I recently shared a glimpse into the “bad side of AI“, where I’m starting to get some automated comments on social media and it’s likely to get much worse.
The side I fear a bit more is the coming glut of AI-personalized email spam, at huge scale. Microsoft has unveiled Viva Sales and Salesforce announced Einstein GPT, both of which use generative AI to help further automate the sales process via email.
Salesforce isn’t even pretending it’s something else, as one of the features they tout is that “Einstein GPT can generate personalized emails for salespeople to send to customers“. Horrible.
As I’ve shared before, cold outreach is the domain of spammers. It’ll be a little trickier to detect, as these AI-generated emails will probably become quite convincing, but it’s unsolicited spam no matter how you try to spin it. Building relationships, which have always been the key to solid partnerships, will reign.
As Gary Vaynerchuk recently said, “the advantage becomes the things that are not automated… that are human-based, and this will be accelerated dramatically with AI“.
AI can still help
I’m still excited for how AI can help in these conversations and I see a few great ways to incorporate it:
- Automated note-taking. Google has tools coming soon that will help take notes during video calls; taking that off my plate will allow me to be even more invested in the conversation and not have to worry about capturing everything myself.
- Prior to meetings, AI can help summarize those notes can get me up to speed. We’ve already seen a tiny peek at that, and much bigger things are coming in the next few years.
That said, the amount of semi-personal spam that I get today is already wildly unacceptable, and it’s going to get worse. However, as it gets worse for everyone, the effectiveness will continue to drop. The replacement will be tighter relationships with those around you, which has always been the ideal way to do business.
