Using AI to demand things from humans is disrespectful. Disrespect is a bad way to start a relationship, so choose your outbound tactics wisely.
Historically, replacing human interaction with demanding machines hasn’t gone well.
Robocalls at dinner, interruptive chatbots on every B2B website. Hell, even Calendly links where you’re effectively demanding someone else do the work of combing through your calendar.
And, of course, spam. Spam exists to deliver a CTA that gets a tiny response rate. So, spam demands scale. And scale demands a marginal cost near 0, which means no human investment. Sadly, most outbound is indistinguishable from spam. (I’ll come back to that in a moment.)
The grand AI theory here is that we hate those things because they’re not good. If they just get better and more human-like, we’ll like them.
That misses something fundamental.
When machines demand something of us—even just the brief moment of attention required to delete an email—we’re annoyed.
When machines masquerading as humans make demands, we’re furious because we feel duped and disrespected.
And if you think you won’t get found out, I disagree. I disagree with both the premise (it’s dishonest) and the practicality. Practically, AI output is way better than the mail merge of yore, but there’s nothing humans are more attuned to than interacting with other humans. Any flaw stands out. AI is going to fight the uncanny valley for a good long while.
So back to outbound. The only thing that distinguishes outbound from spam is the possibility that a human tried to make it relevant. Someone somewhere felt like I, the recipient, was worth that effort.
Replacing all that with AI acting as a faux human means that not only does the sender think my time is less valuable than theirs, they’re also willing to trick me into spending my time on them.
I’m incredibly bullish on AI in sales for things like research, analysis and even informing messaging. In short, improving the things that make human interaction better. We get human relationships *and* efficiency. The potential for AI here is essentially unlimited.
But I think using AI to communicate with your prospects and customers is disrespectful, deceptive and ultimately counterproductive. That’s a poor foundation for anything even vaguely resembling a relationship. This part of the AI hype cycle will collapse.
Choose wisely.
