Bleak and bright

We’re at an interesting moment in technology history. Artificial intelligence is here, getting more powerful by the second. But the future remains, as always, maddeningly opaque. I imagine this may be what it felt like during the earliest days of the internet, or at the beginning of the Atomic age. Depending on the day, it can feel equally likely that a world with increasingly powerful artificial intelligence will be suffocatingly bleak or blindingly bright.

Here’s an example of what I mean.

Play around with Suno or Sora or any of the LLM models and it’s not hard to imagine that we soon enter a world of near-infinite, hyper-personalized, algorithmically-generated, content. Music, books, videos and games, custom developed for you, and beamed directly to your phone or your Meta Ray-Bans or your Apple Vision Pro. Everything and anything generated on-the-fly with one purpose: to keep you plugged in.

How will “real life,” which is beautiful but often quite frustrating and boring, compete with an infinite scroll myopically designed to keep us all coming back for more? Perhaps we’re closer to a Matrix-style plugged in future than any of us would like to think.

That’s one argument. But here’s a counter. What if we build, as a friend of mine calls them, personal AI-powered dopamine defense systems? For example, what if I deploy a personal AI agent that consumes digital content for me and highlights only the content that promotes my personal cognitive development and deepens my learning related to specific topics? (Kind of like that personal AI that goes on dates for you to find the ideal match).

That actually sounds pretty amazing, right?

This is a social/consumer internet example, but the exact same dynamic is playing out in B2B.

We’re seeing a deluge of AI-powered sales tech right now. AI-powered lead generation. Automated lead qualification. Hyper-personalized outreach, written on the fly without a salesperson in sight. Buyers are getting inundated across the board. But, from what I’ve heard, the results aren’t as bad as you might think. We aren’t as good at telling human from AI as we’d like to believe…at least not yet.

So what’s the counter? Well, I’m sure soon enough we’ll have AI agents for our work email inboxes just like for our social feeds. We’re in the midst of an AI arms race, and our inboxes may be the first battleground on which these agents fight.

In reaction, one portfolio company has decided to lean hard into the partner-powered co-sell motion. They’re building a platform that orchestrates the incredibly complex process of getting multiple stakeholders from across companies aligned for a single sale (see here). Co-selling is challenging, but their bet is that, as inboxes become wastelands, buyers will increasingly want to buy from people they know and trust. It’s early, but I’ve started to see this trend play out in some of the more sophisticated GTM organizations already.

It’s clear that artificial intelligence will be used to boost the noise in all of our lives at the expense of signal. And, for what it’s worth, I don’t doubt that at least some percentage of the population will fall prey to the siren song of the hyper-personalized infinite scroll. But I remain firmly on the side of the personal AI rebels. And if that describes what you’re building…let’s talk.