# AI sales agent: the data jobs it can do today

What an AI sales agent can do with live data today: find companies, find and verify emails, enrich lists and research accounts, and where a human decides.

## Summary

Search for an AI sales agent and you find tools that promise to book meetings while you sleep. Open one and the real work is much smaller and more useful: it finds the right companies, finds the right people, gets a working email and writes a first draft. The agent is good at the data work around a sale. The sale is still yours.

This post lists the sales data jobs an AI agent can do today with live data, which providers sit behind each one, what the jobs cost to run, and where you should keep a person in the loop. It is written for someone who sells and wants to try an agent on the boring half of the job.

## What is an AI sales agent?

An AI sales agent is a language model that can call tools to do sales research and prep: find accounts, find contacts, check emails, read a company's recent news and draft a message. It does not close a deal. It prepares the list and the context so you spend your time on conversations.

The difference from an old-style sales tool is that the agent decides which tool to call and in what order. You describe the outcome, such as "ten fintech CEOs with a verified email", and it picks the steps.

## Which sales jobs can an agent do with live data?

Five jobs work today because each one maps to a catalog endpoint with a price and an input schema.

| Job | What the agent calls | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Find target companies | Company search by industry, size or location | A list of companies with domains |
| Find the right person | People search by title and company | Names, titles and profile links |
| Find a work email | Email finder by name and domain | An address, and a confidence value where the provider returns one |
| Verify the email | Email verification | A verdict such as valid or invalid, in the provider's own terms |
| Read the account | Company enrichment and recent news | Size, industry, funding and headlines where the provider has them |

The two email jobs are separate calls with separate prices, and the cheaper pair is rarely the same provider. [Waterfall enrichment explained](https://looot.ai/blog/waterfall-enrichment-explained) shows how to try providers in order and stop at the first hit, which is how you keep cost per found email low.

## What does each sales data call cost?

You pay per call, and the price depends on the provider the agent picks. The table below reads the cheapest priced endpoint for the two email jobs from the live catalog when the page loads.

Sales data price per call: live prices per call are read from the catalog when the page loads, see https://looot.ai/blog/ai-sales-agent-data-jobs.

- Find a work email
- Verify an email

To turn those into a list price, use [what 1,000 lookups cost](https://looot.ai/blog/what-1000-lookups-cost). Divide the total by the rows that returned a usable value, not by the rows you sent, because a miss on some endpoints still costs money.

## How do I run a sales research job with an agent?

Give the agent the outcome, the budget and the output shape. A good brief names the target, the count, the fields you want and the stop rule.

1. State the target: "fintech companies in Germany with 50 to 200 staff".
2. State the count: "ten companies, one contact each".
3. State the output: "company, domain, contact name, title, email, verified yes or no, source endpoint, cost".
4. State the limit: "stop at 50 cents and show any call over one cent first".

Be specific about edge cases too. Say what to do when a company has no findable decision maker (skip it and say so), and what to do when two providers disagree on an email (prefer the one that verifies). An agent follows the rule you wrote, and guesses when you wrote none.

The agent then searches the catalog for each step, inspects the endpoints and runs the cheapest fit. For a worked example, see the recipe for [enriching a company list](https://looot.ai/recipes/enrich-a-company-list), which lists the steps and the provider choices.

## Where should a human stay in the loop?

Keep a person on three decisions. The first is who to target, because the agent optimizes for the list you describe and will not tell you the list is wrong. The second is the message. Draft with the agent, but read every line before it reaches a person, because a wrong detail in a cold message costs more than the hour you saved. The third is the send. Sending email at volume brings its own deliverability and consent rules, and those belong to you.

A useful habit is to review the first five rows by hand. If four of five contacts are wrong for your offer, fix the brief before the agent spends on the other ninety-five.

## How is this different from ZoomInfo or Apollo?

Those products are applications you log into and work inside. An agent with a catalog works differently: it calls separate data providers per job and pays per call. You give up the single screen and the saved lists. You gain the choice of provider per job and a price you can read first. [The ZoomInfo and Apollo alternatives post](https://looot.ai/blog/zoominfo-and-apollo-alternatives-for-agents) goes through which jobs move over and which do not.

We make no claim about their price or coverage here. Compare on your own list: run 100 rows through each option and count the usable results.

## How do I judge the result of a sales research job?

Use one number: cost per verified contact. Add up every call the agent made, including the misses and the verification calls, and divide by the count of contacts that passed verification. That number is what the list really cost.

Then compare it with what you pay today. If you buy contacts from a tool, divide what you pay for it by the contacts you actually used, not the contacts you were allowed to export. The comparison is rarely flattering to either side, and it tells you where to spend your next hour.

Also count the rows you threw away. A list of one hundred with sixty usable contacts has a different cost per contact than a list of forty with forty usable. Keep both numbers, and ask the agent to report them at the end of each run.

## What it cannot do

- It does not send email or run a sequence. This post covers the data side only, so drafting and sending are separate steps you control.
- It does not keep a CRM. Ask the agent to write results to a file or to your own database, as in [the CRM build guide](https://looot.ai/blog/build-your-own-crm-with-an-agent-and-supabase).
- It does not watch accounts and tell you when something changes. That needs scheduled runs and alerts, not available yet, so rerun the job by hand.
- Coverage depends on the provider and your list. A strong result on US software companies may be weak on small local firms.
- It cannot judge fit. A verified email for the wrong person is still the wrong person.

Last checked 2026-10-03 against the live catalog. Author: Walid Boulanouar.

## Questions

### What is an AI sales agent?

It is a language model that calls tools to do sales research and prep. It finds companies and contacts, checks emails, reads account news and drafts messages. It prepares the work, and a person decides who to contact and what to say.

### What can an AI sales agent do today?

It can find target companies, find people by title, find a work email, verify the email and enrich an account record. Each is a catalog endpoint with a price you can read before the call.

### How much does an AI agent for sales cost?

The agent itself costs whatever your model costs. The data costs a price per call, and that depends on the provider. The live table on this page shows the cheapest email finder and verifier today.

### Can an AI sales agent send cold emails?

This setup returns data and does not send email. Sending needs a separate tool and brings deliverability and consent rules that you own. Use the agent for the list and the draft, and review the draft yourself.

### Can an AI agent replace a sales rep?

No. It does the data and prep work faster, and it cannot hold a conversation, read a room or own a relationship. Treat it as a research assistant for the rep.

### How do I check that the contacts are correct?

Review the first five rows by hand, verify every email before use, and compare two providers on a sample of 100 rows. Count the usable results, not the rows returned.

### Can the agent follow up with leads for me?

Not on its own timer. A reminder or follow-up needs scheduled runs, which are not available yet. You can rerun the job by hand and ask the agent to report what changed.

## For agents

### Sales research

```text
Use looot to build a short prospect list.
1. Set up https://looot.ai/skill.md.
2. Target: <describe the companies>. I want 10 companies and one decision maker at each.
3. Search the catalog for company search, people search, work email finder and email verification. For each, show me the cheapest endpoint and its price before you call it.
4. Run the steps. If a work email comes back, verify it. If the email is not valid, try the next provider for that row.
5. Give me a table: company, domain, contact, title, email, verified, source endpoint, cost.
6. Report the cost per verified email and stop if the total goes over 50 cents.
```