The Cold Email Confidence Gap: Why Senders Fear AI More Than Decision Makers

Anna Sonnenberg -

Hunter’s cold email survey data reveals a clear divide between senders and recipients:

  • Senders worry that recipients will know they’re using AI to write emails. They’re concerned AI usage will negatively impact campaign performance.
  • Decision-makers can’t reliably spot AI usage. Instead, they typically judge cold emails on other factors — like repetition and relevance.

This disconnect goes beyond a basic misunderstanding. It creates a confidence gap that prevents senders from adopting genuinely useful tools that could help them achieve key outreach goals.

In this article, we’ll explore why this gap exists, which factors to focus on instead, and how senders can responsibly incorporate AI into cold emails.

Senders are skeptical of AI usage

B2B professionals who actively experiment with GenAI are surprisingly wary of AI tools. Many are downright skeptical of AI usage.

Hunter’s cold email survey shows that nearly half (47%) of these professionals say they’d be less likely to reply to an email if they thought it was AI generated.

This is a true paradox: Senders are open to using AI to create emails, but they’re not open to receiving emails written with these tools.

One reason for this? Bad AI emails are memorable. But good AI emails aren’t — they blend in with any other marketing or sales message in your inbox.

Senders overestimate their own AI detection skills

Could senders even identify an AI-generated email in the first place? Hunter’s data indicates that most can’t distinguish an AI email from a manually written email.

When asked to review 9 emails for AI usage, most correctly identified fewer than 4 emails — meaning their success rate was less than 50%. While there were some variations between industries, even the top-performing segments (marketing/agency, technology, and financial services) successfully identified just 4–4.5 emails.

This suggests that senders overestimate their AI detection skills. If they think they’d be less likely to reply to an AI-generated message, they might actually be reacting to other elements in the email content or structure.

Decision-makers care about factors other than AI

While senders claim a bias against AI emails, most of their recipients don’t share this view. In fact, Hunter’s survey data indicates that 67% of these decision-makers don’t mind receiving AI-generated emails.

For decision-makers, AI isn’t a dealbreaker. When deciding whether to reply, they pay attention to the relevance and credibility of the message.

Although decision-makers don’t mind if senders use AI to generate messages, they do care if the messages they read sound like AI. This is subjective, but some of the most common AI red flags include:

  • Formulaic email structures
  • Excessive use of compound adjectives
  • Templated rhythms like equal-length sentences
  • Generic messages with a lack of personalization

Senders get minimal feedback on what isn’t working

An unsuccessful cold outreach campaign usually means senders receive few (or no) email responses. Since these campaigns generate minimal feedback, senders have to make assumptions about what isn’t working.

When senders use generative AI to create failed email campaigns, it’s easy to assume the tool or technology is the cause.

But the fix doesn’t have to be avoiding AI altogether. Some more balanced options might be testing a template with a less formulaic structure or manually adding more personalization to an AI-generated email.

Senders face real consequences when campaigns fail

Senders’ livelihoods depend on outreach response rates. When they don’t reach their engagement or pipeline goals, they face real consequences.

As a sender, you may opt to avoid any tool or technology you think could lead to outreach mistakes and negatively impact your cold emails.

But avoiding AI isn’t the answer. With AI, you can generate relevant, timely, and personalized emails at a scale you could never reach manually.

Instead, you need the right tools for the job and the confidence to use AI.

Here’s a better solution: Use an AI tool that generates messages that don’t include AI red flags. Then, add the human touch that recipients want to see.

How to responsibly incorporate AI into cold emails

Cold email campaigns are both an art and a science. As a sender, you need to use proven outreach techniques and effective tools to reach the right recipients at scale.

Yet cold email also requires nuance. That means you need to add creativity and your own personal touch to every email you send. Otherwise, you risk sounding robotic and getting lower response rates.

With Hunter’s AI Writing Assistant, you can generate and personalize cold emails at scale. Start improving your cold email performance with Hunter today.