The secret to ensuring that your company doesn’t lose customers? Constant, AI agent-powered corporate surveillance.
That’s according to Josh Earle and Leo Paz, a pair of founders behind a vibe-coded Silicon Valley startup called Outlit. The venture argues that “AI customer surveillance” is the future of business-to-business sales. (“Our thesis,” as Earle put it in a disarmingly straightforward pitch email, is that “every company will soon assign an AI agent to every customer to watch their every move.”)
“The whole surveillance component came up because that’s the way we feel companies can serve their customers,” Earle told Futurism in an interview. “It’s really the only way we see this is going to play out.”
Outlit’s goal is to amass as much real-time information about a company’s clients as possible. According to Earle, agents trawl internal records like call logs and sales data as well as external information like social media posts and the websites of people’s employers; they then compile that data into detailed customer profiles, often complete with “actionables” like outreach recommendations and sales guidance. Outlit argues this level of insight will help companies prevent “churn” — business jargon for lost customers — or find opportunities to upsell.
“Every company is looking to automate so much customer work with agents, but there’s a whole issue of data freshness, real-time understanding of customers,” Earle said. “What we found was that if we were able to basically monitor a customer across every internal and external signal, we could actually create a real-time understanding, and this would include monitoring all the activity under product, under [customer relationship management], under LinkedIn, under website — everything.”
Outlit, which is backed by the incubator Y Combinator, is yet to be publicly released. And as it stands, it’s working mostly with business-to-business software companies, and says it isn’t in the business of monitoring individual consumers — nor does it want to be, according to Earle.
“We probably wouldn’t be going business-to-consumer,” Earle told us. “The data would suck anyway.”
But while Outlit isn’t sending agents to follow random shoppers around the web, said Earle, the goal is to “be monitoring every external data piece from a company, and the internal as well… they need to know what’s going on with [their customers] — from every call that they’ve had, from every interaction, from every LinkedIn.”
The resulting product, as described by Earle, is basically a detailed intelligence dossier.
“It’s one page, and it’s always updating,” said the founder, “and it’s all of everything we can find on them at all times.”
It’s true that companies already store a great deal of data about their clients, scouring the web for information about a given customer and its workforce; Outlit argues that there’s too much valuable data out there for individual human workers to effectively gather, let alone make sense of quickly enough for it to be relevant. But as with other AI-powered surveillance technologies, the deeply-automated process adds an extraordinary layer of scale and perpetuity to data collection and consolidation.
Agents, after all, never need to sleep.
“A customer — let’s say a salesperson, a [customer success manager] — will wake up, they’ll go to their engine dashboard. It’ll show these cases that we built, all the contents that we pulled in, our reasoning, and what to do,” Earle explained of Outlit’s process. “Then for each customer, you can see all the sources. You can see all of the signals that have come in, all of the relevant ones, irrelevant ones. So it’s a real-time hub of insights, and then it’s pushing out these actionables. We have all this data. What should you do with it? What’s top of mind right now?”
Earle said that Outlit is designed to draw on the massive hordes of data it collects to tell clients “what to say, what to send, materials, and all that stuff.” To that end, one area where the founder says Outlit excels is for account managers and customer success teams who “need to understand their customer,” and “can’t afford to lose the deal.”
“That’s the big stress point where people really love us,” said Earle. “They’re like, ‘I can’t afford to lose this. I can’t afford not to be on top of this, and I’m just scrambling right now.’ So that’s one of the pains that would make somebody be like, ‘okay, yeah, I do want to know everything about them. I do want to monitor them.’”
Of course, people don’t only post about work on public accounts. Someone might share on their LinkedIn or other public social media account that they recently got married, or had a baby, or experienced another exciting life change; on the flip side, they could share that they were recently divorced, or were diagnosed with an illness, or had a death in the family.
Asked whether any of that information could get swept up in Outlit’s trawling nets, Earle told us he’d “never thought about that, and we don’t actively track it. But theoretically, we can monitor anything posted on the internet.”
Asked if Outlit sees the need to inform those being monitored, or if they’ll offer the opportunity for an opt-out, Earle said no.
“There’s nothing that we’re doing that’s illegal, so we’re within our right to be able to monitor signals,” said the founder. “I wish what we were doing was extremely novel. It’s a new way of doing it, but this is already being done today.” (Outlit’s website promises that customer data is secure and anonymized, and not used to train its models.)
Indeed, in Earle’s view, the future he and his cofounder are building is inevitability. “This is how companies need to operate to be able to serve their customers,” he told us, while arguing that data-hoovering agents will ultimately be able to “maintain and understand human relationships better than humans will.”
“Irrespective of how people feel about it, I think this whole concept of continuously monitoring — and call it surveillance, whatever you want — it is going to happen. It’s going to happen, and I feel like sometimes I speak to people about this and they think it’s either a weird concept or it’s creepy or something,” Earle said. “I think people are underestimating how well agents can absorb context, and how that translates into understanding, and maintaining human relationships better than humans can.”
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The post Y Combinator “Customer Surveillance” Startup Says “Every Company Will Soon Assign an AI Agent to Every Customer to Watch Their Every Move” appeared first on Futurism.
