AI Spam: Technical Success, Business Failure?

Here's a great example of an AI product that works great on a technical level but utterly fails at the business level: "Hyperpersonalized" sales emails courtesy of AI.

While going through my spam folder (since Google occasionally misclassifies emails), I came across a fun specimen. Someone had built a tool that examines company websites, identifies the relevant people and information about them, and then feeds that into an LLM with the task of generating "personalized" opening and post-script statements to be slapped around a generic sales email. In my case, what I got was

First of all, congratulations on your incredible journey from VortX Labs to becoming the Co-Founder of Aice Labs! I truly admire how you transform businesses with practical AI solutions, making a real difference in Vancouver's industry."

for the opener and then for the closer, I got

P.S. I really admire how Aice Labs makes AI practical and impactful for businesses. By the way, is the "Dungeness Crab" at "Blue Water" truly a must-try like I hear? Maybe we can meet there someday!

I can feel the sleazy used-car-salesman energy oozing right out of that. I'm not a sales expert, but I have a strong suspicion that if your sales emails aren't effective, it's probably due to what you're offering, rather than your opening line not being a sycophantic paraphrasing of the recipient's bio or lack of local flair in the P.S.

I'm sure the people building the tool paid attention to ensuring it worked technically: Does it correctly identify names, titles, backstory, and location? Does it successfully pull in some locally relevant info? (I genuinely wonder how they're pulling that off, on a technical level. Have an AI agent look for the top restaurants in the recipient's city and talk about a high-rated item on their menu?)

But I'm certainly not going to buy whatever they're selling.

So what's the greater lesson here? Maybe it's Dr. Ian Malcolm's quote from Jurassic Park:

Your [prompt engineers] were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.