An AI prospecting tool finds people who might buy from you and tells you something about each. To choose one, ask it for 20 prospects matching your buyer, then check each row: right company, right role, a working email, and a reason for fit that you can confirm on the company's website. Divide the price by the share of rows that pass. That gives you the cost per usable contact, the one number that lets you compare a $20 data add-on with a $1.50-per-person agent.
Most guides to this category list tools by name and leave the checking to you. That is the part that decides whether you waste a month. A prospecting tool that returns 500 names, a third of them wrong, looks productive and costs you reputation when you email them. Below is the test, the arithmetic, and the kinds of tool you will meet.
What counts as AI here
Two things get sold under this name. One is search: you describe the buyer in words and the tool returns matching companies and people. The other is research: for each person, the tool reads something about the company and produces a line you can use in an email. Many products do the first and call the second "personalization," which is often only a name and a job title dropped into a template. Ask for both and test them separately.
Kinds of tool, with what their pages say
- Databases with filters and AI on top. Apollo's pricing page, read on 2026-10-30, lists Free, Basic, Professional and Custom plans, says credits are pooled across the team and do not roll over, and says the no-cost plan connects only Gmail accounts. Instantly's page lists a 450M+ contact B2B lead database with 13 filters on its Starter bundle, and lemlist's lists a 650M+ lead database on its Email plan.
- Enrichment platforms. Clay's pricing page lists a no-cost level with 100 data credits and 500 actions a month, and paid levels with more of each. They are built for stitching sources together, and you assemble the workflow yourself.
- Agents that prospect as part of the job. AiSDR charges $1.50 per person prospected on pay as you go, research and writing included. Rocketship takes a plain description of your buyer and builds the list; searching and counting how many match is free, and you pay 4 credits for each person found with an email, nothing when no email is found.
- Browser extensions. Rocketship's Chrome extension is free and shows who to contact on any company's website and adds them to your list.
The 20-row test
Describe a buyer you know well, such as "owners of independent dental practices with two to four dentists in Ohio," and ask the tool for 20. Then check every row.
- Right company? Open the website. Is it a dental practice of about that size?
- Right person? Does the person have the role, and still work there? A quick look at the company's own team page settles it.
- Email present and plausible? The tool should show whether an email was found. Be wary of tools that return an address for every row, since in real data not every person has a findable one.
- A reason for fit you can verify? If it says "recently opened a second location," find that on the site. An unverifiable reason counts as a fail.
- Duplicates and strays. Count repeats, competitors and companies that closed.
A row passes only if all five checks pass. Our guide to lead data you can check before paying goes through verification further.
From pass rate to cost per usable contact
Say 14 of the 20 rows pass. The usable rate is 14 divided by 20, or 70%. Now take the price per contact and divide by 0.70.
- lemlist's lead data add-on, per its page on 2026-10-30, is 2,000 credits a month for $20 on monthly billing, and 2,000 credits buys 400 emails. That is $0.05 per email. At a 70% usable rate it is about $0.07 per usable contact. That figure is data only; the writing and sending are extra.
- Rocketship at pack pricing: 1,000 credits for $45 and 4 credits per person with an email is 250 people for $45, or $0.18 each. At a 70% usable rate, about $0.26 per usable contact, and the research, writing, sending and follow-up come with it.
- AiSDR at $1.50 per person prospected is $2.14 per usable contact at the same 70%, with research and writing included.
These do not say which is best. They show that a cheap data credit and an all-in agent price answer different questions. The cheap one buys a name and leaves the rest of the work to you. If your time is free and you enjoy the work, the cheap one wins. If you want the meeting booked, compare the all-in rows.
Where AI prospecting goes wrong
Invented facts. A model asked to explain why a company is a fit may produce a plausible sentence from nothing. Reading each company's own website before writing, and not stating what it cannot find, is the safeguard. Rocketship says it reads each buyer's own website before the first email and never invents facts about them. Verify that on your 20 rows rather than trusting it. The same check works for every vendor.
Stale data. People change jobs. Any database has some share of people who have left. Your 20-row test measures it for your buyer, which a vendor's average does not.
Legal assumptions. The FTC's CAN-SPAM guide says the law makes no exception for business-to-business email, so a prospect list does not exempt you from the opt-out, address and honest-header rules. See what lead enrichment is for where this data comes from.
Tools versus people
Nothing here replaces knowing your buyer. If you cannot describe the person in one sentence, no prospecting tool will find them. Describing your buyer in one sentence comes first, and how to build a lead list covers the manual version.
Run your 20 rows on Rocketship by describing your buyer in the app, where counting matches costs nothing, and the 7-day trial takes a card at the start.