Things AI Cannot Scale

Are we overselling the potential of automation?

Happy Sunday and welcome to Investing in AI! I’m Rob May, CEO at BrandGuard. I also co-founded the AI Innovators Community in Boston and New York. Check it out if you want to join. We just did a great startup showcase event in Boston last week, and have a full slate of events in 2024.

We are entering what feels like a golden age of AI automation, and as a result I see early stage startups trying to automate pretty much everything. One of the most time consuming things we do, as humans, is communicate with each other. Some of the startups I’ve seen are trying to automate various workflows often pitch communications automation.

For some types of communication that’s fine. Customer support is really transactional. I just want to get my problem solved and be done, so AI is well suited to this. But I’m less convinced of some of the other use cases I see, like automating the communication aspects of financial advisors, hiring processes, or managing people.

Some processes are not meant to scale. In particular, a lot of person-to-person actions are required to build trust and smooth over the bumps that naturally occur in human relationships. Can AI automate these away?

Imagine you have a good friend, but one who can be a little… demanding on your time. What if you could deploy a bot that sounded like you, but would text the friend automatically? That would be all well and good until you ran into them on the street and they commented on the conversation and you had no idea what they were talking about. Or, you might ask them a question to be polite to which they answer “we discussed that over text last week.”

Now imagine we all use bots to maintain our relationships. My bot talks to your bot. We never really know if it’s us or the bot talking. But - are we really maintaining a relationship when we do that?

I think it’s important to understand the limits of AI to invest in it properly, but it seems like most people are just assuming AI will automate away pretty much everything. I don’t think that’s true. Processes that are more relational and less transactional are going to be more difficult to offload to AI - now matter how good it gets. In these cases, AI is a better assistant than automator. We should focus on that distinction as we build and invest.

Thanks for reading.