Stochastic Parroting isn't Selling
"We're not using AI".
This was, on the face of it, the rather shocking statement I received on a salesfloor recently.
It was the first time someone had explicitly been so counter-cultural on the matter.
Yet beneath the surface, it wasn't so revelatory. After all, much of AI's past twelve month buzz has clearly cooled.
What salesperson has not had their bubble burst by being served up unintelligible nonsense when seeking to have some specific sales doc text provided in a split-second?
Who hasn't been disappointed when asking for knowledge on which we truly own the hot take, only to receive instant 'fact' which we know to be, at best misleading.
When have we sought to speed production of materiel, only to be consumed for longer than would've been the case with delaying edits, irritating rewrites and reformatting, and most begrudgingly, starting over?
Then there's the précis of meeting notes, secondary documentation, and prospect company or personnel background, which fail to convey the essence of what we require.
Not to mention the occasional skill brush-up, where we may ask on advice only to rapidly realise that rather than being the technique of a superstar, is rooted more among the average bumbling mediocrity.
Such breakthroughs may emerge that banish all these deficiencies and more.
That ai-topia remains beyond our current selling horizon though.
The present cooling involves a backlash too.
Customer service and Sales AI-bots that replaced real-life agents now themselves being replaced by those actual humans in the drive to regain lost authenticity and clients.
Salesteams conscious their IP - unique, integral and valuable to them - is all of a sudden in rampant danger of discovery, regardless of touted firewalls.
An acceptance that - in our Enterprise, solution space - there is yet to appear AI capability which neatly marries a specific element of our job with a cast-iron recognisable adoptable improvement.
The phrase of this post title is one of renown from an insider sceptic. Emily Bender coined it back in 2021. Mainly levelled at the newly proliferating bots.
Where they 'haphazardly stich together' responses 'without any reference to meaning'.
Which in our world, feels like the antithesis of what sells.
Indeed, her withering dismissals of AI output can be quite poetic;
- synthetic text extruding plagiarism machines
- a fancy wrapper around some spreadsheets
- a glorified Magic 8 Ball
- like a hyper-intelligent octopus eavesdropping on human conversation, and
- 'the emperor has no clothes, but it is surprising how many people want to be the naked emperor'
I myself do use the tech. Yet am now vigilant as to limitations.
In the past month, a trio of tasks with impact stick in the mind.
- Produce a photo of a key image
- Provide analysis of a sector with which I was unfamiliar according to a particular market model with diagrams, and
- Parse a pdf for gaps, with a list of 'questions unanswered'
Perhaps you won't be surprised to learn the one with most noticeable reaction was the pic. Generated, for what it's worth, by Grok.
Yet as welcome as these contributions were, and undoubtedly made a difference to buyer receptivity, whilst also both saving me a fair amount of time and served up what I may not have been able to do unaided, they are kind of around the edges.
What I really want to see is something that runs through the core of a commercial seller's role. Genuinely bringing a step-change focus in where we spend our time, access both the seen and unseen, and uplift our results that follow.
For the next few Sales periods at least, the trick to staying on top of improvement and not sounding like anyone else out there pitching, is I think twofold.
Concentrating on those tasks around the edges we can beautifully utilise and replicate or even (with care) automate, and finding assistance that starts to try streamlining the way we fundamentally sell.
Neither are as easy as they may sound. Especially the latter, which is the real game-changer.