The age of AI is among us, and everyone is rushing to build new systems that will allow one person to act like twenty. The allure is clear:
- What if you could have an AI agent call and email hundreds of sales prospects, with dynamic responses generated to anything the prospect asks?1
- What if you had an AI personal assistant that could schedule a haircut for you, or call twenty doctors offices to find an appointment opening for you in the next week?
- What if an AI could respond to your emails for you, to make sure you stayed in touch with friends and relatives?
- What if an AI could reach out and interview multiple people for a news article to get quotes, so that you could be a much more in depth investigative reporter?
The time savings on solving any of these problems would be massive, and there would be all sorts of secondary benefits as well: from helping people with social anxiety, to just being able to accomplish much more in any given day. Who wouldn’t want something like that?
The first challenge arises when businesses and individuals who have not implemented AI in their lives start receiving more emails and phone calls. For businesses, their inbox becomes inundated with outbound sales emails and contact form requests, and their phone line is called constantly by an AI trying to sell them something or schedule an appointment.2 For individuals, they start having in-depth conversations with friends and family, only for them to talk to these people in person later on, and realize that that person never saw any of these emails, or even responded themselves personally for that matter: an AI either auto-responded for them, or summarized the conversation to them and followed up accordingly.
To adapt to the challenges from the above, these businesses and individuals who realize they are mostly now fielding AI phone calls and email decide they will also add AI into their lives, to deal with the increased volume of communication.
Now at this point, if you are an optimist, you perhaps think this situation is now ideal: AI talks back and forth with each other much more quickly, and can come to a consensus such as whether or not to book an appointment much faster than a human ever could. If you are a pessimist, however, you might believe that while a lot of communication ends up happening, nothing ends up being decided: since people don’t want to be “fooled”3 by an AI, they’ll just have their own AI not allow any decisions to be made without their explicit approval.
This past year, I’ve picked up my phone for an unknown caller perhaps five times. Each time I did so, it was a mistake: the caller was either a spammer, a scammer, or a bot. I had hoped that with the implementation of STIR/SHAKEN we’d finally get back some feeling of safety, but after 3 years of implementation by major carriers I still don’t see an end to the spam. The end result has made me give up altogether on phone calls as a medium — and with the rise of AI I suspect this is just the beginning.
In five years from now, will there be any communication channels left we can trust?
Footnotes
- Too many startups to mention here that are doing this already. See Instantly, SmartLead, and SalesHandy, among others. ↩︎
- This is already happening to me: 90% of the emails I now get to my business email or contact form are bots or automated. ↩︎
- “Fooled” In that for a business, an AI will end up filling their calendar with no-show haircut appointments and sales calls for things they don’t need, and that individuals will be “fooled” into talking to an AI for some period of time and developing a friendship, only to later realize they were not talking to a real human. ↩︎