"Hyperpersonalized” Outreach

The promise of AI is that it lets you do good stuff at scale. We don't need more automations to do crap at scale.

Case in point: if you're trying to sell me an AI tool that does hyper-personalized outreach to my ideal clients, and you're obviously using the tool to hyper-personalize your outreach to me, it had better be hyper-personalized.

But every example I've seen boils down to:

"Your journey from the university you graduated from to your currently held position, according to your LinkedIn profile, is so inspiring. Bla bla bla buy our tool."

That's not hyper-personalized. That's grabbing two data points off LinkedIn. It doesn't get any lazier. It doesn't make me think, "wow, someone took the time to learn something about me; let's hear what they have to say." It makes me feel icky and put my guard up: "Okay, sleazo, what are you trying to sell me?"

On a technical note, AI could do better:

• My LinkedIn profile links to a company website with hundreds of articles I've written. Have the AI read those and reference something from there.

• Check other places on the web I show up, to see what else I care about outside work. Connect over the fact that I have kids, or like the outdoors, or occasionally enjoy online chess.

If the AI doesn't do any of these, it'll annoy people with generic spam, and I can't see that working for my clients.

But even an AI that does create hyper-personalized outreach is still problematic:

The personal connect doesn't work if it's not from a person. The whole point is that something we share becomes the starting point for a conversation, and a reason to trust you. If you're an AI, you don't share anything with me. Name-dropping interests gleaned from my public presence does nothing to build that trust.

I still read these outreach emails, even though most end up in my spam filter, because I'm curious if one of them will ever write a message that's at least somewhat relevant.

The larger lesson: we have enough low-quality stuff in the world already. What we should demand from AI is that it not give us more. Set the bar high. If that's too high for AI, then it's not the right tool.