What is NORA from Nagent?
NORA is Nagent's AI Outbound Research Lead, a teammate on the Sales team who reports to SERA, the AI Sales Chief of Staff. She finds companies that fit your customer profile, scores each, researches the good ones into a dossier with sources, drafts the first email, reads the replies and hands a qualified meeting to a named person. She works by email only, and on a new workspace every send waits for a person to approve it.
What does NORA do, step by step?
NORA owns the top of the outbound funnel: from "we have no idea who to call" to "here is a qualified account and everything we know about it". Her public page expands the name as Nagent Outbound Research and Activation. She does five things.
Discovery. She searches a contact data provider for companies and people that fit your active customer profile, as a one-off search or a saved campaign that runs daily or weekly. Existing customers and suppressed contacts are removed. Each company is scored 0 to 100 against your profile, with industry, company size and geography weighing most.
Research. For a company worth pursuing, she builds a dossier: an overview, why it fits, its buying signals and its pitch hooks, each with a source and date. Signals include stated pain, funding, a new leader, hiring, a tech change or expansion. After 30 days a signal counts as stale.
Drafting. VANI, the outbound email writer (Beta), drafts the first-touch, follow-up and breakup emails for her from the dossier and your workspace's knowledge.
Sending. She sends a draft only after it has been approved, and checks that approval again immediately before it leaves.
Handoff. A qualified reply becomes a meeting and a handoff card with the dossier and the buying committee. A person acknowledges it; a handoff nobody acknowledges within 36 hours escalates.
What makes NORA's emails different from a typical AI SDR's?
Most of the difference sits in what a draft is allowed to say.
Every claim traces to research. VANI returns each email with a list of every specific claim it made about the prospect. Each claim must appear in the dossier, its signals, its hooks or the contact record, and a validator checks it. A draft that fails is refused.
Thin research means a question, not an assertion. With a thin dossier, she asks one qualifying question instead of inventing a reason to write.
No invented proof. VANI does not invent funding, hires, headcount, customer names or numbers, and does not name-drop customers. It may name a product or outcome only if it appears in your Offerings.
A fixed shape. A subject of 60 characters or fewer, a preview line, three to five short paragraphs and exactly one low-friction ask.
Contacts only for a fit. She reveals a contact only for a company that scores 70 or more out of 100. Below that, the contact is held, which keeps reveal spend and list quality in check.
If you want the method behind this, our guide to finding ICP-fit accounts and researching them with AI walks through it.
What does NORA need before she can work?
A workspace can have NORA installed and still produce nothing. Three things come first, in this order:
An active customer profile. Nothing is discovered without one. With none active, her mission control says "The funnel is not running".
Knowledge to write from. Her Knowledge screen has four shelves: Who you sell to, What you sell, Who you are and Sales collateral. With a shelf empty she can write but cannot cite. A workspace with neither Offerings nor knowledge gets drafts written on the brand name alone, with no product claims.
A sending account. Outbound email goes from your own sending account and a domain you verify, and replies come back to her.
Set these up before judging the drafts. Most poor first drafts trace back to an empty shelf.
How does a prospect move through NORA's pipeline?
Each company sits in one stage on her Qualify board and moves only when something happened:
Discovered to Researched: research on the company completes.
Researched to Enriched: people at the company are found.
Enriched to Ready to send: the first draft is approved. Approving does not send it.
Ready to send to Contacted: the first email is actually sent.
Contacted to Engaged or Disqualified: a reply reads as interested or a question, or as not interested or an unsubscribe.
To lead: the account enters your CRM view as a qualified lead, which needs the four qualification questions answered with evidence.
Replies are classified as interested, objection, scheduling or unsubscribe, so the cadence stops or changes course. An unsubscribe writes the address to your workspace's suppression list, and every send is checked against that list at the moment it leaves.
Who approves what NORA does?
Every NORA action declares the level it needs to run without asking, and below that level it waits for a person. Reads always run. Sending and running the follow-up cadence are held for a person: sending is gated separately from her level, and on a new workspace every send waits for approval.
Nagent's autonomy ladder has five levels: L1 Observe, L2 Assist, L3 Operate, L4 Represent and L5 Lead. Agents arrive at L2 Assist. The system can nominate an agent for a raise on its record, a person decides, and levels rise one step at a time. The autonomy and governance docs explain each level, and our post on earned autonomy for AI agents explains the idea.
What waits shows in one place. Her Pending screen lists lead reviews, cost-cap exceptions and approvals, each with a link to where it is decided. Drafts wait on her Messages screen to be read, edited, approved or rejected. Broadcast releases only already-approved drafts, inside the sending hours you set.
What does NORA not do?
Being clear about the edges saves a bad first month.
She does not send a draft nobody approved. A draft still marked as a draft is refused, whatever her level.
She does not write unqualified people into your CRM view. On a new workspace that view is nearly empty, and that is correct.
She does not close deals. Her work ends at the meeting handoff.
She does not set her own target. A person declares targets; she reads them.
She works by email only. No calls, no LinkedIn or social messages, no SMS. Templates for social networks can be written for a person to send.
She does not sync with an outside CRM. An outside CRM can be connected as a tool, but her pipeline does not sync records with it.
How does NORA compare with other AI SDR tools?
We make Nagent, so read this section with that in mind. The products buyers usually compare NORA with take different positions:
11x and Artisan run managed, multi-step outbound agents with calls or other channels, and quote on request. Artisan's pricing page describes Ava as "Autonomous by default, adjustable by design", with approval before sending available as a control. 11x covers email, voice, chat, social and SMS.
Unify is AI-assisted outbound where drafts queue for a rep's approval, sold per seat from $20 a month on its pricing page (checked 24 October 2026).
Clay and Apollo are data and workflow tools: Clay for building research workflows across many data providers, Apollo for a contact database with sequences.
NORA's position is narrower: research first, email only, claims checked against the dossier, and a person approving sends on a new workspace. If you need voice, social or a vendor-run sending operation, one of the others fits better.
Where does NORA sit inside Nagent?
Nagent is multiplayer AI for growth: people and AI agents in one shared context, delivering the number. NORA works in the Sales room, which SERA leads, alongside VANI, LIPI (who writes to people you have already spoken to) and your people. Type @ and pick NORA to ask her something; she answers in a thread with the sources the answer came from. A send is never offered from a room thread: it starts from her Messages screen or a workflow. Read more about the AI Sales Chief of Staff role.
On cost, there is no separate NORA price. She works on the Sales team, Nagent plans are on the pricing page, and agent work is metered in credits that are visible in the workspace. For scale, an AEO page audit is about 10 credits and a campaign build about 40. Every discovery run states its cost before it starts.
Frequently Asked Questions
Will NORA send email without my approval?
No. On a new workspace every send waits for a person, whatever level her seat shows. Drafting and research run on their own. Drafts wait on her Messages screen, and Broadcast releases only drafts that have already been approved.
What is an AI outbound research agent?
It is an AI agent that finds accounts matching your customer profile, researches each one into evidence such as signals, people and reasons to reach out, and drafts outreach from that research. The research comes before the writing. NORA is one; tools such as 11x's deep research and Clay's Claygent do parts of the same job.
Does NORA work on LinkedIn or make calls?
No. NORA sends email. VANI writes email only and does not write LinkedIn messages, place calls or speak. A person can send templates on social networks.
Can NORA work from our existing CRM?
She reads the workspace's own lead records. An outside CRM can be connected as a tool under a connection only your workspace can use, and each tool action is ticked on individually, but her pipeline does not sync records with it.
See NORA research and draft against your own customer profile: book a demo, or start on NORA's page.