I Pulled 25 AI SDR Vendors' Job Boards. Eight Are Hiring Human SDRs, and the Reqs Say What the AI Can't Do.

TL;DR: On August 15, 2026 I pulled the public applicant-tracking JSON for 25 named AI SDR and AI outbound vendors. Sixteen publish a board I could confirm belonged to the right company, carrying 520 open reqs between them. Seven of those sixteen are hiring human SDRs or BDRs, and Regie.ai advertises an eighth on its own site: 13 individual-contributor reqs plus 3 SDR-manager reqs on the boards, against 52 AE reqs and 163 engineering reqs. Read together, those reqs answer the buying question better than any demo does. The agent takes list building, sequencing, sending, CRM records and scheduling. The human keeps the phone, the qualification judgment, the objection handling, and the job of tuning the agent.

The marketing will not tell you where the machine stops. But every vendor selling an AI SDR also needs pipeline, and most run an applicant tracking system that publishes JSON to anyone who asks.

What did I actually count?

Twenty-five named vendors, checked on August 15, 2026 against four public ATS endpoints: Ashby's posting-api/job-board/{slug}, Greenhouse's boards-api/v1/boards/{slug}/jobs, plus Lever's and Workable's equivalents. Where a slug did not resolve I read the company's careers page to find the board it links to, which is how Clay turned up under claylabs and Rox under Rox-Data-Corp.

Sixteen published a board I could confirm was theirs. Regie.ai publishes openings on its own site instead, and I read those there. Eight I could not read: 11x, Landbase, AiSDR, Warmly, Jeeva, Salesforge, Instantly and Smartlead. 11x and Landbase both link their careers pages to Ashby boards that return zero postings through Ashby's posting API and its GraphQL endpoint alike, so I have no evidence either way about them.

Which vendors are hiring humans to do outbound?

Vendor	ATS board	Reqs	SDR/BDR	AE	GTM eng	Eng
Artisan	Ashby artisan	3	1	0	1	0
Nooks	Ashby nooks	46	4	3	5	15
Clay	Ashby claylabs	73	3	6	8	15
Common Room	Ashby commonroom	10	0	1	1	3
lemlist	Ashby lemlist	8	0	1	0	3
Unify	Ashby unify	8	0	0	1	6
Relevance AI	Ashby relevanceai	11	0	0	1	5
Rox	Ashby Rox-Data-Corp	24	0	2	4	9
Qualified	Ashby qualified	0	0	0	0	0
Amplemarket	Greenhouse amplemarket	13	1	2	0	6
Alta	Greenhouse alta	9	0	2	2	2
Apollo.io	Greenhouse apolloio	43	1	5	5	8
Clari + Salesloft	Greenhouse salesloft	40	0	0	2	15
Gong	Greenhouse gongio	97	4	26	3	25
ZoomInfo	Greenhouse zoominfo	104	0	4	1	44
Outreach	Lever outreach	31	2	0	4	7

That is 520 open reqs: 16 human sales-development roles, 52 AE roles, 38 GTM-engineering and forward-deployed roles, and 163 core engineering roles. The sixteen sales-development reqs, named: Artisan's Business Development Representative (posted 2026-07-29); four at Nooks, including two Senior SDR, Enterprise; three ClayDR Manager reqs at Clay, which is what Clay calls its SDR managers; one at Amplemarket; one BDR at Apollo.io; four at Gong; two at Outreach. That is seven of the sixteen boards. Regie.ai is an eighth, off-board: its Sales Development Rep in Bellevue is listed on its own careers page, not on the stale Greenhouse board its slug resolves to.

A req is not headcount. A job posting is an intention, and intentions go stale. Artisan's own board proves it: three live reqs quote the company's ARR as $8M+, $9M+ and $10M+ depending on when each was written. Read all of this as what these companies say they want, not as a census of who works there.

What do the reqs say the human actually does?

This is worth more than the tally. Artisan's BDR req draws the line explicitly: "You'll own outbound pipeline generation, working alongside Ava, our AI BDR. She handles the lists, the outreach, the records, and the scheduling. You handle everything she can't." Everything she can't, itemized in the same req: cold call prospects, call every inbound lead within minutes, turn conversations into booked meetings for the AE team, carry a quota of meetings held rather than activity, and work with the product team to make Ava better. The hire is "the first Business Development Representative on the Artisan team," at $60,000 to $80,000 OTE, and must be "comfortable being the only human on the team."

Every other req points the same way. Nooks, whose stated mission is to "10x every seller by automating the busywork so they can focus on what humans do best," wants an SDR who "shouldn't be afraid to pick up the phone" and does "your own account research to ensure relevant, personalized messaging." Amplemarket's SDR exists to "generate qualified meetings for Amplemarket's Account Executives." Regie.ai, which sells prospecting agents, wants someone to "own prospecting and drive top-of-funnel outreach across a variety of channels," in office five days a week.

The second pattern is the one buyers underestimate. Across the sixteen boards there are 38 reqs for GTM engineers, forward deployed engineers and solutions consultants, roughly two and a half times the SDR count. Artisan's Forward Deployed GTM Architect req says why: "Ava can do the work of an outbound team across all of it, but only if someone architects the system underneath her and gets an organization to agree on it." Unify's only revenue-side opening is a GTM Engineering Intern. Outreach is hiring a forward deployed engineer specifically for its AI revenue agents. The category is not eliminating the outbound job. It is splitting it into a phone job and a systems job, and 82 live GTM engineer postings spell out what the systems job involves.

Does the Artisan BDR req mean the billboard was wrong?

No, and framing it that way would be lazy. Artisan's public position has been human plus AI for over a year. In April 2025 the CEO told TechCrunch the "stop hiring humans" billboards were "mostly just for attention" and that "human labor becomes more valuable when you have the AI content," while the company employed 35 people and was hiring 22 more. In April 2026 he expanded that into don't stop hiring humans, stop hiring the wrong humans, with a line better than any gotcha: "We've probably hired over 100 people to have the 40 people that we have now."

The story is not a confession. It is the distance between what a billboard sells and what a job req specifies, and the req is the honest document because someone has to show up and do what it says. The claim that this category replaces your SDR team is a marketing artifact. The claim these vendors make to candidates, in writing, with a compensation band attached, is that the agent handles volume and a person handles judgment.

Why did I throw seven boards away?

Because ATS slugs are first come, first served, and a wrong one silently corrupts a count. boards-api.greenhouse.io/v1/boards/nooks/jobs returns twelve real jobs at a company called Nooks that builds Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities for the defense sector: Site Leads, an ISE Industrial Security Specialist, a VP of Operations. Nothing to do with nooks.ai. Greenhouse's octave is a mental health practice, serif is Serif Biomedicines, apollo is Apollo Education Systems. Ashby's vector is a freight logistics company and attention is an AI engineering startup, not the sales AI. Lever's reply is Valorem Reply, a Microsoft consultancy. All seven would have looked like clean data in a spreadsheet, so I confirmed every board from the company description inside its own JSON before counting a row.

What does this not prove?

It does not prove these companies employ human SDRs today, only that they are advertising for them. It says nothing about the vendors whose boards I could not read, and those skew toward the smaller, louder end of the category, which is where the result might differ. Two of the eight SDR-hiring vendors, Gong and Apollo.io, are incumbents that never claimed to replace SDRs, so they carry less weight than Artisan or Nooks. And an SDR req at a 500-person vendor means something different from one at a 40-person vendor.

What it does establish is a documented answer to the question the demos dodge. Buyers who treat the demo as the deployment end up as churn statistics. The vendors' own hiring says the surviving configuration is an agent doing volume, a person on the phone, and a person on the system. That is also the half of Gartner's forecast nobody quotes: agents outnumbering sellers ten to one, with fewer than 40% of those sellers reporting a productivity gain. If you are budgeting for an AI SDR and have not budgeted for the other two, you are buying a different product than the one these companies staff for themselves.