AI Gives You Agency

AI does what computers always do, make information easier to gather and organize. Now users can query and analyze large data sets without needing expensive computers or technical skills.

What that means is for it to be useful, the data set needs to be accurate and the person getting the analysis needs to understand what they are looking at.

The problem with the data is obvious. LLMs don't have the latest data from every field so the response may just be out of date. The Philosopher Gigo truly was a sage.

The second problem is trickier. AI is only useful to people who understand what they are using it to do. Don't just ask me.

We here at KI have a case study of our own about this domain expertise issue. Recently we've begun using a SaaS that will manage all parts of email marketing. Tell it your company information, the market you want to reach, and who to communicate with at the companies you email and off it will go, make a list and an email sequence with unique email messages for each person on the list. The technical parts are worked out, including reporting and opt outs.

We ended up with a campaign of 500 contacts to communicate with. Most of the email messages were delivered, but of the 500 sent only 5 replies came back, all of them polite but firm requests for no more email messages. We had no idea where the failure was.

When I asked someone with direct marketing experience for help, he glanced at the first message and saw the problem: the text was written for a web site, not a cold email campaign. When I asked the AI for help, it delivered on the data. The 90% delivery rate means the list is good. However, it gave me bad advice because we asked it to. We don't have 35 years experience writing cold outreach messages and creating lists of the proper people to send them to. AI is a better hammer, it's a tool that helps make someone good at their job better. Anybody who tells you otherwise has the black leather jacket picked out to celebrate the IPO.

He's now helping us fix it. He's adjusting the messages and tuning the target audience to make sure the messages will go to the right place. He's been doing this his entire career, now he has a way to do it faster.

Companies that integrate AI agents into their processes always outperform companies that don't, as long as those companies remember the only truly valuable part of that process - the human being running it.