AI Agents for Sales & Marketing: What the 8 in Our Index Actually Do

If you are shopping for an “AI sales agent,” the first thing to know is that the category name hides three different products. Of the 8 tools in our Sales & marketing agents category, 4 go find people who have never heard of you, 2 work the traffic already on your site, and 2 are neither. That last pair is the data and research layer that feeds the other two jobs, and buying across those lines is the common expensive mistake.

The second thing to know is the axis that actually decides whether this works in your org. It is whether a human approves each message before it goes out. Two of these tools send and reply without a rep in the loop. Two are explicitly built so that never happens. That is a hiring-and-process decision as much as a software one.

Every figure below was re-derived on 23 August 2026 against the 8 published listings in this category, out of 94 published listings in the index. The method is at the bottom.

The three jobs

Four of the eight do outbound, two work inbound traffic, and two are infrastructure that neither sends nor receives.

Tool	Job	Sends outbound?	Human approves each send?
Artisan	Outbound BDR	Yes	No. Ava replies and books unattended
11x	Outbound SDR + voice	Yes	No, “without a rep touching each step”
Amplemarket	Outbound engagement	Yes	Yes, every draft, explicitly
Unify	Outbound, seller-driven	Yes	Yes, augments a seller rather than replacing one
Qualified	Inbound conversion	No	n/a, engages visitors on your site
Warmly	Inbound + account scoring	Partly	n/a, de-anonymizes and engages traffic
Clay	Data & research layer	Via Sequencer	n/a, you build the workflow
Rox	Account research & CRM hygiene	No	n/a, writes to your CRM rather than to prospects

Outbound: find people who don’t know you

Artisan and 11x are the two built to replace SDR headcount rather than assist it. Artisan’s Ava sources from 250M+ verified B2B contacts, enriches through 22+ data sources, and runs multi-channel campaigns. Since the May 2026 “Ava 2.0” rebuild she also handles replies and objections herself, booking straight onto a rep’s calendar. 11x sells two named workers: Alice runs the SDR workflow end to end, and Julian is a voice agent that places and answers calls.

Amplemarket looks similar from the outside and is deliberately the opposite. Its Duo layer watches buying signals and drafts the message, but a rep reviews, edits or dismisses each draft before anything sends. Amplemarket is explicit about this in its own positioning, and its listing names the alternative directly: teams that want a fully autonomous SDR should look at 11x or Artisan.

Unify sits on the same side of that line. It offers one chat-based agent with 50+ skills that a seller drives, described as augmenting a human rather than replacing one.

Inbound: work the traffic you already have

Qualified is Salesforce-native by design, reading and writing CRM data directly rather than syncing through an integration layer. Piper chats with visitors in real time, qualifies them against your ICP, and books the meeting or routes to a rep. Salesforce acquired Qualified on 1 April 2026 and folded Piper into its Agentforce product line, so the roadmap now sits inside Salesforce rather than with an independent vendor. The native CRM dependency is unchanged: the listing still rules out teams on a non-Salesforce CRM.

Warmly starts a step earlier, identifying who the anonymous traffic is. Warmly reports roughly 65% company-level match rates, while independent reviewers put person-level matching nearer 15–25%. HubSpot announced an agreement to acquire Warmly on 30 June 2026, and the listing states existing contracts, pricing and integrations stay unchanged in the near term. Its own guidance is that ROI is hardest to justify under roughly 5,000 monthly B2B visitors, which is worth checking against your analytics before you take a demo.

The layer underneath

Clay and Rox are not campaign tools, and buying them expecting one will disappoint. Clay is a GTM data platform: spreadsheet-like tables where each column can run an enrichment, an API call or an AI prompt, with Claygent researching bespoke data points off websites and filings.

Rox runs an always-on agent per account, pulling calendar, email, Slack, support and CRM data to flag deal risk, draft call prep and write updates back. It sits on top of Salesforce or HubSpot, which stay the system of record.

What you can and cannot check before you buy

This is where the category is weakest, and the numbers are worth stating plainly.

• All 8 are cloud-only. Not one of the 8 is self-hostable. If your security review requires on-prem or VPC deployment, this category has nothing for you today.
• 3 of 8 have a free tier: Clay, Rox and Unify. The same three are the only ones you can start using without a sales conversation.
• 2 of 8 publish no price at all. Artisan and Qualified quote every tier custom, via a demo. The other six publish at least one figure.
• 7 of 8 offer an API: Amplemarket, Warmly, Unify, Qualified, Artisan, 11x and Clay. Rox is the only exception; its listing records no confirmed public developer API.
• 6 of 8 will not tell you which model runs them. Only Clay (GPT and Claude, selectable) and Unify (GPT-5.6 on its Business tier) name it. We cover why that pattern holds across the whole index in our model transparency census.
• 3 of 8 name a rival inside their own “not for you if” copy. Amplemarket points at 11x and Artisan, Rox points at Clay, 11x and Artisan, and Unify points at all three. In a category this young that is unusually useful, because the vendors have already drawn the lines for you.

Where the prices actually land

The cheapest real entry point is Unify’s Base tier at $20/seat/month. Rox’s Individual tier starts at $100/month for 10,000 agent actions, and Clay’s Launch tier is $185/month. All three sit above genuinely free starter tiers, so you can see the product before any of that.

Above them the category gets steep quickly. Amplemarket publishes a $600/month Startup tier covering 2 seats on an annual term. Warmly sells three tiers priced by the quarter, from $4,875 to $9,750, with no monthly option and no permanent free tier. 11x publishes the top of its range: Alice’s Growth tier at $3,750/month, and Julian at $2,417/month for chat or $5,333/month for voice.

11x publishes prices and still gates them. Every one of those tiers is marked “billed annually; still requires a sales call” in its own pricing, so nothing routes through self-serve checkout. Published is not the same as self-serve, and this category is the clearest place we have found where the two come apart.

Pricing that moves faster than the review sites

Two listings in this group taught us to distrust aggregator pricing pages, and it is worth repeating because it will affect your own research.

Third-party pricing pages dated April to June 2026 still describe Unify as enterprise-only, with a “Growth” plan between $700 and $1,740/month and no free tier. A live check of Unify’s own pricing page finds none of that. The company has moved to self-serve per-seat pricing starting at $0.

Warmly moved the other way. Older reviews describe a free tier and monthly pricing, while its current pricing page sells three tiers on quarterly or annual contracts only. In both directions the vendor’s own live pricing page was right and the review sites were stale. Check it yourself on the day you buy.

Choosing

Work backwards from your bottleneck rather than from the category name.

• Not enough people know you exist. Go outbound, then answer the autonomy question honestly. Pick Artisan or 11x if you genuinely want messages going out unattended, or Amplemarket or Unify if a rep should approve them. Do not buy the autonomous option and then add an approval step, because you will have paid for the part you disabled.
• Traffic arrives and leaves. Pick Qualified if you run Salesforce and want real-time conversation, keeping in mind it is now a Salesforce-owned product on the Agentforce roadmap. Pick Warmly if you first need to know who those anonymous visitors are and you clear roughly 5,000 monthly B2B visitors; it is now HubSpot-owned as well, with its own listing stating pricing and integrations hold steady for now.
• Your data is too poor for either to work. Pick Clay, and budget for the learning curve. Its own listing warns off small teams without technical support, and credit spend is genuinely hard to predict. Pick Rox instead if the data you are missing is about accounts you already have rather than ones you don’t.

How we counted

The denominator on this page is 8: every listing published in our Sales & marketing agents category on 23 August 2026, out of 94 published listings in the index overall. It is a census of that category, not a survey of the market, and a bigger vendor we have not indexed yet is not counted anywhere here.

Deployment, free tier, pricing tiers, model and API availability are read from our own listing records, each researched against the vendor’s live pages. Every one of those facts resolved cleanly to a yes or no for all 8 listings this time; the previous version of this page carried an undetermined API case that has since been resolved on the underlying listings.

Frequently asked

Are any of these actually autonomous? Two are, in the specific sense that they send and reply without per-message human review: Artisan’s Ava and 11x’s Alice. The other six either keep a human in the approval loop or don’t do outbound sending at all.

Can I self-host any of them? No. All 8 are cloud-only, with no exceptions.

Which can I try without talking to a salesperson? Clay, Rox and Unify, all of which have a free tier. Amplemarket publishes a 14-day trial but publishes a price only for its entry tier. We hold no trial length for the other six, which means we could not find one, not that none exists.

Do these replace an SDR? Artisan and 11x are sold on that premise. Amplemarket, Unify and Rox position against it, describing themselves as augmenting a seller or complementing an existing CRM. Both models are defensible. Run a measured pilot rather than buying on the claim. Rox is the only one of the eight whose listing carries named customer figures, with Ramp citing a 10-15% conversion-rate increase and New Relic 50%+ faster rep ramp, and those are the vendor’s references rather than our measurement.

Which is cheapest? Unify at $20/seat/month, or free on the Unify, Rox and Clay starter tiers.

Does it matter that Qualified and Warmly were acquired this year? For buyers, mostly in what it signals about staying power. Salesforce closed its purchase of Qualified in April 2026 and HubSpot announced its agreement to buy Warmly in June 2026. Both listings state pricing and product stay put for now, and both point at the biggest practical risk being longer-term: a roadmap that increasingly serves the parent company’s own CRM rather than standing alone.

---

Every fact here comes from our own listing research across the 8 tools in this category, each verified against the vendor’s live pages, and re-derived on 23 August 2026. Pricing and model details change often in this category. If you find something out of date, tell us and we’ll re-check it.