Working in Silicon Valley in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Hunter Walk was keenly aware of how other people’s generosity paved the way to his success, including his nearly decade-long career at Google. So years later when Walk, now a venture capitalist, became the kind of person who could open doors for others, he made himself a promise: Whenever he got a cold email that didn’t seem like spam, he’d respond. “I felt like it was my job to pay it forward,” says Walk, partner and co-founder of the venture capital firm Homebrew Management LLC.

Most of the time, Walk sends back a respectful thanks but no thanks. Occasionally he happens on a real opportunity, as when a cold pitch led him to invest in a startup that was later acquired for $275 million. “That, in and of itself, might have made this profitable,” he says. In 2018, Walk wrote on his blog about how he’d always preferred a good cold email to a half-hearted warm one. So it was no small thing when he published another post in late September announcing his days as an email completist may be numbered.

“AI slop is killing my inbox,” read the post, which was accompanied by an illustration of a “slop cannon” propelling mail at Walk’s face.

Over the past year, he says, the rise of artificial intelligence agents has driven up the volume of the cold emails he receives and driven down the quality, making his vow to respond to them unmanageable. Where once much of the inbound mail may have simply missed the mark, now it reads like “Hunter Walk Mad Libs” — riddled with hallucinated references to things he’s never written, oblivious mentions of his least successful investments and earnest interpretations of his most obviously sarcastic social media posts. “It’s like if a person got dressed in the dark, and when they turned the lights on they’re like, ‘No, I meant to wear stripes and polka dots and two different color socks,” Walk says.

Cold outreach is, for the most part, a nuisance. Few people are particularly interested in seeing what the person calling from an unfamiliar number has to say, or in wading through an unsolicited pitch for a business opportunity via email or LinkedIn. At worst it’s a security risk. Yet cold outreach is a fact of life for a wide array of professions. It’s how small businesses grow to be bigger ones, how salespeople working on commission pay their bills and often how young people who don’t have powerful built-in networks get their start.

Cold outreach — by phone and email — has been a dying art form for a while now thanks to a confluence of spam filters, caller ID tools and a general cultural aversion to answering the phone. AI may be exacerbating the issue. One recent report from the web hosting company Hostinger, which analyzed 1 billion anonymized emails, found that just 13% of emails were likely written by humans. While the remainder includes a wide range of automated messages, including e-commerce promotions and security alerts, an April 2025 analysis out of Columbia University found that more than half of all spam, much of it malicious, was AI-generated.

The proliferation of AI agents such as Muse from Meta Platforms Inc. and Dots from OpenAI is poised to make the volume problem worse.

It’s little wonder that people are growing even less receptive to emails from total strangers. Now the people whose livelihoods rely on this thankless medium are rethinking the way they work and inventing new ways to get noticed.

Oscar Duran is an account executive for Notified, a division of the global financial-services firm Equiniti Group Ltd. His day-to-day responsibilities include researching public-relations agencies and cold-calling them to sell subscriptions to Notified’s press release service, GlobeNewswire. But lately, just getting a human on the other side of the line has been harder than ever. At least once a week, Duran says, he calls a potential client only for their AI agent to answer the phone. Where once he could pique someone’s interest by relying on steadfast tools of the sales trade — personality and charisma, among them — now the agents are immune to his charms. “Those tend to be dead ends,” he says.

Cold-pitching now requires more creativity, Duran says. Recently, after writing emails and leaving voicemails for Chris Gale, co-founder of the PR agency Gale Strategies, Duran resorted to tracking him down in a webcast Gale was hosting and writing to him in the comments. “Believe it or not, that adds value,” Gale says. “I was going to listen to his pitch.”Afterward, when Duran followed up, Gale recognized his name and clinched the deal over email. But Duran admits approaches like this one are a lot harder to scale than the old “smile and dial” method, adding to the cost of securing any single deal. “You really have to lean in,” he says.

Leah Dergachev, who runs her own marketing and communications firm, Austley, has also moved more of her cold outreach to social media, where, she says, “it’s easier to show up as a human.”This shift is driven in part by her own experience as a business owner overwhelmed by a growing number of emails she’s not sure are coming from actual people. “No one is doing their homework here,” she says.

Dergachev’s inbox grew so flooded that, earlier this year, she built an AI agent that filters all the cold emails she gets into two Gmail folders labeled “Nope” and “Maybe.”A pay-to-play scheme asking her to fork over $5,000 to apply for some award in Dubai? Nope. A cold pitch from a new employee at a company she knows and has emailed with before? Maybe. (While Dergachev had to jury-rig her own system, AI-detection companies like Pangram Labs Inc. are now marketing their own plug-ins that can automatically label and archive AI-written outreach.) Yet even as AI creates more obstacles for cold outreach, some professionals are finding it can also be a valuable tool for breaking through.

Alex Warmerdam runs an 18-person company called VeeBeeDee that provides customer-prospecting and cold-calling services to major global tech companies. Traditionally that’s required salespeople taking a long list of potential prospects and calling them all to determine who’s worth a more intensive conversation. That meant relying on generic scripts for every person they called.

But over the past year, VeeBeeDee introduced a new vibe-coded platform for its salespeople, which automatically generates research on each prospect — likely pain points they’re experiencing, targeted questions to ask — and works it into the script. That cuts down on the time it takes to do research, which has enabled salespeople to make more calls. It’s also led to an increase in talk time, Warmerdam says, because it generates more focused conversations.

For Warmerdam the requiems for cold outreach you sometimes see on LinkedIn these days are a bit premature. But, he says, “the game has changed significantly in the last 12 months, and I’m not sure where it’s heading.”Anytime AI crowds out human-to-human interaction, there’s a chance valuable connections will get lost in the process. But there are bigger societal stakes to consider too. The decline of cold outreach as an effective medium could benefit those who already have access to powerful people and limit opportunities for those who don’t.

In a recent LinkedIn post, Princeton University computer science professor Arvind Narayanan lamented the loss of control over his own inbox in part because, having grown up in India, he was once the young person sending cold emails to researchers. Putting up barriers to unsolicited messages could herald a return to “clubby hierarchies,” he wrote. “Without cold emails, I wouldn’t have ended up where I am today.”

Walk, the venture capitalist, has yet to bring himself to stop replying to cold outreach altogether. For now, he says, he’s still trying to give the person — or thing — on the other side of his emails the benefit of the doubt. But as the volume continues to grow, he knows he’s nearing his limit. “It’s like you go from shaking hands with a person to shaking hands with an octopus to shaking hands with a centipede,” Walk says. “I still only have two hands.”