Feb 2025: Revolutionizing Sales with Outreach's AI Prospecting Agent

The beauty of sales is that it’s constantly in motion, and the heart of sales’ current momentum lies within AI. An increasingly demanding market (longer sales timelines, decreasing win rates, more required touches.) requires sellers to build more meaningful connections, close deals faster, and navigate complex buying processes – all with the same number of hours in a day. In sales, time is money. And efficiency is the gift we strive to give at Outreach. It’s also why we’re excited to announce Outreach’s newest AI agent: the Outreach AI Prospecting Agent, coming February 2025.

Selling is a fundamentally human activity. It’s not a transaction; it’s a transfer of enthusiasm. The magic happens when reps are face-to-face with buyers, yet reps spend a significant amount of time on non-selling tasks such as manual research and updating complex CRMs. We believe that AI should handle the heavy lifting so sellers can shine everywhere AI can’t.

Our relentless drive to empower sales teams has led us to pioneer cutting-edge technologies that automate workflows, surface critical insights, and give sellers back their time to do what they do best. We’re expanding our comprehensive AI suite to include our AI Prospecting Agent.

SVP of Product Nithya Lakshmanan demonstrates how the Outreach AI Prospecting Agent revolutionizes the prospecting process, turning it from a time-consuming chore into a seamless, automated workflow. Whether you’re a sales leader looking to drive efficient revenue growth or a seller aiming to maximize your potential, this innovation will change the way you think about prospecting forever.

A New Era: AI Augmenting Human Sellers

We are at an exciting juncture where AI is enabling human sellers to perform at their peak potential like never before. At Outreach, AI isn’t just a buzzword; it’s a cornerstone of our innovation. From predictive analytics to natural language processing (NLP), we’ve embraced AI since the beginning.

Kaia is the first live AI to coach sellers in the moment, during conversations. And we have added even more AI capabilities to Kaia this year, with Smart Coaching and Custom Topics.

This year, we shipped several Assistive AI features with Generative AI. Outreach summarizes conversations and next steps from every meeting, every call. We help sellers write professional emails in a flash with Smart Email Assist.

You can ask questions about your accounts and deals to quickly identify risks and buying signals from conversations - what has the customer shared about competitor products,  what are their pricing objections and more.

From Copilots to Agents

Now, we are witnessing another leap forward in the industry, as we go from Assistive to Agentic AI.  

What does that mean? AI is evolving from being an assistant or a co-pilot to the human, to becoming a true partner in our work. Agents can handle entire workflows from start to finish, almost like having a skilled teammate who knows exactly what to do.

It means your sales teams can break free from many repetitive tasks to focus on what they do best – connecting with customers and building meaningful relationships.

Our founders built Outreach to make SDRs the superheroes of the revenue org to help them prospect effectively, build pipeline quickly. Today, prospecting is every seller’s job. Cost-reduction initiatives and an increased focus on customer expansion revenue mean that Account Executives and Account Managers find themselves responsible for self-sourcing more of their own pipeline.

But talk to any sales leader or seller, and they will tell you that prospecting can still be time-consuming, mundane, and mentally taxing, but it’s a fundamental part of the job for the seller to make their quota. 

Sellers have to spend time to target the right accounts, laboriously painfully going through multiple apps and websites for this research, and then identify the right prospects in each account.

Then there is time spent to develop and land the right message with every prospect. This adds up to a LOT of non-selling tasks, almost 8-10 hrs every week!

Introducing Outreach’s AI Prospecting Agent

The magic happens when sellers are in front of prospects: listening to their needs, diagnosing problems, and offering solutions. It’s time to rethink prospecting. Sellers focus on building the human connection, let AI do the rest.

Imagine having a tireless AI partner that handles all of this manual work for you, around the clock. This is what we are delivering to you with our new AI prospecting agent:

1. Automate Account Research

Our AI is constantly researching your accounts, analyzing signals from multiple data sources, so you don’t miss a beat with your customers.

2. Personalize Content at Scale

Gone are the days of generic outreach  and simply hoping that the prospect will respond. Our AI crafts relevant content for every prospect, so you engage them with the right message every single time.

3. Generate Pipeline 24/7

The agent is working non-stop 24/7, identifying opportunities, building the pipeline, and mitigating risks across accounts.

AI Account Research

AI is working in the background finding the most recent and relevant signals for your account and prospects: 1st party, 2nd party, and 3rd party signals. First party includes signals mined from your engagement data such as a negative sentiment from a stakeholder or third party buying signal like if a company is hiring in a specific department or received new funding.

It also finds prospect level signals such as a recent job change so you can act swiftly when a critical stakeholder leaves an account or joins a new company. With all of these signal updates automatically enriching accounts in their book of business, sellers can act quickly to capitalize on a brand new opportunity in an account or mitigate risks.

AI also performs deep research on a target account from the company's website, 10-K statements, press releases, news and posts. 

Sellers get an account summary that is ready in seconds, not hours! With all of this research done by AI, sellers can easily prioritize which accounts and prospects to focus on.

AI Content Generation

Next, let’s go into how AI automatically personalizes the content. 

The Seller Content Hub is where you upload your company’s messaging on value prop and pain points addressed by your products & services. This is leveraged in creating customer facing content so it resonates with every buyer, in every industry – in every segment.

All of the automatic account research and messaging is available for AI to deliver personalized messages at scale. AI crafts messages for every touchpoint on every channel: Email, LinkedIn, and even Call Scripts. For email, you can personalize your subject line, opening sentence, or the entire email. 

AI personalization is not just for the sequence content. As the accounts are automatically updated, Smart Email Assist also gets a boost so sellers are alerted when new signals come in and can send highly relevant messages, engaging prospects at the right time.

Who doesn’t like to save time by having AI do most of the heavy lifting? Just imagine the impact this could have on your engagement and watch those conversion rates go up!

AI Prospecting Agent

And the magic continues when you connect this research and content to automate the entire prospecting workflow.

Using the new Prospecting Agent, you can set up targeted plays by sales motion or segment - Inbound, Outbound, New Logo or Expansion.

Identify accounts to target based on firmographic data such as industry or revenue, your prior engagements or specific buying signals in that account.

Then, you specify the personas. The agent can identify existing prospects to target, or even identify new prospects that don’t exist in your CRM yet. A great example is an expansion play, where the agent can identify new personas for that next product offering you want to upsell into the account.

Next, the Agent automatically enrolls these prospects into sequences. 

As accounts and prospects are being researched in the background, every content in the sequence can be unique and personalized to that prospect.

And the best part? It’s your choice on how autonomous the agent should be.

• For the flows where you want the human to be in the loop, the sequence steps can be manual. AI is still doing the research and crafting the content. Sellers get this personalized content ready to go when they start their day. They just have to review and hit send.
• For segments where you are comfortable deploying the agent autonomously, configure a fully automated sequence with a hand-off to the human when the prospect is ready to engage.

In the future, the agent will take this automation further – dropping voice messages in the voice of the seller and sending automatic replies.

We just went through how the new AI prospecting Agent from Outreach - gives you the latest insights on your accounts, generates unique content for each prospect, and automates the entire prospecting workflow.

What makes Outreach's AI Prospecting Agent different

Now, you’ve probably seen many agents in the market. Here is what makes the Outreach agent uniquely suited to help you scale your peak performance like no other agent.

Prospecting, whether for new logos or within a book of existing customers, is not a one-size-fits-all job.  Outreach customers can deploy Agents that are tailored to their revenue funnel and for their sales motions.

1. Relevant, connected data

Outreach consolidates signals from third-party sources, integrates with first-party data from your own systems, and most importantly, it is the only platform that gives you first party signals from the engagement data, based on the most trusted source: what your customers are telling you.

That means that every seller on Outreach and the Outreach Agent is a data-driven, signal-based seller that finds the best fit prospects, and engages them with relevant content for their unique needs.

2. One trusted platform

Outreach Agents are built within the same enterprise-grade platform your sales, account management, and RevOps teams use every day to run their business. It is trusted, secure, and integrated –you don’t need any point solutions, expensive data clouds or IT resources to use the Outreach Agent.  Outreach admins can quickly build and deploy Outreach agents that execute a prospecting workflow bespoke to your company’s sales motion. 

Now you can build your target lists, research, and engage all in one platform: Outreach. No more swivel chairing across apps and websites.

3. Flexible - Copilot or Autopilot

We want to ensure your agent does not spam your customers and erode your company's reputation. So we let you decide just how autonomous your agent is.  

If you target strategic accounts or existing customers, you want human oversight. AI has still done all the heavy lifting, so the seller simply needs to review it before engaging the customer.

If you have a long tail of unassigned accounts or a low-risk segment, dial it up to a fully autonomous flow. AI helps you scale fast in these segments without adding more resources.

Agents can be used to engage new logos or existing accounts.  It can target existing prospects or source new prospects that are not in your CRM. This is the ultimate flexibility that you get only with the Outreach prospecting agent.

Stay tuned: The vision for Outreach’s AI Agents

This is just the beginning. Our journey with AI Sales Agents is starting with reducing research and prospecting burdens on your sales reps.

Our vision is to deploy agents across the sales process just like our platform today. Imagine having a Coaching Agent, a Deal Agent, or a Forecasting Agent to help you reduce the amount of time spent deliberating on what steps to take to move the deal forward or guessing at where you’ll finish the month, quarter, or year. 

I am sure you are wondering when you can get access to this. Stay tuned as we will be revealing more details in our February release.