Replacing the SDR org chart with a stack
The economics of an AI-led outbound function versus a six-person BDR team.
A six-person BDR team in London, fully loaded with management, tooling and OTE, costs a bridging brokerage roughly £450k a year. We have been running the equivalent function as an AI stack for our broker clients for nine months. The economics are not subtle. The interesting question is what brokers do with the cost line they get back.
What the AI stack actually costs
Inference, infrastructure, data enrichment, dialler and orchestration come in at roughly £6-£9k a month for a broker generating equivalent top-of-funnel volume to a six-person team. Add a single senior closer to handle the qualified output and the all-in number is meaningfully under £200k a year against the £450k baseline.
More importantly, it scales with volume rather than with headcount. Doubling output does not double the cost line; it adds inference and not much else.
What you give up
Tribal knowledge. A six-person BDR team accumulates a sense of the market - which lenders are quoting hot this month, which postcodes have planning logjams, which developers are quietly looking. A model can be told all of that, but a human team learns it for free.
We have largely solved this by treating market intelligence as a deliberate input to the model rather than a happy accident of having humans in the loop. It is more work, but the consistency on the other side is worth it.
What brokers do with the saving
The pattern across our client base is consistent: the saving gets reinvested into more deal closers and into brand work. The brokers who are winning in 2025 are top-heavy on senior closers and use AI for the entire funnel up to a qualified call. That ratio - one closer for every two AI 'BDRs' worth of output - would have been unthinkable in 2022.
It is the right ratio for the current market.
Replacing the SDR org chart with a stack is one of those changes that sounds dramatic when described in the abstract and feels obvious six months in. The brokers who have made the switch are not going back. The brokers who haven't are competing on a cost structure that no longer makes sense.
Capital Edge publishes one note a month on UK bridging finance, paid acquisition, and AI-led outbound. Written for brokers, by the team running the playbook.