Last month, as we wrapped up the YC demo day hustle, we stepped back to zoom out and think about the big picture.

What's our end game? Where is the world going to be in 5 years? Where are we now and how do we get closer to that end game?

Getting featured on the Times Square billboard was a good nudge and reminder to think bigger. We told ourselves that the next trip to NYC will be when we go IPO ;)

Evolution of Marketing in the last two decades

It’s obvious to me that every technological inflection point changes the form factor of marketing.

• 20 years ago, traditional marketing was primarily print media. People dedicated their mornings to reading every section of the newspaper. Companies paid magazines to be on their cover.

• Next came the internet boom → Marketing went digital. Websites solved for physical proximity. Companies could sell their product to anyone in the world. The cost of producing marketing artifacts went down significantly.

• With the smartphone boom, marketing became real-time for the first time with social media. We are informed of what is happening around the world instantly. It also became personalized - every user has a phone on them and each phone could receive a personalized message.

• Enters the AI age - what’s growth & marketing going to look like?  Our prediction - Marketing becomes white-gloved in the AI age.

Why does Marketing become "White-gloved" in the AI age?

because this is what the world looks like in the next 2 years -

1. 🤖 Personal bots - Every person will have their own AI bot (just like each of us has a smartphone), which will be their personalized concierge.

2. 👾 Biz bots - Every company will have its super AI bot, orchestrating various AI agents across messaging channels to sort, rank, and filter the best message to use for every user.

3. 👾 Biz bots will hyper-personalize messaging for u̶s̶e̶r̶s̶ 🤖 Personal bots. Personal bots will decide the content and form factor to prioritize for you every second.

4. All of this would require scale, orchestration, and cost optimization at various points (data → messaging channels → biz bots → personal bots → users)

What's the hill we are going after?

We're looking at a world where communication is not a mass broadcast. It is conversational. It's individualized for every user.

Marketing morphs into something that is -

1. 1-1: We can infer the exact message to send to every user in real-time.

2. 2-way: We can immediately start a personalized conversation with users as they respond.

3. Omni-channel: The form factor of that conversation is fluid and not fixed. As you "click into a shoe promotion email", you land on a personalized website where "you're speaking to a personalized agent" about the shoes you want to buy. After your first purchase, "they reach out to you in 3 months" with the perfect recommendation from their latest arrivals in a push notification. Marketing will be channel smart and channel agnostic.

4. Memory forming: Conversation becomes truly personal when we can build a long-term memory of how people interacted with us over many years. We can only hold up to 4 objects in our working memory. That changes with AI. It can hold millions of data points as context for every user.

What does a Marketer's world look like in that age?

🙅 They don't build campaigns. They write goals and requirements and achieve on-point relevance instantly.

🙅 They go from operationally heavy copy-pasting tasks across 47 platforms to decision-making platforms, where they can strategize and test hypotheses efficiently.

🙅 They don't make ad-hoc decisions. They truly utilize data without requiring quarter-long data analytics projects.

🙅 They move away from maintaining large data enrichment sheets to instantly building and sending the right communication to each user.

🙅 They are not buried in fragmented insights that have to be manually curated in slide decks. They will have access to years of knowledge and context on demand.

🙅 Decision-making is not siloed and skewed to the loudest voice in the room. Data and historical evidence drive it.

How do we build for this future?

These days, we find ourselves immersed in conversations on whether AI decides human behavior or if people decide how we would adopt AI. Our hot take is people adopt AI but that decision is heavily rooted in perception, more than rationale. That perception is formed from (1) observing early adopters of technology (2) social media's framing and (3) their risk appetite, among other things.

Here's how we are taking baby steps to get close to that future -

(1) Building trust: From the beginning, we're building nuances in the product that give people trust and confidence in AI content. We are not rooting for a world where we can shove GPT-generated crap at millions of users mindlessly. We are deliberately spending time introducing small but powerful features that inherently build confidence in using AI. Some examples include gradual traffic ramp-up and smart categorization that lets us scale human review workflows across millions of users.

(2) Building for teams, not an individual: AI accelerates the groundwork to come to decisions. It doesn't replace the decision-maker. We're constantly thinking about collaborative aspects that are critical for large enterprises to adopt AI.

What does this mean?

The next big AI marketing platform isn't a chatbot. It's a platform that intelligently incorporates workflows for different functions (product, engineering, data science, legal, and brand managers). That is when it can allow these functions to cut down operational costs and run lean teams. Our stance is none of these functions stop to exist, however, they become very lean with AI.

(3) Building for nuances: Our strategy is to be vertically focused. We're not building a horizontal tool that achieves AGI right away. We're going sector by sector, channel by channel, use case by use case. We're perfecting our algorithms bottoms up.

We don't know if any or all of our predictions are going to be true. The only thing we're sure of is that these are exciting times and we're lucky to be building the next generation of marketing tech with AI! :)

Rumor has it we're hiring. You know where to find us!