public repositories, press coverage. Every finding is delivered with the URL it came from, and accounts with no genuine trigger are marked as such rather than padded with generic observations.
+Can it find email addresses?
Not reliably, and it should not be asked to. The connection catalog has no contact database in it, so verified addresses come from whatever prospecting tool you already use while the worker handles research and drafting.
+How is this priced against an outsourced SDR?
There is no monthly retainer and no seat. You pay $2 per human-hour of delivered research and drafting, itemised job by job, and nothing at all in a week where no task is assigned. Meetings booked remain the work of the person sending the emails.
Related
Hire an AI competitive analyst
Assign it every Monday and you get a written record of what your market did last week, with a URL behind every line of it.
Hire an AI research analyst
Assign the question on Tuesday afternoon and read the brief before your Wednesday call, with every claim carrying the URL it came from.
Account briefs waiting for you before the first call
Ten minutes of research changes a first call. Nobody has ten minutes before a first call.
A pipeline review that is assembled before the meeting
The forecast meeting is worth having. Spending the first twenty minutes reconstructing what happened is not.
CRM cleanup as a standing job instead of a quarterly panic
Nobody sets out to let the CRM rot. It rots because cleaning it is a four-hour job with no owner and no deadline.
Connect HubSpot to Polaris
Private-app tokens are scoped where you create them, which makes HubSpot one of the easier connections to grant narrowly.
Web search in Polaris
Nothing to authorize, nothing to store, and every query a worker runs appears in the activity feed while it works.
AI worker
The difference between an agent you prompt and an agent you assign work to.