How AI bees Achieved a 30% Reply Rate Using Smartlead

When Elias Hamied Kermani and his co-founder Brian Hadi Attarbashi started AI bees back in 2018, the outbound world looked very different.

There was no Smartlead. No intent-signal targeting. No AI reply classification.

Most B2B lead generation agencies were doing what most agencies still do today: buying a list, loading up a template, and hitting send on thousands of cold emails they knew, deep down, nobody was going to reply to.

Elias and Brian refused to build that kind of agency.

What they built instead took eight years, hundreds of client campaigns, and more than a billion outbound touchpoints to get right.

Today, AI bees sends over a million emails and LinkedIn messages every single month across hundreds of simultaneous campaigns. They have run outbound programmes for more than a thousand B2B companies spanning investment banking, SaaS, tech, and professional services.

AI bees have delivered a 14% reply rate on intent-based cold email campaigns at a time when the industry average sits between 1 and 3%. They pulled a 30% reply rate on a single targeted run of just 800 contacts using smarter data and a language filter most agencies would never think to use.

That distinction matters more in 2026 than it ever has. Inboxes are more crowded. Spam filters are sharper.

Decision-makers have seen every template, every subject line trick, every "just bumping this to the top of your inbox" follow-up. The spray-and-pray approach to cold email outreach is dead, and the agencies still running it are taking their clients down with them.

AI bees made a different call early on: that cold email, executed with precision and backed by the right cold email infrastructure, was still the most powerful B2B outreach channel available.

Not cold calling, where you fight through gatekeepers and interrupt someone's afternoon. Not LinkedIn outreach, where you need a connection request accepted before you can even land a direct message.

Email is the only channel where you reach a decision-maker directly, on their terms, and at genuine scale. The logic was always there. AI bees built the systems to prove it.

The B2B Lead Generation Agency That Treats Cold Email Like Engineering

Most people get one thing badly wrong about high-volume outbound: they assume scale and precision are opposites.

That if you want to send a million emails a month, you have to sacrifice targeting. That if you want real personalisation, you have to accept a small list. AI bees was built on the belief that this tradeoff is a false one, and eight years of results back that up.

The agency runs nothing like a traditional shop working off shared templates and a recycled prospect list.

It operates more like an outbound engineering team: precise ICP targeting, disciplined email deliverability management, signal-based campaign strategy, and a proprietary B2B data platform called AI Ark that powers their most effective targeting work.

AI Ark is now available as a standalone product, which says everything about how seriously they treat data as a competitive edge.

What pushed AI bees ahead of the field was not one single tactic. It was the discipline to test every channel, cold calling, LinkedIn outreach, SEO, paid media, and follow the data wherever it led. The data kept pointing back to email. Elias shared:

"The emails are landing directly in the inbox. If you do cold calling, you either have to talk to an assistant to get through to the person, or you might annoy them. LinkedIn requires a connection request before a direct message. Email is the only channel where you directly reach the inbox. And it scales, we are sending more than a million emails and LinkedIn messages every single month, and 90% of those are emails."

Eight years of iteration, a proprietary data platform, and the cold email sending infrastructure of Smartlead underneath every campaign. That combination is what separates AI bees from every other B2B outreach agency in the market, and what makes the results they deliver possible.

How AI bees Built on Smartlead

AI bees switched to Smartlead from a previous provider at a moment when the economics of cold email infrastructure no longer worked.

Paying per inbox, while the industry was shifting toward requiring multiple inboxes per campaign, meant that growth and cost were directly linked. Every new client, every new sending domain, every new sequence added to the bill. It was a model that punished success.

Smartlead's unlimited inboxes model changed that relationship entirely. Here is how Elias described the shift:

"Back then in 2018, there was no Smartlead. When we switched, the unlimited inboxes option was a game changer. Before that we were paying per inbox. With the change in the industry where you have to have multiple inboxes to send thousands of emails to prospects, this was really what led us to make the switch."

Three years later, AI bees has not moved.

The platform has deepened into every layer of their operation: email warmup, deliverability management, client workspace management, AI-powered reply classification, and now warm calling through SmartDialer.

The private Slack channel with Smartlead's team, the community, and the direct access to support have become part of how the agency runs day to day.

Who AI bees Works With

AI bees operates as a full-service outbound agency for B2B companies across industries.

The consistent thread across every engagement is decision-maker outreach: reaching the right people, at the right companies, at the right moment, through cold email and LinkedIn.

The agency has managed outbound programmes for more than a thousand companies over eight years.

Each client gets their own dedicated workspace in Smartlead, white-labeled with AI bees branding, and direct access to their campaign data and reply analytics without ever needing to jump on a screen-share call.

The verticals they serve most include:

Investment banking and financial services, where precise cold outreach helps professionals reach business owners and deal principals at scale.

B2B SaaS and tech companies, where intent-signal campaigns target VP-level decision-makers at high-fit accounts during the moments they are most likely to engage.

Professional services firms, where relationship-driven outreach opens the door to enterprise deals that traditional marketing channels rarely reach.

The metric that matters across all of them is not open rates. It is not overall reply volume.

AI bees measures success on positive replies, and Smartlead is one of the only cold email platforms that separates out-of-office responses and surfaces positive reply rates as a distinct, trackable number.

The Challenges Smartlead Helped AI bees Solve

Scaling Cold Email Infrastructure Without Watching Costs Spiral

Running hundreds of simultaneous client campaigns requires thousands of sending inboxes rotating across domains.

The previous provider's per-inbox pricing model made growth directly proportional to cost. Every new client, every new domain, every expansion was a budget decision that slowed the agency down.

Smartlead's unlimited inboxes model removed that ceiling entirely. AI bees could take on new clients and push higher volumes without treating infrastructure as a financial constraint. The email warmup tool running automatically in the background maintained domain reputation across all sender addresses without manual intervention per domain. As Elias put it:

"Smartlead has a very good warmup tool, which helps us to maintain our domain reputation relatively high. That was a major factor alongside the unlimited inboxes."

Giving Every Client Full Visibility Into Their Own Campaigns

With hundreds of active clients, each expecting transparency into their own campaign performance, AI bees needed a way to provide direct access at scale without creating an operational nightmare or a security risk.

Smartlead's white-label workspace feature solved this cleanly.

Every client gets their own dedicated environment branded with AI bees' logo and identity.

They log in directly, see their own campaigns running, review their replies, and track performance without AI bees having to schedule a call and walk them through a shared dashboard:

"Instead of going into a call with each customer and showing them their results in our main dashboard, we can give the customer direct access to their dedicated workspace, white-labeled with our branding and our logo. The client can go directly into the campaigns and see how the campaigns are working, can see the replies."

Making Sense of Thousands of Replies Without Drowning in Noise

At the volume AI bees operates, inbound replies become an analytics problem as much as a sales problem.

A million sends a month produces thousands of responses. Without a system to classify them automatically, the genuine buying signals get buried in out-of-office messages, unsubscribes, and neutral replies.

Smartlead's AI reply classification categorises every inbound response into preset categories and lets AI bees add their own custom labels for specific clients and campaign types.

Critically, the platform strips out-of-office replies from the core metrics and surfaces positive reply rates as a standalone number. For an agency that reports on positive replies above all else, this is not a nice-to-have feature. It is the core analytics layer:

Getting Support That Actually Resolves Things

Running client campaigns at this scale means that when something breaks, it breaks across the board. Speed of resolution is not a customer service preference. It is an operational requirement.

Smartlead's support structure, including a private Slack channel with their team, has made it possible for AI bees to get fast, substantive answers on every issue. Elias shared:

The Campaigns That Proved the Model

AI bees measures itself on positive replies, not overall reply volume. Every campaign is evaluated against that standard. The results that stand out are not the large TAM blasts. They are the small, signal-driven, intent-based campaigns where the right data made everything else irrelevant.

Campaign 1: LinkedIn Intent Signal Targeting, 14% Reply Rate

AI bees exported a list of people who had liked a specific post on LinkedIn. Using AI Ark, they identified the verified email addresses of those individuals and uploaded a list of 1,000 to 1,500 contacts into Smartlead. The campaign was built entirely around that one signal.

Standard cold email campaigns on a clean TAM list produce reply rates, net of out-of-office, of one to three percent. This campaign produced 14%. And the positive reply rate moved with it:

"Usually what we see in reply rates in a standard campaign, if you remove the out-of-office replies, is maybe one or two or max 3%. In this particular campaign, we had 14% reply rates. And not only the overall reply rates, the positive reply rates were also significantly higher."

The lesson is straightforward. When your outreach is built around a signal someone already acted on, you are not interrupting them. You are continuing a conversation they started.

Campaign 2: Spanish-Language Outreach to a Bilingual Audience, 30% Reply Rate

A client was generating zero leads through standard English-language outreach to US-based VPs of Sales. The ICP was right. The messaging was tested. The list was clean. Nothing was working.

AI bees went into AI Ark and used the language filter to identify prospects within that same ICP who also spoke Spanish. The list came back at 800 people. The emails went out in Spanish.

The reply rate was 30%.

"They received an email in Spanish, although they are used to an English-speaking environment. They are living in the United States and someone speaks to them now in Spanish, and noticed on LinkedIn that they speak Spanish. But you need the AI Ark filter to find them. It was an amazing campaign because we had not only a high reply rate, but also a high positive reply rate."

This is what signal-based outreach actually looks like at its best. Not personalisation for its own sake, but personalisation built on a data point that genuinely differentiates one human being from another and makes them stop and pay attention.

How Smartlead Powers the AI bees Engine

Unlimited Inboxes

‍The feature that brought AI bees to Smartlead in the first place. Removing the per-inbox cost structure meant the agency could scale to new clients and higher volumes without treating cold email infrastructure as a budget line item. Learn more about Smartlead's infrastructure.

White-Label Client Access

‍Every client gets a dedicated Smartlead workspace branded with AI bees' identity.

Clients log in, see their campaigns, review categorised replies, and track performance independently. No dashboard calls. No shared views. Full transparency at scale. Learn more about white-label.

AI Reply Classification With Custom Categories

‍Smartlead's AI categorises every inbound reply automatically, with custom labels available for specific client needs.

The platform separates out-of-office noise from genuine responses and surfaces positive reply rates as a distinct metric.

For an agency that lives and dies by positive replies, this is the analytics foundation everything else sits on. Learn more about Smartlead's AI features.

Email Warmup Infrastructure

‍The warmup tool runs automatically across all of AI bees' client sending infrastructure, maintaining domain reputation without manual configuration per domain. At a million sends a month across hundreds of client accounts, automated warmup is not a feature. It is the foundation of consistent inbox placement.

Office Hours and Community

Smartlead's weekly office hours sessions are not optional at AI bees.

They are a standing calendar block for the entire GTM team, a forced learning session every week. After each session, the GTM engineers sit down and apply what was covered directly to active campaigns.

"It is a blocker in our GTM team's calendar. They have to watch it in order to learn the new skills that Smartlead's team and their guests share with the audience. After those sessions, the GTM engineers sit down and discuss things we can improve based on what was learned in the office hours." Learn more about the Smartlead community.

Notable Achievements

• More than a million emails and LinkedIn messages sent every single month, across hundreds of simultaneous client campaigns, with 90% of that volume driven by email outbound on Smartlead.
• Outbound programmes delivered for more than 1,000 B2B companies since 2018, across investment banking, SaaS, tech, and professional services.
• A 14% reply rate on a LinkedIn intent-signal campaign of 1,000 to 1,500 people, at a time when the standard TAM campaign produces 1 to 3%, with positive reply rates tracked separately in Smartlead analytics.
• A 30% reply rate on a Spanish-language campaign targeting 800 bilingual US prospects identified through AI Ark's language filter, with strong positive reply rates sitting alongside the overall figure.

Three years running on Smartlead as one of the platform's earliest customers, through significant volume growth, feature expansion, and eight years of combined cold email experience building behind it.

Hundreds of white-label client workspaces running simultaneously, each independently accessible by the client, with full campaign data and AI-classified reply visibility available without a single screen-share call.

What Comes Next

The SmartDialer expansion is the immediate priority.

The conversion logic is straightforward: reach the prospect immediately after they engage with an email and convert that intent into a booked demo before the window closes.

"If someone replies to an email, neutral, positive, even negative, and we call that person immediately, it will increase the chance of converting them to a demo. This is what we want to leverage now with Smartlead's new feature: call people immediately when they respond, convert more people to demos rather than just replying back over email."

After eight years in outbound and three years on Smartlead, the conviction at AI bees has not changed.

Cold email, run with precision and backed by the right infrastructure, is still the most effective B2B outreach channel available. Smartlead is what makes that possible at scale without breaking the economics.

Ready to build a cold email outreach engine that books real B2B appointments at scale?