AI selling AI: The bots say they’re great at new business – but they’re never getting mine

Cold emails, bad grammar and messages that are condescending or insulting. This is how AI tells us that they’re the best at growth generation. But the truth is, referrals, relationships and nurtured contacts are where the real biz lies. More than 80% of B2B buyers say their vendor relationship started with a referral and referred leads convert at a rate that's up to 70% better than leads sourced any other way.

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I get AI sales messages every day. They invade my inbox and haunt me on LinkedIn. All of them promise to get me more new business than I can handle.

But almost none of them are any good.

And I don’t mean they're boring. I mean they actively put me off. Almost make me want to vomit.

I get cold emails proudly explaining that they never send cold emails to win leads. I get messages that open by telling me that everything I'm doing is shit. I get outreach that has clearly skimmed my last three LinkedIn posts, drawn some grand conclusion, then thanked me for my “valuable insights” like I’ve just given them the secret of life. One recent message guaranteed to book me sixty meetings a month – so if I do that, where do I find the time to do the work my clients pay for?

But that’s the pitch: "buy this AI and we’ll win you tons of new business", sent to me by the very thing proving, message after message, that it won’t.

The pattern, once you notice it

Once you start paying attention to this slop, the same tells show up consistently.

Typos and phrasing that read like a bad translation, or something written by a Dalek that learned English from a spreadsheet. Endless follow-ups, each one promising to be the last one, but they never are. Research so thin it assumes my small consultancy has the AI budget of Google. Offers for services I would never need, pitched with total confidence, because nobody even glanced at what I do.

None of this is a coincidence.

Nor is it as new as it may feel.

How fast the problem has grown

Before ChatGPT launched in late 2022, AI-generated pieces made up roughly 10% of all new content. By May 2025, that figure had mushroomed into 51% of everything published online.

LinkedIn moved even faster. Suspected AI use on the platform jumped 189% in the two months immediately after ChatGPT’s release, and by October 2024, more than half of all long-form posts showed clear signs of being AI-generated or AI-assisted. However, LinkedIn let the complaints pour in for years before doing anything about it. Of course they did. It kept the dollars coming. Then, when the outcry was finally starting to hurt their growth, they rolled out a “Seems like AI slop” reporting button which suppressed flagged posts across the platform.

Quite frankly, this is what the entire genre of AI sales outreach deserves and it should have happened long ago.

Even the AI shills know it isn’t working

The thing that surprised me most while conducting research for this piece was that some of the best evidence that AI-generated sales outreach doesn’t work comes from the same people who sell those AI tools.

The same people.

Their own published figures show average cold email reply rates falling from 8.5% in 2019 to around 3.43% today, a decline they partly attribute to low-effort, AI-generated volume flooding every inbox. They also calmly point out that over 40% of all cold email traffic is now believed to be AI-written, and that fully AI-generated emails get flagged as spam at close to three times the rate of those written by a human.

I don't know about you, but I'm still struggling with the fact that these figures are coming from the companies that sell AI outreach tools, admitting, in their own marketing content, that their product often fails. This is like a car dealer selling you a vehicle they promise will run for a million miles, knowing full well that the engine will blow up as soon as you drive off the lot.

Don't the vendors realise how insane this is?

I’m sure some do, but they carry on anyway because the volume math still beats paying people to write properly. Others may believe their own pitch completely. However, it really doesn’t matter, because the ‘buyers’ have caught on and they don’t like what they see. Around 52% of consumers say they disengage the moment they suspect content is AI-generated, and preference for AI-made content has fallen from 60% in 2023 to just 26% today.

So what works?

In more than thirty years of doing this, I’ve rarely gained a client from a cold pitch that arrived out of nowhere. Nearly every piece of business I’ve won traces back to a relationship, a referral, or someone remembering a conversation from months or even years ago.

But you don’t have to take my rose-tinted word for it. The data supports my observations.

Roughly 65% of new B2B business comes through referrals and recommendations. 84% of B2B buyers say their relationship with a new supplier started as a referral, and referred leads convert at a rate that's up to 70% better than leads sourced any other way. Research from the Wharton Business School also found referred customers to be more profitable and considerably cheaper to acquire than customers won through other channels, with acquisition costs running at around £18 less per customer.

Of course, none of this happens by chance. Relationships are time consuming. You have to stay in touch, do favours without expecting anything back, and turn up consistently. That’s a lot slower than AI firing off five hundred emails an hour. But the difference is, relationships work and AI slop doesn’t.

Ten techniques that really get new B2B business

These aren’t theory. This is what I’ve seen succeed, repeatedly, over many years.

Technique	Why it works
Don’t ask for anything at the start	Most people need half a dozen genuine interactions with you before they’ll trust you with their money or their reputation
Help for free where you reasonably can	It almost always pays back more than it costs, and it’s memorable in a way a sales pitch never is
Never hit a new LinkedIn connection with a pitch straight away	Nobody warms to a stranger who tries to sell the second they’ve said hi. Would you buy from someone who did that at a party? No, you wouldn't
Stay in touch, even just to say hello	Relationships fade through neglect far more often than through anything either side got wrong
Turn up in person as often as you can	Events, conferences, even the local park run. In my experience, 80% of success is just showing up
Never miss or run late for an in-person meeting	First impressions carry more weight than almost anything you’ll say once you’re actually in the room
Ask happy clients directly for referrals	Most satisfied clients won’t refer you unprompted. It has to be asked for, clearly and occasionally
Publish something worth reading before you ever pitch	Good thought leadership makes 60% of B2B decision-makers more willing to pay a premium and 86% more likely to shortlist you for work, without a single sales call
Favour warm introductions over cold ones	This skips most of the trust-building work a stranger has to do from a standing start
Keep a record of anyone who matters to you and use it as your contact book	Good intentions fade over time. A simple, deliberate habit of checking in doesn’t. I keep a detailed log of every contact, every interaction – and I go back and reach out regardless of if there’s any business there. Keep in mind that only 5% of your contacts are open to new business at any time. You won’t know when that window opens. The only way to find out is to stay in touch

And that’s it, the whole method. It works with no paid subscriptions needed, but there's one caveat - don't rely on any task in isolation. You have to manage this as a multi-layered process that needs constant attention. It's not a one and done and it never will be.

Final word

I’ve had some absolute crap sent my way in 2026. What’s the worst AI sales pitch that’s landed in your inbox this year? Tell me, I'm interested to know.

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Follow Chris Godfrey for regular insights and opinion on the business of content & marketing. Subscribe to CONTENTED now

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