The AI Sales Agent is an outbound prospecting agent. Key capabilities:

Finds qualified leads that match your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
Writes personalized cold emails for each prospect
Creates complete multi-step outreach campaigns
Continuously optimizes messaging based on replies
Fills the pipeline while you focus on closing deals

Cost: 5 Instantly Credits per lead. We’ve added 1,000 free Instantly credits to all users, so you can try out the new AI sales agent completely free!

Create AI Sales Agent

Navigate to AI Agents from the left sidebar
Click "Add New"
Select AI Sales Agent
URL input: Provide a URL to your website, landing page, or product page. The Al will analyze it to understand your offering.
Manual Instructions: Provide detailed instructions about your product, ideal customers, messaging tone, and any specific requirements.

Waking Up State

When a new AI Sales Agent is first created, it goes through an initial setup phase ("Waking Up") where it:

Learns about the business from the provided Memory
Prepares outreach strategies
Gets ready to find and contact leads

The Live Feed will show the Learning state until setup is complete. No sending happens, and no actions are needed from you during this phase.

Configure Memory

Memory is the AI Sales Agent's knowledge base. It tells the agent who to target and what to say. It has three sections:

Business Offers

Descriptions of what your company sells or offers.

Each offer is a free-text description of a product, service, or value proposition
Multiple offers can be created and individually toggled active or inactive
Only active offers are used by the AI sales agent when generating outreach
Offers can be created, edited, duplicated, and deleted

Customer Profiles (ICP — Ideal Customer Profile)

Defines the target audience the Al sales agent should prospect. Multiple ICPs can be created and activated/deactivated independently.

Each ICP contains:

Name: Label for this ICP (e.g., "Enterprise SaaS CTOs")
Problems solved: Pain points this ICP experiences that your product addresses
Benefits: Specific value your product delivers to this ICP
USP: Unique selling proposition for this ICP
Customer goals: What this ICP is trying to achieve
Success stories: Relevant case studies or testimonials
Keywords (include/exclude): Keywords to target or avoid when finding leads
Company size: Filter by size (0–25, 25–100, 100–250, 250–1K, 1K–10K, 10K–50K, 50K–100K, >100K)
Industry: Industries to target
Job title (include/exclude): Job titles to include or exclude from prospecting

Guidance Rules

Custom instructions that direct how the AI sales agent writes emails and communicates with prospects.

Maximum 10 guidance rules per AI sales agent
Useful for: enforcing short emails, requiring specific CTAs, avoiding certain topics, maintaining brand voice

You can train your AI Sales Agent to always include your email signature.

Use variable {{accountSignature}} instead of {{sendingAccountFirstName}}

Settings

The Settings tab has five sub-sections:

AI Settings

The AI Sales Agent has two autonomy settings that work together:

Non-Autopilot (manual review): Requires manual approval via Live Feed before finding more leads or sending any emails.
Autopilot: The AI sales agent acts fully on its own. Activities are automatically approved.
Auto-reply to responses: Automatically respond to prospect replies with contextual messages when enabled

💡Tip: Configure your Memory (Business Offers, Customer Profiles, Guidance Rules) fully before enabling Autopilot Mode.

Accounts to Use

Select one or more email sending accounts (or account tags) for the AI sales agent to use. Accounts can be selected individually or by tag group.

Schedule & Limits

Daily Sending Limit:

Minimum: 10 emails/day
Maximum: 10,000 emails/day
Default: 10 emails/day

Note: This daily limit for AI Sales Agent controls both the number of emails sent and the number of leads enriched per day -> they share the same cap. To send or enrich more, you can increase the limit.

Sending Schedule:

Start time (default: 00:00): Beginning of the sending window
End time (default: 23:59): End of the sending window
Timezone (default: Etc/GMT+12): Timezone for the schedule
Sending days (default: Mon–Fri): Saturday and Sunday are off by default

Basic Deliverability

Settings	Default	Description
Disable Open Tracking	On	Avoids tracking pixels in emails, which improves deliverability
Enable ESP Matching	On	Matches the lead's email provider to improve inbox placement
Prioritize New Leads	On	New leads are contacted before older ones in the queue
Text-based Opt-Out	On	Automatically append a plain-text unsubscribe line to every email

Slack Integration

Connect a Slack account to receive notifications about agent activity (emails sent, leads found, replies received, etc).

Leads

Manage leads generated by the AI Sales Agent in the Leads tab:

Filter leads
Sort leads by Ascending (A→Z) or Descending (Z→A) order
Export leads
Move or copy leads to a campaign or list

Delete leads (with an active CRM subscription)

Click the lead you want to delete
In the pop-up window, click the Actions button in the top‑right corner
Select Delete

Delete leads (without CRM subscription)

Go to CRM
Click the "Lists" section
Select your target AI Sales Agent list
Click the checkbox to manually select target leads or select the first x results. Cannot bulk delete when selecting all results.
Once leads are selected, the "Row actions" button appears in the top-right corner
Click "Row actions" to open the actions menu
Click "Delete selected"

Live Feed & Analytics

Analytics Cards

Leads Found: Total leads discovered and enriched by the AI sales agent
Emails Sent: Total outreach emails sent by the AI Sales Agent
Replies: Number of replies received from prospects. The percentage shown is the reply rate (replies divided by emails sent)
Opportunities: Total number of opportunities created from your AI Sales Agent outreach. The dollar amount shown is the total value of all opportunities

Activity Feed

Shows real-time actions taken by the AI sales agent: emails sent, leads enriched, replies received, meetings booked.

In Non-Autopilot mode, some activities may require you to approve or reject a suggested action.

The feed can be filtered by activity type.
Click the 'Finding Prospects' activity to approve or reject actions to find leads.
Click the 'Click to view email' activity to review lead details, approve or reject the sequence email generated for each lead(click to edit the email). Rejecting a lead doesn't remove it from the Leads tab.

Agent Statuses

Learning: Initial setup phase. The AI sales agent is learning and preparing
Active: The AI sales agent is running and sending outreach
Paused: The AI sales agent is temporarily stopped. No emails are sent
Draft: The agent has not been fully configured or activated yet

Common Issues & FAQ

AI sales agent is not finding or contacting leads

Check the following:

Agent status is Active (not Paused or Draft)
At least one sending account is selected under Accounts to Use
At least one Business Offer and one Customer Profile are marked active in Memory
The Daily Sending Limit has not already been reached - 10 per day by default. Once you increase the limit, click the 'Finding Prospects' activity to approve finding more leads
Click the 'Click to view email' activity to approve or reject the sequence email generated for each lead for sending.
The current time falls within the configured Sending Schedule

AI sales agent in Autopilot mode is not sending emails automatically

Autopilot Mode is toggled On in Settings → AI Settings
Daily sending limit(10 per day by default): Once hit, no more emails are sent and no more leads are generated until the next day
The AI sales agent has sufficient Instantly credits remaining(5 credits per lead).

AI sales agent sent emails on the weekend

Edit the Sending Schedule in Settings → Schedule & Limits and uncheck Saturday and Sunday.

AI sales agent stopped sending after a few days

For non-autopilot mode: You'll need to manually approve or reject the leads in the Activity Feed. Once approved, the AI sales agent will start sending within its schedule
Daily sending limit(10 per day by default): Once hit, no more emails are sent until the next day. Once you increase the limit, click the 'Finding Prospects' activity to approve finding more leads
Approve sequence emails: Click the 'Click to view email' activity to approve or reject the sequence email generated for each lead for sending.
Instantly credits: You may be out of credits(5 credits per lead). Upgrading your Instantly Credits plan to get more credits, and the AI sales agent will start adding more leads to contact within a few minutes
The sending account may have been deactivated or hit its own limits

How do I improve lead quality?

Refine the Customer Profile (ICP): Tighten job titles, industries, and company size filters
Add include/exclude keywords to the ICP to focus prospecting
Add more detail to Business Offers so the AI can write more targeted emails
Add Guidance Rules to messaging standards (e.g., email length, CTA style)

How do I improve email quality?

Add or refine Guidance Rules (up to 10) with specific writing instructions
Provide detailed Business Offers with clear value propositions
Fill in all ICP fields, including Problems Solved, Benefits, USP, and Customer Goals