The first wave of AI SDRs treated email infrastructure as a commodity.
11x raised at a $1B valuation. Artisan plastered the Bay Area with billboards. Regie signed 200 logos in twelve months. They all ship the same architecture: an OpenAI wrapper that drafts emails, plumbed into a generic SMTP relay (SendGrid, Mailgun, sometimes a tiny in-house pool of warmup IPs). The bet was that drafting was the hard part. It wasn't. Drafting is now a feature of a $20/mo Anthropic API key. Distribution — landing in the inbox, day after day, without getting flagged — is the part nobody solved.