Folderly says AI-heavy outbound teams are seeing worse email deliverability

Folderly’s new report says 70% of surveyed B2B sales professionals now use AI for outbound email, but many are seeing inbox placement get worse rather than better. The findings suggest deliverability is becoming a hidden bottleneck as AI-generated outreach rises and email filters tighten.

Why it matters: - Folderly says outbound teams are scaling email faster with AI, but inbox placement is not keeping up. - The report argues that weak deliverability can quietly erase pipeline because bad sends often fail without bounces or obvious errors. - 95% of surveyed professionals said inbox placement matters to sales success.

What happened: - Folderly published Fixing B2B SaaS Outbound Email Deliverability in 2026 on June 18, 2026. - The report combines original survey research with platform benchmark data. - The survey covered 100 B2B SaaS sales and email marketing professionals in tech and finance. - 70% of respondents use AI for at least some outbound emails. - 20% use AI for all or almost all outbound emails. - 82% believe AI-written emails are detectable by recipients. - Only 7% believe recipients cannot tell when an email was written by AI. - Among respondents who said outbound has gotten “a little harder,” 75% use AI to write their emails. - Among respondents who said outbound has gotten “a lot easier,” 32% use no AI at all.

The details: - 79% of respondents said a prospect has told them they never received an email. - About one in five said that happens often. - 65% said cold email sequences have suddenly stopped getting replies. - Only 11% of organizations have a dedicated deliverability function. - Sales is named as the responsible team 38% of the time. - IT is named 22% of the time. - A combined 16% said they do not know who owns deliverability or that no one does. - When sales managers answered for themselves, 48% said deliverability lands on them. - Folderly’s benchmark data comes from 32 teams running strong sending infrastructure. - Those teams had a 99.0% median inbox deliverability rate. - Those teams posted a 45.2% average open rate. - Folderly said that is about 1.6 times the 2026 industry average of 27.7%. - For teams that came to Folderly in crisis, the average deliverability recovery was 70.5 percentage points. - Folderly said that recovery often took six to eight weeks. - Adhesive Media sustained a 25% reply rate. - Folderly said that reply rate is more than four times the elite cold-outreach benchmark of 5.8%. - Folderly said Adhesive Media tripled its revenue.

Between the lines: - The report’s main argument is that AI can lower the cost of sending more email without improving the chance that email reaches the inbox. - Folderly says Gmail and Microsoft have raised the bar, which can make high-volume AI outreach look more spam-like to filters. - The findings point to deliverability as an infrastructure problem, not just a copywriting problem. - Folderly’s CEO, Anastasiia Ivannikov, said lower barriers to writing more email are not the same as more email reaching the inbox. - Ivannikov also said AI-generated outbound is flooding inboxes and triggering new filtering heuristics. - Folderly says the common failure point is leaving one person responsible without the tools to fix deliverability.

What’s next: - Folderly is pushing teams to treat deliverability as continuously managed infrastructure rather than a one-time warm-up. - The company says outbound teams need monitoring, root-cause fixes, and clear accountability if they want to scale. - Folderly’s report is likely to feed more scrutiny of how AI-generated sales email affects inbox placement and reply rates.

The bottom line: - AI is making it easier to send outbound email, but Folderly’s data says that does not mean more of it is landing where sales teams want it to go.