Does anyone else have their outbound AI in “draft mode” first for a period? I do a week of manual reviews of everything it generates before letting it send on its own
Every time I read posts about AI outbound agents, it feels like everyone trusts their agents to work alone. People talk about setting up these agents and letting them rip at scale within thirty minutes like there is zero risk involved. For me it's fine to experiment with AI lead generation but for actually sending messages (for both cold outreach and warm leads/replies) maybe I am just more paranoid than most, but I feel like I have to verify the outputs pretty rigorously before I trust an agent to work on its own.
Whenever we plug in a new agent or even just change the prompts on an existing one, we run it in a manual review mode for a full calibration week. The agent writes every message into a review queue and one of us has to read each one before it ever hits a prospect. It sounds slow, but that first week is always where the embarrassing stuff gets caught. Just in the last few days, I flagged several things that would have been a disaster to send. I caught one wrong industry pitch because the data enrichment was stale and the prospect had moved from fintech to healthcare months ago. It also generated an opener that completely misread a German LinkedIn bio and used a tone that was way too familiar for that market. And there was even a duplicate sequence that almost went to the same person twice on the same day because they were sitting in two different campaigns.
Right now I am reviewing the messages and manually piping the good ones into Expandi as custom variables for my LinkedIn sequences. It is a bit more manual work upfront, but I use that review process as a feedback loop to refine the AI. If a draft is off, I adjust the prompts and let the agent try again. I usually do this for a full week until the results start hitting the quality bar I want.
Only once I am really satisfied do I let the agent start working autonomously, and even then I will still spend the following week reviewing what it sends. In my niche the cost of a bad first impression can be pretty high, so I would rather take some time to set things up than risk sending something that makes us look like a generic spam bot or worse.
Is anyone else actually putting their agents through a proper draft mode like this, or are you guys just letting it loose after a few test sequences or messages? I cant tell if im being too paranoid or people arent really telling us the full story and leaving these details out when they write about this.