Key terms
Sally is your AI copilot. She powers every piece of AI-driven work in Salestools — researching prospects, drafting personalised messages across email and LinkedIn, managing replies, and surfacing the one approval that matters most on your Dashboard each day. Sally writes per lead, not per template, so every message is tailored to that specific person’s role, company, and context. AI SDR is a guided, seven-step wizard that configures a complete sales agent for you. You work through Persona, Audience, Voice, Channels, Playbook, and Guardrails in sequence, and a live preview rail on the right updates as you go. AI SDR is the fastest path to a working agent — best when you want results quickly without hand-building a cadence. Automation is the hands-on cadence editor. You wire each step yourself — channel, message, delay, condition, and exit rule — with full control over timing, branching, and prompts. Automation is best when you want to control every detail of the sequence or build something the AI SDR wizard doesn’t cover. Both AI SDR and Automation deploy into the same AI Agents list, where each running agent enrolls leads and works them step by step. ICP Profile (Ideal Customer Profile) describes the companies you want to reach — industry, company size, location, technology stack, and other firmographic filters. You create and manage ICP profiles in your AI Library and link them when building an agent to define which companies get enrolled. Persona Profile describes the people you want to reach — their job title, seniority level, and function within a company. Link a Persona profile in the agent builder to narrow enrollment to specific buyer types inside your target companies. The four persona roles — Decision Maker, Champion, Influencer, and End User — are how Salestools buckets leads inside a cadence based on their job title. You can give each role its own message prompt so the same step reads completely differently for a CEO than for an analyst, without writing a separate sequence for each. Playbook is a ready-made cadence shape — for example, a 5-touch outbound sequence or a light 3-touch follow-up. Selecting a playbook sets your sequence structure in a single click. Choosing Custom flow hands you off to the Automation builder to design the cadence yourself from scratch. CoPilot mode means Sally drafts every message and waits for your approval before anything sends. Use CoPilot when you want full review control, are testing a new audience, or are sending to high-value prospects where precision matters. AutoPilot mode means Sally sends autonomously within the daily caps, quiet hours, and cooldown windows you configure in Guardrails. Use AutoPilot for high-volume prospecting sequences where you trust the messaging and want Sally to work without interruption.You can switch an agent between CoPilot and AutoPilot at any time from the agent settings — you don’t need to rebuild anything.
How AI SDR and Automation compare
Both tools produce the same kind of agent and both support CoPilot and AutoPilot modes.
Build an agent with AI SDR
The AI SDR wizard walks you through seven steps. A live preview rail on the right updates with your trigger, channels, and estimated daily sends as you go.1
Open the builder
Go to AI Agents → Create AI Agent in the left sidebar. The Builders area opens on the AI SDR tab by default.
2
Set your Persona and Audience
On the Persona step, name the agent, choose who Sally signs messages as, and link an ICP profile and a Persona profile from your AI Library to define who gets enrolled. Leave them blank to reach all website visitors.On the Audience step, preview the people who match your filters. You can pin specific prospects to enroll only them, or leave the audience open to enroll everyone who matches.
3
Configure the Voice
Pick a tone (formal, conversational, direct, etc.), add words or phrases Sally should never use, and write free-text instructions for how she should sound and what angles to lead with. Click Save as prompt to store your voice settings as a reusable prompt, or select a prompt you’ve saved before. Sally keeps one voice across the whole cadence and adapts the angle automatically based on each lead’s persona role.
4
Pick your Channels
Turn on the channels the agent should use — Email, LinkedIn, Phone, or Calendar — and set a daily cap per channel. You can also select a reply handler to manage incoming replies automatically; leave it blank and replies route to your inbox for manual handling.
5
Choose a Playbook
Select a cadence shape — for example, 5-touch outbound or light 3-touch. To design the sequence step by step yourself, choose Custom flow, which opens the Automation builder with your existing agent context pre-loaded.
6
Set Guardrails and launch
On the Guardrails step, configure:
- Aggressiveness — drives daily message volume (light / moderate / aggressive)
- Cooldown window — minimum gap between contacts to the same prospect
- Business hours only — restricts sends to working hours in the prospect’s timezone
- Daily trigger cap — maximum new prospects enrolled per day
Build a cadence in Automation
The Automation builder gives you a vertical cadence you control step by step. Toggle the header between Plain English (a readable summary of the flow) and Flow (the editable step cards), and choose CoPilot or AutoPilot before activating.1
Open the Automation tab
Go to AI Agents → Create AI Agent, then switch to the Automation tab in the Builders area.
2
Configure the trigger and audience
Click Configure on the Enter when card to set a data source — Find Leads, My Leads, My Companies, Website visitors, or Intent signals — and apply filters. The Audience tab groups matching leads into the four persona roles with counts. Check specific people to pin them, or leave the audience open to enroll everyone who matches.
3
Add and arrange steps
Add a step for each touch, pick its channel (email, LinkedIn invite, LinkedIn message, call, and more), and set a delay (send now, or after a number of minutes, hours, or days). Reorder steps with the up and down arrows. Add IF/THEN conditions — replied, connected, not connected, visited, opened, clicked — to branch the flow based on prospect behaviour.
4
Write the message for each step
Open a messaging step’s inspector. Select a persona chip (Decision Maker, Champion, Influencer, or End User) to write a prompt scoped to that role, or leave none selected to write a base prompt for all leads. Type / to insert a variable like the prospect’s first name. Open the Preview tab to generate the real message Sally would send for that persona and check that it reads as intended.
5
Set exit rules and test
In the Exit rules panel, choose when the agent should stop for a lead — on email or LinkedIn reply, a booked meeting, a no-reply timeout, or if the lead is already enrolled in another active cadence. Use Test run to preview the full cadence against one real lead, and send a test message to yourself before going live.
Unsubscribe and hard opt-outs always stop an agent immediately — this exit rule can never be disabled.
6
Activate the agent
Choose CoPilot or AutoPilot, then click Activate. Your agent appears in the AI Agents list and starts enrolling the audience you configured.
CoPilot vs. AutoPilot at a glance
CoPilot Mode
Sally drafts every message and queues it for your approval. Nothing sends until you click Approve & send. Use this when testing new audiences, targeting high-value accounts, or any time you want full review control.
AutoPilot Mode
Sally sends autonomously within your daily caps, cooldown windows, and business-hours settings. Use this for high-volume sequences where you trust the messaging and want Sally to work without interruption.
Explore the builders
AI SDR Builder
Step-by-step walkthrough of the full seven-step guided wizard.
Automation Builder
Deep dive into hand-building cadences with conditions, delays, and per-persona prompts.
AI Library
Create and manage your ICP profiles, persona profiles, and saved prompts.
Find Leads
Search the 240M-record graph to build audiences for your agents.