This article was written with contributions from Toni Cadden, SDR regional manager, and Lora Kassanchuk, global head of mid-market SDRs.

AI makes it incredibly easy to prepare research reports and send large batches of personalized emails. But in a sales environment filled with white noise, a genuine human touch is a competitive advantage.

As part of an ongoing series on how AI is changing roles at Atlassian, the Teamwork Lab interviewed eight sales development representatives (SDRs) in three regions in August 2026 to understand the changes in their job role before and after AI. The lab also spoke with an SDR intern and an AE. We discovered that SDRs use AI to augment repeatable tasks like account research and drafting outreach. That allows them to spend their time and energy on value-additive activities that require a human touch. In fact, the the SDRs themselves have drawn a hard line. No AI written communications or artifacts reach customers or AEs without human review first.

The speed and volume of responses – often within days – also means that SDRs play an important role in identifying effective sales strategies and messaging. SDRs send hundreds of messages, make dozens of calls, and book meetings rapidly. That tight feedback loop makes them unusually quick and proficient at identifying when AI works and doesn’t.

AI eases the burden of prep work

The SDR role is heavy on account planning, pre-contact research, and writing outreach. But AI has shifted those responsibilities. Work that once took hours—sizing up accounts by fit, value, or buying signals and mapping stakeholders—now takes about a tenth of the time, which allows SDRs to spend more time on tasks and functions that add value.

One Atlassian rep built a system they called SDR Mission Control, with a single front door that sends different tasks to the correct sub-agent. A mid-market AE now uses the tool, while the SDR and AE share the responsibility of strategically evaluating leads. The SDR still owns the pursuit of the sales leads and the AE still owns sales strategy and other decisions about how to advance an opportunity through the process. AI has just sharpened the quality of the leads that the SDR is able to bring to the AE by handling the prep work.

[Previously] the SDR responsibility was to just send us the leads, not necessarily be part of the strategy exercise or the knowledge exercise to get this information. That was more an AE responsibility. Now it’s a shared responsibility. – Luis Vidro, account executive

One stand-out entry-level success story came from an Atlassian intern. Reps had been checking the inbound lead dashboard in Salesforce once a day. Research showed that replying to an inbound lead within an hour sharply raises conversion, and getting those alerts into Slack had been on leadership’s to-do list for four years. As one of the projects during the course of their six-week internship, the intern was able to wire the dashboard to Slack so that alerts were shared with the team in in real-time. This dovetails with our research on new grads, which found that hires with a year or less of experience were more likely to be daily AI users than other hires.

Being freed from many of the dull prep work allows the SDR to focus their work on the human decisions that matter most. SDRs are now able to reinvest their time into core duties that specifically require human contact.

One SDR went from five or six calls a week to twenty. Another used the time to sit-in on discovery calls and organize demos. But while AI has optimized the account research, it has added another layer of information overload, and presented SDRs with the new, time-consuming challenge of sorting the useful information for that particular account from the generic information.

Human contact is a hard line

Every SDR upheld a consistent boundary. Every SDR used AI to prep, but when it came to internal or external human contact, that moment required human intervention. No SDR sends AI-written emails without human review.

Atlassian’s internal AI engineering team built SDRs an agent called Sales Sidekick, which generates a personalized call script, account history, and suggested discovery questions the moment a rep dials. That is to say, the agent is the information layer and never the orchestration layer, and this is where the human side of the SDR job comes to life. The agent never decides what goes into the call, and never makes the call itself.

The ability to make the customer laugh, that ability to make the customer share information that they wouldn’t have shared otherwise – that is something that I truly believe that no AI tool can give me in any capacity. – Patrick Konadu, sales development representative

Every SDR cited human work as irreplaceable. For example, one SDR stopped using AI for outbound email, wrote their emails the way they would text a friend, and booked 10 meetings in a week. The ability to make a prospect laugh, share information that they wouldn’t otherwise have said, or handle objections is a skill set that no AI can replace.

That human discretion is also an important part of the evolving relationship between the SDR and their AE. While the argument could be made that the AE could absorb some of the prep work as AI workflows make that easier, the focus of the AE has always been to close deals, rather than build a sales pipeline. Without an SDR, there will be a gap in the market goals because no one is advancing the early stages.

SDRs also provide an invaluable service by building and testing AI workflows because their feedback loop is so tight. A rep sends hundreds of messages and makes dozens of calls a week; customers either reply, or they don’t. The volume and speed of that feedback gives the SDR team plenty of data with which to test AI workflow changes before rolling them out to the greater Atlassian sales organization.

Lora Kassanchuk, the global head of mid-market SDRs, summarizes the economics as such: “SDRs have always been naturally scrappy and resourceful. Give them a locked door and they will find a window; give them AI and suddenly they are building doors of their own.”

The bottom line

Our research discovered that while AI took over much of the prep work for an SDR, it didn’t replace human judgment and does not have the ability to build relationships.

In other words, while AI removes most of the boring prep work, it can’t replace human accountability. While an AI can help an SDR prepare for a call and take the follow-up actions to keep the momentum going, it can’t take the call itself. For any team considering whether or not to bring in AI, its most effective use case is to augment the prep while protecting the human relationships that generate the pipeline and close the deal.

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Methodology

In August and September 2026, the Atlassian Teamwork Lab held 10 semi-structured interviews, each 30 to 45 minutes long. The lab spoke with eight sales development representatives in the mid-market, enterprise, and strategic segments, based in the US, EMEA, India, and APAC, as well as an intern on an SDR team and a mid-market account executive. Time savings and results were self-reported.